Earlier this month, photographers Tivadar Domaniczky, Balazs Gardi and Teru Kuwayama received an official notice from the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines announcing that their embedding programme would be ending as the troops prepare to return home. The three photographers had been with these Marines for the past six months as part of the Basetrack initiative.

Basetrack is an "experimental media project" built to track the deployment of more than 1000 Marines throughout the duration of their tour of duty in Afghanistan. It brings together the three photographers with a team of journalists, army experts and web programmers, all working together to keep families and friends up-to-date with the lives of these Marines. In the process, they also reach a larger audience interested in a new kind of war reporting. Transmitting from the Helmand province, the journalists send "their reports and reflections as they travel across the battalion's area of operations".

Domaniczky, Gardi and Kuwayama are three photojournalists with a deep experience of conflict, especially in Afghanistan. Gardi and Kuwayama have been embedded with US Marines on and off since 2004, when "the embedding system was quite new in Afghanistan", according to Gardi. "It wasn't a common practice - it was started in Iraq and later implemented in Afghanistan."

Living and interacting with Marines, the photographers quickly came across a couple of issues. First, the location made it virtually impossible for these US forces to communicate with their families. "It's like you're on the moon," says Gardi. "There's nothing. No cell phone lines, no internet connection. Each unit only has one satellite phone."

Second, the Marines were extremely grateful for the journalists that report from Afghanistan. "They don't really understand why the media back home is not reporting more about that war," adds Gardi. "The media doesn't seem to be interested in that subject or giving it enough space."

Missing link
From these issues came One-Eight Basetrack. "We're with the Marines, on the ground, broadcasting images and videos, conducting interviews with them," says Gardi. "The main challenge here is to stay interactive. We are trying to be available and accessible to everyone at all times. We want to generate a back-and-forth dialogue and be there to answer questions." Using the site, and the community that's built around it, family members can keep track of their sons' and daughters' daily lives - creating a link that was missing until then.

Cpl. Michael Perry smokes a cigarette after he returns from a firefight near Doghaka village in Musa Qala district, Helmand Province on November 7, 2010. Image by Balazs Gardi/Basetrack.org, available under a Creative Commons license.

"Whenever I hit the publish button with some new content, in seconds, I get a lot of comments and requests," says Gardi. "Of course, most of the people understand that we can't always find their loved ones - the battalion is quite big. But if you get a request about a certain Marine and you know that Marine and talked to him in the past, what you could do is just tell them that you spent time with him. ‘This is how he feels, what he does.' But you're not just broadcasting stuff back home, you also get feedback from the families that you can share with the Marines. That kind of connection, especially in Afghanistan, is very rare.

"The cool thing about this system, is that you have basically unlimited space and possibilities to publish and to respond. Sometimes perhaps the images are not the greatest, but that's not important. What really is amazing for me is to see how people connect with each other and to see that much feedback. We're seeing a community being built in front of our eyes."

Building trust
Beyond building a new communication platform, Basetrack is also building better relations with US commanders. "Without the co-operation of the Marine Corps, this project would not have been possible in the first place," says Gardi. In fact, the Executive Officer, whom Kuwayama and Gardi first met in 2004, is very involved in the project. "We have his trust. He appreciates what we're doing." But, for security reasons, there's a limit to what Basetrack's members can say on the site. "We can't discuss what will happen - future missions, for example. But we can talk about the past and present," says Gardi.

The real innovation with Basetrack lies in the back end. To create the Basetrack initiative, the team has developed a media platform built specifically to support and facilitate independent journalism. "If you look at the Basetrack website, it's a highly tweaked and modified Wordpress site, but it's combining elements that independent journalists needed but never really had in the past," explains Gardi. "We're working with an excellent web development team that has a great understanding of what we need in order to achieve what we're doing."

One feature allows the military to review and redact the photographers' posts, for example, whether they're text or images. When the military uses this tool, a comment is added to the post indicating how and why it was altered, ensuring as much transparency as possible.

Future funds
Once One-Eight Basetrack concludes later this year, the team will make the Basetrack platform available as an open-source system. "If journalists and NGOs want to use it for non-profit goals, they'll be able to download it," says Gardi. In fact, the Hungarian photographer will use it for his own ongoing project - Facing Water Crisis. "I'm going to further tweak that system to implement it to my project. We developed that system for like-minded photographers, journalists and organisations so that it makes it extremely easy to share information in a more social-media-oriented way."

