The world wide web has revolutionised the way in which people access and use technical information. Multimedia platform providers such as YouTube are increasingly being utilised by government and businesses to extend detailed messages to clients.

This project will test the potential for using the internet to communicate and extend ideas and concepts in a way that adds value to existing written industry guidelines and web tools by developing an extensive series of short documentaries covering a range of crop production, protection & best practice topics in an informative and entertaining way and host them on the internet where they can be readily accessed.

The use of internet hosted video to communicate complex ideas or market concepts has undergone extraordinary expansion in recent years due to the improved accessibility of high speed internet and the advent of easy to use hosting platforms. This form of multimedia is becoming increasingly recognised as a source of ideas and practical demonstration of all types of human skills and presents a unique and potentially cost effective opportunity for cotton industry extension.

The industry already has a considerable investment in many individual written and web software products such as the cotton production guidelines or various infoPAKS, and videos would add value to this existing repository of information. The project will not aim to compete with the digital video efforts of CSD whose material generally has a ‘hot topics’ or seasonal update emphasis, but rather focus on producing a searchable archive of production topics from pre-planting to post-harvest that a grower or advisor might use in the same way as a crop production manual. The emphasis would be on producing documentaries with a significant shelf life.

The cotton industry’s joint extension program, CottonInfo, is designed to service the commercially unmet cotton research and development information needs of growers and to support industry efforts to improve practices, productivity, competitiveness and environmental performance. The development of video content will assist CottonInfo’s communication efforts – thus supporting the CottonInfo strategic goal of making R&D information, trusted advice and specialist technical R&D knowledge readily available through a variety of different communication channels.

The expected outcome of this project is the creation of a user-friendly resource for extending cotton best production practices to growers, advisors, students and general public via an increasingly popular communication method that is currently being under-utilised by the cotton industry. It is anticipated that this extension tool could also become commonly used to communicate outcomes from industry funded projects and that researchers would be asked to nominate project highlights that may be suited to the creation of short documentaries as part of normal reporting processes.