Nomad Green: The First Workshops

Mongolia from above

Mongolia from above

As announced in our previous feature on the Rising Voices grantee Nomad Green, the first four workshops took place in May. Portnoy Zheng posted the schedule of the first two days here from where you can get an idea of the proceedings. Citizen media tools like blog, flickr, picasa, Youtube etc were introduced to the participants and with them they will be discussing the environmental and public health issues in Mongolia.

Portnoy informed via an email to the Rising Voices Community on May 14, 2009:

The first four workshops just finished yesterday, we have trained about 60 participants and right now there are more than 70 articles in Mongolian at the dashboard of Nomad Green waiting to be published (after being edited by Otgoo, Odnoo, and Bolor, our Mongolian editors.)

It takes time, and it will take more time to translate them into English. But we are all excited about this project and I think we have all four successful workshops.

The venue of the workshop was the Press Institute of Mongolia which has a computer lab with about 15 functioning computers and fast enough Internet connection.

ng-participants-640x480

ng-participants1-640x480

Amongst the participants were environmental activists, independent journalist. But most of them were concerned citizens and students.

Portnoy introduces us to some of the members of the Project:

“Nomad Green is an idea brought out by General Secretary Lin Cheng-hsiou (Axiou) of Mongolian and Tibetan Foundation (MTF) in Taiwan.”

Axiou

Axiou

The Chief Editor, Ms. Otgonsuren Jargal (Otgoo), is an active member of Green Coalition of Ulaanbaatar. She has working experience as journalist and editor in both mainstream and independent media of Mongolia. Besides speaking Mongolian, her mother tongue, she can speak good English, French, and Russian.

Otgpp

Ms. Otgoo

Davva

Davaa (Guo Liang)

Davaa (Guo Liang), the workshop assistant is a Mongolia-born-Chinese high school student. He is fluent in Mongolian and Mandarin.

Axiou presented “Why Nomad Green” to the participants which ended with the slide: “empower ourselves in the web age”.

Portnoy used this slide to introduce Nomad Green and the environmental issues in Mongolia:

Boum and Otgoo interpreted the above presentations in Mongolian for the participants.

Then Boum apprised (in Mongolian) the participants about the environmental issues in Mongolia and shared his experience as a major environmental activist in Mongolia for more than a decade.

Boum

Boum

Here are some of the Nomad Green participants in Ulaanbaatar sending greetings to the world:

Soon you will be able to read their posts too in English or Mandarin. Here is the video from the third workshop:

After the workshops Portnoy retrospects:

Successful, however, still far from perfect. We don't have much time to teach all the tools I think are necessary to all participants, so some of them know how to twitter and most of them don't. Most of them know how to post an article in wordpress based Nomad Green website now but still some of them don't.

The project website has many posts up but they are still in Mongolian only. There are no online translation tool to translate from Mongolian. So many of the world readers have to wait till the translations are up. The translators will soon be completing their final exams and have time to translate them into English and Mandarin.

Portnoy informed about the future plans of Nomad Green:

We also plan to extend our training to other rural provinces in August, but I haven't got any idea of how to gather enough computers. Darkhan (the 2nd biggest city) and Erdenet (the 3rd biggest city) will be our first targets. I checked some Internet cafes in the two cities last week when I visited there and they are really not suitable for training.

But we are confident that the Nomad Green team will overcome all the challenges and make it possible. None can stop them empowering themselves to be an active part of the citizen media revolution and address the perils of climate changes in Mongolia.

Images courtesy Portnoy Zheng & Nomad Green

2 comments

  • keep up the great work friends! This is a strong start for Nomad Green. Don’t worry, as long as there are blog posts , even in Mongolian, it is already an open window to this amazing country.

  • […] The first workshops of the Rising Voices grantee Nomad Green took place in last May in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar. More than 60 participants attended those workshops to learn the use of citizen media tools with which they will be discussing the environmental and public health issues in Mongolia. But only about 20 participants actually commenced posting in the project blog. Portnoy Zheng, cited the main reason as lack of Internet connections to implement the learning practically. He describes that these efforts were taken to overcome the problem: The editor’s team (including me) is encouraging participants to write their first post around themselves and their thoughts on greener and healthier Mongolia, and is also encouraging participants to give us hand written pieces or document file, in order to lower the worries of publishing on Internet. […]

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