Rising Voices

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.

Shaghayegh Azimi is the epitome of what is often referred to on Global Voices as a “bridge-blogger”; that is, someone who uses their weblog to bridge two or more cultures. There is only one catch - Azimi isn’t really a blogger; her passion, rather, lies in video. Her project, Iran Inside Out, is a window of moving images that will allow those living outside the country to point their video cameras and share their lives with the rest of the world.

This week we are introduced to another of the Rising Voices second round grantees, “Prison Diaries”, based in Jamaica. It will use citizen media tools like blogs, video and podcasts to share the daily journals of inmates, allowing all Jamaicans to learn about the realities of Jamaica’s overcrowded prison system with the hope that this will counteract the false ideas of veneration of gang leaders implanted by the media.

Rising Voices grantee Pablo Flores, who is in charge of the implementation of the One Laptop Per Child program in Uruguay, believes that the XO laptop is more than just an educational tool. He also sees the lime green laptops as an important communication device which he hopes will allow all Uruguayan students to be heard by the rest of their country and participate in the online conversations which will affect their future.

We are delighted to introduce to you the first of the second round grantees of Rising Voices. Foko Blog Club is a blog outreach arm of FOKO, a project founded by four bloggers committed to the development of Madagascar by teaching blogging skills to the young people in Madagascar.

The Rising Voices citizen media outreach initiative will start out 2008 with five new and innovative projects based in Kenya, Madagascar, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Iran.

This week we have the pleasure to introduce to you the fifth of the first round grantees of the Rising Voices. ‘Neigbourhood Diaries’ is a citizen writing program moblising young people living in ’slums’ as citizen journalists to research, write and disseminate unrecognized and authentic community narratives in local and global media.

One of five Rising Voices outreach award winners, Voces Bolivianas is a participatory citizen’s media project that promotes the use of online media to allow Bolivians especially from underrepresented groups to share their stories about their lives and communities, thus deciding how they are represented.

As promised, this is the second installment of a two-part podcast about Medellín, Colombia and how the HiperBarrio project is taking advantage of the city’s new network of library parks to teach the skills of citizen media to young people from the working class northern hills.

Medellín Colombia is synonymous with drugs, with Pablo Escobar, Marxist guerilla groups, and violent paramilitarists. But over the past decade it is also becoming well known and well regarded for having one of the most ambitious social experiments in Latin America. In this first part of a two-part podcast we become better acquainted with modern day Medellín.