For Gardi, that's the future of journalism, because he believes the current model has a fundamental problem - the search for profits. "Mainstream publications, today, are for-profit organisations," he says. "They're not serving the real purpose of journalism any more. Once you're following the agenda of shareholders and owners, you can't say that you're independent."

To stay independent, Basetrack was built with the help of a $200,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, which was awarded to Kuwayama. "The money is put toward developing the system - pay the developers and cover the journalists' costs. We're not making a profit. Most of it is used to cover expenses or buy the equipment we need."

White phosphorous rounds burst over enemy positions as Marines try to cloud the battlefield in order to help troops egress while receiving fire near Doghaka village in Musa Qala district, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on November 7, 2010. Image by Balazs Gardi/Basetrack.org, available under a Creative Commons license.

When the Basetrack platform will be released to the public, it will also help make journalism much more democratic, says Gardi. "Before, journalism was very elitist, as you needed capital to start a publication or create something online. Now, it's all there, online, and it's free."

In fact, even Basetrack's images are free. "They're all under a Creative Commons licence, so that anyone can use them for non-commercial purposes," he says. "If a school needs images to illustrate the war in Afghanistan, they'll be able to use ours. That's what makes Basetrack unusual."

Embed cancelled
However, on 05 February, the Basetrack team received a letter from the Battalion's public affairs officer ordering the photographers to leave. "Basetrack is being asked to leave 1/8's positions due to perceived Operational Security violations on portions of their website," the letter reads. "These concerns are legitimate. Specifically the websites tie in to Google Maps to display friendly force locations. At this time there has been no official OpSec determination yet and therefore they are being asked to leave and NOT disembedded (disembedding is a formal process that occurs after OpSec determinations have been finalized). RCT 8 Public Affairs concerns lie in the fact that anytime too much information is aggregated in one place in a fashion tying unit disposition and manpower together we have facilitated the enemy."

Speaking to BJP, Teru Kuwayama isn't totally surprised. "There had been complaints from the battalion's commanders about Basetrack's Facebook page," he says. "There was a perception that the news articles on the Facebook page were too 'negative' on the war, and the unregulated nature of the conversation was clearly causing discomfort."

But, he adds, "they'd been very positive about the project in general and the Basetrack.org site. What was surprising was the explanation that was given in the official letter - the reasons given were totally different, didn't mention Facebook at all, and the given reasons fell apart quite quickly. At this point, the official word is that there is no 'operational security' concern related to Basetrack, and that there was no violation of any 'media ground rules'."

Despite the abrupt end to the embedding programme, the Basetrack team has pledged to continue working in and out of Afghanistan, especially given the "outpouring of support" from families and marines. "It has been pretty remarkable," says Kuwayama. "It's been a steady stream of messages from the families expressing their disappointment and confusion."

He adds: "The project is very far from over - it's actually growing very rapidly - the websites are still active, there's still Basetrack contributors on the ground in Afghanistan - now unembedded, and the core mission of tracking, personalizing, and unpacking the war continues. There's a very dedicated audience of USMC family members that isn't giving up either. We have a huge backlog of content to process and release, and we're iterating and upgrading the underlying Basetrack 'system' - that ultimately gets released as an open-source software platform and a best-practices user manual/cookbook - that anyone can use."

Members of the Basetrack team are also working on a book, says Kuwayama. "Also, there's so much audio and video and textual data that there's an endless range of possible spin-offs - iPad versions, droid apps, mixed-media downloads, etc. Those possibilities don't even depend on us - all our material is freely available for non-commercial use under Creative Commons licensing, so anyone can put together their own media packages, and distribute them over their own social media channels."

The team also expects the project to evolve once the more than 1000 Marines it followed come home. "I'm very curious to see what happens when they enter high-speed internet territory and many of them have access to Basetrack for the first time. In the words of the Clash (and the Terminator), 'the future is unwritten'," says Kuwayama.

Visit www.basetrack.org.

This article is based on a feature published in BJP's February 2011 edition. When that issue went to press, the Basetrack project had yet to be cancelled by the US Marines. This online feature has been modified from its print version to reflect that fact.