The East African nations of Uganda and Kenya led the way in the countries with the most number of applications. For a closer look at what other countries were represented among the applications, please take a look at the word cloud created by the site Wordle. The size of the country name corresponds with the number of applications received from that country.

Countries Represented Word Cloud - Click for a larger image.

Ninety-five percent of applicants submitted a proposal for the first time, meaning that the remaining five percent participated in past Rising Voices microgrant competitions beginning in 2007. We also asked applicants to best describe the focus area of their project, and Education, Women and Gender, Indigenous Communities, and Development were the categories mentioned the most.

It was also interesting to input the text from the project descriptions from all of the proposals. Again using a word cloud, one can see which terms and concepts were used most often.

Project Term Word Cloud - Click to see a larger image

These are just some quick demographical details gathered from an initial look at the 1175 proposals. In the near future, we will be developing a map that will help visualize the specific locations from which the proposals came. We will also help show places around the world that share similar interests based on the topic of their citizen media outreach projects. Only those projects which gave permission to Rising Voices to publicly share that information will be included in the map.

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Over the next six weeks, we'll be carefully reviewing each proposal with our selection committee. Shortlisted finalists will be contacted sometime in late February. We will also contact all applicants that have not been selected. Due to the high volume of applications, the anticipated announcement for the winners will now be mid-March.

We are delighted with the widespread interest in bringing citizen media to underrepresented communities around the world. Around 95% of the proposals were from first-time applicants, meaning most are new to the work of Rising Voices. We strive to be a resource for organizations and individuals like you who wish to bring digital participatory media to their communities. We share news of competitions, contests, funding opportunities, tutorials, and examples of outreach initiatives. We also try to feature the work of other organizations and individuals working in local underrepresented communities around the world to bring the benefits of citizen media to more people.

We hope that you continue to stay in touch and become a part of the Rising Voices community. There are several ways to do so:

• Read and participate on the Rising Voices blog for news about grantees, case studies of projects, and news from our working groups. (Please leave a comment if there is something you find interesting).
• Join the Rising Voices mailing list where we share links and news about external funding opportunities and resources for those interested in citizen media in developing countries.
• Follow us on Twitter (Please say hello! @risingvoices).
• Follow us on Facebook (Let us know on our wall that you applied for the microgrant! We'd love to hear from you).

Thanks again for your interest and best of luck!

Written by Eddie Avila
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In this modern world we are using using digital devices and gadgets and thinking Digital everyday. We are living the Digital life by acting digitally - always clicking, linking, tagging and Liking. The contest is your chance to tell your story “What makes your life so click-worthy?”

The competition is open to everyone - professionals, amateurs - anyone in the world can apply. There is no upper or lower limit on age. (details here)

Click on image to enlarge poster.

The contest will progress through four main rounds. In the first stage, participants will send in their written abstracts by 26th January 2012, giving details of their video proposal and what inspired their story line. The proposals will be judged by a panel of jurists where 25 ideas will be shortlisted for the next round. The list will be voted by the public and top ten favorites will be chosen. Finally, the judges will pick the two best videos among the ten.

The Top 10 videos will receive a prize of EUR 500 each and will also get a chance to be part of a film screening at CIS premises in Bangalore. The two best video makers will receive loads of prizes.

Please submit your proposal via Online Application Form by 26 January 2012.

Here is a video produced by Harry McKillop Elementary School, Melissa, Texas, to show that today's digital natives are hungry for guidance and opportunity to experiment with all the new tools available.

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A major part of Rising Voices' mission to support and nurture underrepresented communities so that they can begin to take full advantage of participatory digital media tools has been our microgrants for citizen media outreach projects. Since 2007, these small grants provide an opportunity for individuals, grassroots groups, networks, and other organizations without significant access to larger funding to be able to pass along knowledge by teaching others in their community in the use of these tools, as well as to provide ongoing support.

Rising Voices is pleased to announce the 2012 open call for microgrant proposals, and we are currently accepting project proposals for funding up to $4,000 USD for global projects.

Who is Eligible to Apply

This funding opportunity is open to private individuals, groups, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We encourage partnerships between individuals and organizations. For example, if an NGO does not have experienced citizen media trainers on staff, it would be extremely important that it seeks collaboration with the local blogging community to find the right trainer(s) with the necessary skills. Individual applicants might also find it highly beneficial to partner with organizations from the communities they plan to serve in order to strengthen the project's impact and to have access to potential project participants.

There is no requirement for an organization to be legally registered, but we do require selected projects to have access to a bank account that is able to receive international bank transfers.

