WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Homage positions itself to capture the torrent of social media conversations about service & sacrifice, past, present & future in 5 installments. Our work as executive producers on award winning military history documentaries, consulting with the Smithsonian on strategies to increase attendance, and work with diversity initiatives with the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs provide us with a unique perspective and oversight on building a social registry for the post-10 year anniversary of 9/11 blogosphere Homage features a capital and awareness campaign to build the first ever registry  to enable the extraction of  race and gender of the service-members killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Homage manages the flow of information between the wounded physically, psychologically, or emotionally during the ten-year timeline. We update threads between bloggers and social media channels that provide the connective tissue between the 9/11 aftermath, and deployment healing. Homage enables our partners to stream to a dashboard of categories like news, health, and video. Streams can be viewed together or filtered from our Dashboard and then easily shared via Facebook/Twitter, and on to mobile devices. Homage lets our partner keep track of the trends that matter, create unique personal and public dashboards and share there dashboards with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

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A Much Needed Ease In Demands On US Troops : Rachel Maddow reports on the expected announcement of shorter deployments and more time at home for U.S. troops.

Click to read more… ………Click to read updated story…

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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hom·age noun \ˈä-mij, ˈhä-\

Something that shows respect or attests to the worth or influence of another.

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‘Death And After In Iraq’ Memoir Of A Mortuary Shade it Black: By Jess Goodell with John Hearn In the Mortuary Affairs unit, one of Goodell’s responsibilities was to sort through the pockets and belongings of troops lost in combat. She found all sorts of things — crumpled up napkins, pictures, spoons, letters, even sonograms of their soon to be born children Read more>

“I don’t think I ever stopped smelling death when I was in Iraq.”- Jess Goodell

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We’re embarking on a journey of great importance, to tell the seemingly lost or unexposed stories of the American Military. Ambitious in our quest, iPatriots is discovering that there is an endless stream of inspiring forgotten history about Veterans. Great men and women who have fought and still are fighting to protect the rights and freedoms of our citizens. In efforts to encourage support from America for Veterans we are developing a series of multimedia projects aimed at holding the viewers attention and leaving them with a greater understanding of the sacrifices made by all soldiers in the armed forces; past and present. These projects will use films, commercials, documentaries, interactive web videos, as well as written materials to enlighten Veterans and the public about the stories of American Soldiers. iPatriots is focused on demonstrating to the over twenty four million Veterans that there is a place in mainstream media, where they have an enormous impact.  Mass media is where iPatriots has found the best environment to bring the stories of the Veterans to life. It will be explained in the quality of media that mass culture has been demanding from the entertainment world for the last two decades.  The military has made steps toward incorporating this mainstream image into the progress of the military.  We can help close any gaps by opening a new window into the government that the public will relate to.  As an organization we are requesting the true testimonies of soldiers and persons with first hand knowledge of these historic events.  Their accounts of Heroism will be implemented in making true historic depictions of soldiers and their families.  We will seek out soldiers and family members to form realistic images of them to pass down through history in an audio/visual record of their statements.

One of our greatest stories of service and sacrifice comes from Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa, first American woman killed in Iraq, and the first-ever Native- American U.S. woman soldier killed in any war.

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America’s Chaotic Road to War

Bush’s Global Strategy Began to Take Shape in The Frantic Hours After Attack: Tuesday, September 11 Shortly after 9:30 p.m., President Bush brought together his most senior national security advisers in a bunker beneath the White House grounds. It was just 13 hours after the deadliest attack on the U.S. homeland in the country’s history. Bush and his advisers sat around a long table in the conference room of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC. Spare and cramped, the bunker was built to withstand a nuclear attack, with sleeping berths and enough food for a few people to survive for several days.

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HOMAGE’s mission is to empower all diverse members of the armed forces, veterans, family and friends through a network that provides resources, education, and the ability to creatively share their stories. The vision is simple, to be the advocate for diversity to veterans, military families, and members of any branch of the armed forces, to include the Coast Guard and National Guard. Veterans and their descendants represent 1/3 of the total U.S. population, and yet only 8 million veterans currently access their benefits (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2010). HOMAGE is a social utility network, which overcomes disparity by uniting all federal, state, and local veteran organizations, in order to enhance veteran awareness about disability, medical, educational benefits, and foster a safe inclusive environment for storytelling as a form of healing. HOMAGE promotes diversity through selfless service by enabling members of the armed forces, veterans, family and friends the ability to bring their story to the world in an effective manner without sacrificing passion, quality or artistic vision. HOMAGE will not be an obstacle, but a venue where communications happen and stories can have a significant presence that enable the stories to be powerful and sincere. We provide stories of service & sacrifice to a new audiences and most importantly preserve this rich part of our nation’s history, so that future generations will remember what veterans and their families have given on behalf of our country. Only through preservation can we educate our grandchildren about what it is to serve for a cause greater than oneself. HOMAGE is a dedicated social utility network that enhances communication in every language and cultural channel for veterans by uniting the over 400,000 uniform record locators and organizations that support veterans under one common operating system. We accomplishes this mission by providing customized resources, blog, forum, and personalized social networks so that users can interact with one another, and possibly connect with former service members. Additionally we encompasses all forms of storytelling by utilizing social media in order to allow individuals to share their stories through videos, pictures, letters, art, or songs. HOMAGE is unique in that it affords a family member or veteran to create an oral history listing their description of their service, campaigns, and any awards they may have had. The oral history represents a time capsule for future generations to use in order to have a better appreciation of the sacrifices their relatives made while serving in the armed forces.

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HOMAGE is a social registry aggregating reflections, images, and sights/sounds during the ten year-time-line of 9/11. We ask the question of “where were you” on September 11, 2001, when 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four US commercial passenger jet airliners and crashed them into the Towers of the World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA. HOMAGE take us back to when the Twin Towers collapsed within hours of being struck by the planes and 2,995 people from over 70 countries were killed in the attacks. Months before and after September 11, many important international events occurred. On October 7, 2001, the US military’s Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) was launched in Afghanistan, and followed with Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). HOMAGE provides this generation with an opportunity to pay tribute to 6,000 plus service members killed in action, and thousands of Wounded Warriors and returning Veterans from the longest war in U.S. history. HOMAGE will provide research, scholarship and oral history for all, but future generations may benefit the most from the HOMAGE repository of facts and capture of events and emotions as they happened.