Rising Voices

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.

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.

One of the most exciting developments from last week’s batch of posts is that many Rising Voices participants are using their blogs as more than just spaces of communication. They have realized that by tapping into the support of a community, they are able to start campaigns to help their neighbors in need.

The HiperBarrio project in Colombia has taken advantage of the Medellín’s network of library park facilities which include internet rooms to teach the citizen media skills to young people from the working class northern hills. In this week’s feature we will read some of the experiences of the participants to know how these libraries are carrying out a social role to keep the youth engaged in creative citizen media activities.

Public libraries are transforming from centers of reception to centers of creation, transmission, and communication. In Latin America, the movement toward a more participatory library system is being led by a small satellite library in Medellín, Colombia and BiblioRedes, the national library network of Chile.

HiperBarrio’s presence at Medelink 2008, a local festival of digital culture, might have helped the citizen media outreach project discover a model of sustainability while extending their work to more communities on the outskirts of Medellín.

In celebration of International Women’s Day, Rising Voices grantee and Nari Jibon founder, Kathryn Ward, came up with the idea of a friendly poetry competition among Rising Voices bloggers. Participants of the ten citizen media outreach projects were given a week to write and submit their poems related to the theme “women hold up half the sky.”

When Rising Voices first launched in May of last year, we hoped that at least some of the participants of the outreach projects would emerge as strong leaders and capable trainers to replicate the citizen media workshops among their own networks of friends and family. We never expected, however, that those leaders would emerge so soon and that the great majority would turn out to be women. This week’s feature article is a translation of a post by Professor Álvaro Ramírez, who teaches media and communication at the University of Bergen, about three of those leaders.

Jorge is one of about 20 young people in the peripheral working class neighborhood of San Javier La Loma who are using citizen media to rescue the forgotten history of their community. His song “ConVerGentes” which he performed in this video in early January 2008 discusses the potential of using participatory media to rescue the forgotten history and culture of local communities.

The first round of Rising Voices outreach projects have already been training participants in underrepresented communities how to use the tools of citizen media for just over seven months now. Now many of the projects are taking their media production skills to the next level by using Windows Movie Maker to produce short video documentaries that reveal the realities of the communities where they live.