What Kind of Projects May be Funded

Rising Voices seeks project proposals that share our mission of bringing voices from new communities, as well as underrepresented language groups to the online global conversation through the use of participatory citizen media. The project's primary activities should be to provide citizen media training workshops to the target community, as well vital ongoing support and mentoring. Please see our roster of current and alumni grantee projects for examples of previously funded projects.

Examples of potential projects may include:

• Organizing a citizen media “boot camp” with experienced local bloggers to train and mentor participants from underrepresented communities that will result in a local network of support.
• Working with an indigenous community to teach and encourage new generations to begin to use Twitter to connect with others as a way to preserve and promote their native language online.
• Partnering with a local library with a computer to lab to invite community members to discuss local problems and solutions, and train them how to create a group blog to take these conversations to the wider community.
• Organizing a series of digital photography group walks where residents can document life in their community together and create an online Flickr photography exhibit.
• Teaching local residents to record and edit audio recordings on Audacity for a community podcast that can be uploaded online, as well as distributed to local radio stations for a wider reach.

Project ideas are not limited to these, and we encourage you to be creative, yet realistic in your proposals.

Application Process

Interested applicants should complete the online proposal application form (link here), which should also include a detailed budget. It is extremely important that applicants follow the word count guidelines for each of the questions.

If you would like to download the application questions to complete offline in order to upload later, please view or download the text document here (Google Doc format). However, all applications must be submitted online, and we cannot accept any additional attachments. Once you have submitted the application, you will see a confirmation screen like this. While we welcome and encourage projects from all corners of the global, all applications must be completed in English due to the common language of our selection committee.

Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $2,000-4,000 USD. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets. Applicants are encouraged to submit budgets for less than the maximum $4,000 USD as smaller grants allow us to fund more projects.

The application deadline is February 3rd, 2012 at 11:59 PM GMT (Please double check the time zone equivalent in your region). The proposals will be reviewed by a committee of Global Voices staff and volunteers, as well as members of previous Rising Voices grantees. We hope to be able to announce the grant recipients by February 28, 2012.

Expectations of Successful Grantees

Successful projects will be prominently featured on the Global Voices networks. Grantees will be required to sign a grant agreement, which will outline accounting, reporting, and other terms and conditions regarding how funds will be distributed. Grantees will also be required to post regular project updates to the Rising Voices website, be in regular communication with Rising Voices staff, as well as actively participate in the Rising Voices community.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments section below or by sending an email to eddie [at] globalvoicesonline [dot] org.

Good luck!

Written by Eddie Avila
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However, this is not to say that these voices are not developing during this rise in digital participation, as there are more and more people from diverse backgrounds taking part in various training initiatives or simply learning on their own. Yet, this participation can be be greater and more far-reaching.

With the support of HIVOS and IBIS, Rising Voices is organizing a three-gathering in Cochabamba, Bolivia on December 12-14, 2011 with some of these emerging voices and other creators of digital media. The focus of the gathering “Conectándonos” (Connecting) is to provide support and training to 35 participants from these underrepresented communities and those working closely with these groups to examine how they can play a role in ensuring that the Bolivian digital space is more inclusive with greater participation by all sectors of society. The site of the gathering will be the mARTadero, an arts and cultural space located in South Cochabamba.

The format of the gathering will include the sharing of case studies on citizen media outreach projects around the country and around the world, as well as hands-on training workshops in a Bar-Camp-like format. On hand will be five experienced Bolivian bloggers who will share their own experiences and provide ongoing assistance through the workshops. Finally, there will also be small-group activities where the participants will develop their own ideas on how to be resources in their own communities to encourage others to begin to use these digital tools.

In addition, there will be an event open to the public to be held on December 13th to discuss this need to help bridge the participation gap in citizen media in these underrepresented communities. Follow along on Twitter at @conectandonosBO [es] and please visit the website Conectándonos [es] during the course of the three-day event. We'll publish articles translated into English on the Rising Voices blog.

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From the dialogue description on the New Tactics website:

Information is a powerful commodity for human rights defenders. Receiving and sharing information is at the heart of human rights work. Modern technology, such as the mobile phone, and the global distribution of the internet, provides new opportunities for citizens to actively participate in journalism. The mobile phone is arguably the most accessible form of information communication technology and a popular tool for receiving and sharing information.

Human rights practitioners are finding innovative ways to utilize mobile phones to amplify the voices of communities around the world in order to collect and disseminate news and information. In Namibia, readers are able to text in editorial comments that are then published in the Namibia print paper. In Guatemala, radio listeners text in their comments that are then read on-air. In India, mobile phones circumvent a radio news ban and allow people to both access news and record information. These are just a few examples of how practitioners are using mobile phones to get and provide information and news from and to citizens.

