Rising Voices

ConVerGentes, the San Javier La Loma-based group of young journalists who form part of HiperBarrio, have started a podcast in Spanish. Have a listen to learn more about their community, how it is different from the rest of Medellín, and why they are headed to Campus Party.

Kenyan youths face a low life expectancy because of extreme poverty, poor health care and an AIDS epidemic. Some of them are internally displaced and took refuge in camps after the post election violence. But with the help of REPACTED, a Rising Voices grantee they have found hope and are daring to make a change in the society. Learn how they are doing it in this week’s feature.

Why do we blog? Because we want to express ourselves, to be heard, to learn about others, to augment networking, and most importantly to enhance a new social imagination, engage in social causes among other things. Emerging bloggers in two of the Rising Voices funded projects have done commendable jobs in taking personal initiatives to help others and promote the cause to a greater scale.

Rising Voices aims not just to get new communities actively participating in the conversational web, but also to introduce their voices to mainstream media outlets so that, for once, under-represented communities are portrayed by their very residents. While the majority of the ten current Rising Voices outreach projects have been covered by mainstream media organization, Voces Bolivianas takes the prize when it comes to attraction national media attention. The citizen media outreach project, which trains new bloggers in El Alto, Santa Cruz, and other sites around Bolivia, was featured yet again this week, this time in the Santa Cruz-based Vamos magazine.

When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. “Murder capital of the world”, sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life? That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S.E.T.) has set out to accomplish with its new citizen media initiative, Prison Diaries.

On the first anniversary of the Nari Jibon Blog we have asked the people behind Nari Jibon of Bangladesh, its educators and a participant about the challenges of the citizen media outreach project so far. We wanted to know what they have learned, how the blog has helped them, what the frustrations have been and what were their happiest moments. Read all about these in this week’s feature.

Today’s video features Carmen Paniagua, the lyrical poet and songwriter of HiperBarrio. Carmen is incredibly shy, especially behind the lens of a camera, but her eyes and ears are always observing, keen observations about herself and her community which make their way into each of her poems and posts published frequently on her blog, Baúl de Letras. Carmen is also one of the authors of Nunca Será Suficiente, a group blog novel.

The Neighborhood Diaries project of Kolkata resumed after two month long break. The project faces new challenges; reconnecting with the young citizen journalists from marginalized communities, making them computer literate and so on. Learn more about the developments of this project.

Five representatives from Rising Voices will present their experiences - either as trainers or trainees - in citizen media outreach projects in Colombia, Bolivia, Madagascar, and Kenya at this year’s Global Voices Summit on June 28 in Budapest, Hungary.

While most of the posts on Rising Voices cover the latest achievements of our grantee projects, we also want to offer readers hands-on tips to make citizen media easier to create in the developing world. As the saying goes, a photo can speak a thousands words. In this post we’ll review some new online tools that make editing images and sharing them online easy and fun.