Others participating as resource practitioners:

• Melissa Ulbricht (co-facilitator) - MobileActive's staff writer, United States
• Becky Hurwitz - Project Manager at MobileActive and currently working on the SaferMobile project, United States
• Rich Jones of the Open Watch Project
• Mong Palatino - one of the founding conveners of TXTpower, Philippines
• Brian Conley and others of Small World News
• Sean McDonald and Amy O'Donnell of Frontline SMS, United States
• Alix Dunn - applied researcher and consultant in the role of digital tools in activism, Egypt
• John (Kipp) Kipchumbah of InfoNet, Kenya
• Sam duPont - Field Fellow for Dimagi, author of Global Mobile blog at at DC think tank NDN, currently based in Thailand and Philippines
• Patita Tingoi and others from Fahamu, Kenya
• Boukary Konaté and Eddie Avila from Rising Voices, Mali and Bolivia

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The guide is available for download and used freely by organizations and individuals working in the field of HIV/AIDS education, prevention, and treatment. The guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

With the Swahili version of the Blogging Positively Guide now available, the resource is now available in five languages.

Download the guide here:

Written by Eddie Avila
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Bandim and Enterramento (Guinea-Bissau)

In the Western African country of Guinea-Bissau, the organization Associação Amigos das Crianças (Association Friends of the Children) has built a strong relationship with the youth in the neighborhoods of Bandim and Enterramento located on the outskirts of the capital city Bissau. According to AMIC, the residents of these communities face challenging issues such as the lack of access to safe drinking water, a fragile sanitation system, poor educational infrastructure, and few safe places for children to play.

However, in these neighborhoods there is a also strong spirit of creativity and artistic expression thanks to the work of AMIC, in collaboration with the local cultural group “Cultural Netos de Bandim.” Together they have been providing alternative cultural activities such as art, dance, and theater workshops as a way to engage the local youth living in these two neighborhoods. Under the leadership of Ector Diogenes Cassamá, a local artist and activist, AMIC will begin to add digital storytelling to the cultural offerings available to the neighborhood youth.

The project seeks to teach the youth of these two neighborhoods how to use digital photography and video to document life in their surrounding community. Even though the two neighborhoods of Bandim and Enterramento are not adjacent to one another, the project will allow youth from the different neighborhoods to interact with and learn about youth in another part of Bissau. Through community exploration and interviews of fellow residents, the youth will gain a better understanding of the history of the neighborhood. The youth will also learn about the current challenges facing their surroundings, and how they can play a role in shaping their future.

Friends of Januária (Brazil)

The small town of Januária located in the north of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais has had a recent history of difficulties with its local government. In the span of six years, the town has gone through seven mayors. Several of these mayors were removed because of wrongdoing [pt], including many cases of mismanagement of public funds. Because this small town with a population of 65,000 is located far from many of the urban centers in Brazil, the local government receives little or no press coverage, which is often a way to hold local public servants accountable to their constituents

Since 2004, a local organization called the Association of Friends of Januária (Asajan) has been raising awareness about the issue of local governance among the town's residents. Through investigative journalism work and public awareness campaigns, Asajan has been championing transparency and accountability for Januária's local government. Much of this work has been made possible by one of Asajan's founders, Fábio Oliva, who is an active blogger himself and who has been writing about issues of civic engagement. In 2008, Brazilian multimedia journalists Amanda Rossi and Jamila Venturini filmed a documentary [pt] about the work of Asajan and about the ongoing needs of the local community, with a focus on Asajan's work holding public officials accountable.

Asajan now seeks to include more local participation in its work of monitoring the municipal government and its budgets, as well as learning about ways to access public information regarding their town. The project will be led by Rossi and Venturini, in close collaboration with Oliva, Asajan, and others, which will engage residents of the town, especially focusing on youth, teaching them how to use citizen media tools for greater civic participation. The participants will use blogs, digital video and photography, as a way to document the issues facing the town and to monitor the local government's response to these needs.

Transparent Chennai (India)

Transparent Chennai is a local organization that has been aggregating, collecting, and displaying data for public interest use about the Indian city of Chennai. Access to this information helps residents better understand the needs of the city, as well as the local government's response to these needs. Much of the data is available via interactive maps containing various layers of social, political, jurisdictional, and environmental information about the city. Staff and volunteers of Transparent Chennai have done much of the previous data collection, even though there exists an open invitation for the general public to submit their own information to the database of knowledge.

For this pilot project, Transparent Chennai will add new elements to their existing work by focusing on directly engaging two local artisanal fishing kuppams (villages) in South Chennai. The residents of Usur and Olcott will take part in hands-on workshops where they will learn how to contribute to the map, marking the boundaries of their village, land use patterns - especially how different livelihoods in the community use space outside of their homes and along the water, identifying local resources, points of historical and ritual importance, and gaps in local infrastructure and in government services. The youth of the villages will also take an active part through the use of digital cameras to photograph life within the kuppam, and to post these photographs as a way to create another layer of geotagged images to the map.

This project will engage these villages that have been engulfed by the expanding borders of the city of Chennai. Despite laws in place to protect the coastline from rampant development and to preserve the rights of traditional fishing communities to their land, both Urur and Olcott kuppam are currently threatened with eviction to make way for an elevated expressway the government is planning to build along the city’s coast. The project leaders have discussed the proposed project with the fishermen's panchayats or local governing councils, and together they feel that it is particularly important to bring other voices and other notions of the city into the local and global conversation, so that these voices too can be valued and preserved as an essential part of modern Chennai.

Blind Dates (Greece)

The local school for the blind in Thessaloniki, Greece has recently faced uncertainty with the threatened closing of their school due to operational budgetary constraints. Even though an agreement was eventually reached with national officials ensuring the school's continued operation, many students at the school felt frustrated that their voices were not being heard during the debate that would directly affect their lives. Several of the school's volunteers approached the students about the possibility of using citizen media as a way to express their thoughts on the state of their school, as well as other issues facing the blind community in northern Greece.

As technology for the blind computer users continues to progress, it has become easier and easier for the visually disabled to these citizen media tools. For example, through the use of screen readers, which is software that provides text-to-speech capabilities allowing the user to hear the words aloud that are written or typed by the user, this has enabled many individuals to send emails, to surf the web, as well as as to publish to their personal blogs. Voice recording for audio podcasting is also another way that the blind can express their thoughts and ideas online.

The project “Blind Dates” will be led by Alexia Kalaitzi, who is a volunteer at the school, in close collaboration with Stefanos Tokatlidis, a current student at the school. Tokatlidis has been a blogger [el] for a little more than a year, and is eager to teach his fellow students how to create and manage their own blogs using some of the technologies available for blind students. In addition to teaching the students how to blog, the project will receive technical support from the local NGO United Societies of Balkans to broadcast the audio podcasts on an online web radio station. The content created by the students will cover a wide range of subjects including news about the school, as well as issues pertaining to accessibility issues and public policies concerning the blind community in northern Greece.

Ségou Villages Connection (Mali)

Many rural Malian communities are separated by great distances from the urban centers, including the capital city of Bamako. In many instances, the poor infrastructure, poor roads, and limited electricity, can make the distances seem much larger. However, the emergence of communication tools such as affordable mobile phones can help strengthen the links between the residents of rural villages and the larger cities. This is especially important for many Malians who have left their communities for greater educational and economic opportunities in Bamako.

One prolific Malian blogger, Boukary Konaté, is originally from the Ségou region in Mali, which is located along the Niger River. Even though he lives and works in Bamako, he still holds strong binding ties to his community back home. He has been an innovative local leader in the use of citizen media tools as a way to keep residents in the Ségou region informed about news taking place in the capital and around the world. For example, he provided live Twitter updates with scores and news of the 2010 World Cup football matches taking place in South Africa. These microblogging messages written in French and the native language of Bambara provided valuable updates to the football fans in Ségou without television sets.

Konaté's project seeks to continue this communication flow with the residents of the Ségou villages, but the project will add a teaching component where villagers will learn how to send their own news and information back to Bamako. Through hands-on workshops that will take place in various villages, Konaté will train the residents how to use their mobile phones to send news about the communities to the residents living in the capital. They will also receive feedback and comments from the readers, with all of the information to be collected on a community portal made available in French and Bambara. This two-way communication will strengthen the relationship between residents in the villages and those now living in the capital city.

Please join us in congratulating and welcoming the five newest Rising Voices grantees. We're excited to see their work unfold and we hope you are too!

Written by Eddie Avila
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We are unable to contact each applicant individually. If you applied and have not been contacted already, we are sorry to inform that your project did not make the final round. There were so many great ideas from many underrepresented communities around the world, but unfortunately our funds are limited and we cannot fund every project. We hope that you stay involved with Rising Voices, and if you do decide to implement your project, please let us know and we'd be happy to share your work with the rest of the community. Please keep an eye out for the next round of microgrant funding. You are always welcome to reapply.

Don't forget to subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter, or “like” us on Facebook.

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The guide is available for download and used freely by organizations and individuals working in the field of HIV/AIDS education, prevention, and treatment. The guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Download the guide here:

Special thanks to Alexey Sidorenko for additional contributions.

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