Rising Voices » Tutorial

Witness: Learning To Use Videos For Change

Rezwan — Sun, 13 May 2012 21:42:44 +0000

WITNESS, a human rights non-profit organization based in USA, empowers people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice. Founded in 1992 by musician Peter Gabriel, WITNESS is working to advance human rights through the use of video for change across many countries of the world.

The organization makes available useful training resources for human rights organizations and activists to help them do their work better. WITNESS’ core methodology is “video advocacy”, where the use of video is considered an integrated tool in human rights campaigns. It has trained individuals from more than 80 countries through hands-on workshops and provided video cameras to selected activists and community leaders. Its video sharing website The Hub empowers people to document and publicize unseen atrocities. It also operates an important preservation program through the WITNESS Media Archive.

WITNESS has launched its comprehensive training curriculum on human rights advocacy through video, which is available for download for free. It features 7 modules and 37 individual sessions ranging from 30 minutes to 6 hours long. These modules offer information about how to use videos for human rights advocacy activities, create and present credible stories to support their campaigns, the tricks of videomaking and much more. Included in each session are these downloadable PDFs:

Descriptions of session objectives, and what the participants will learn and experience;
PowerPoint slide decks, which are embedded so you can see the key points and structure of the session.
Facilitator notes which highlight the structure of the session; key points, details on the resources and case studies, and suggested exercises to complete during the session.
Participant notes help guide participants and provide essential information to support the session.
Handouts are incorporated in the session, and also in a workbook for participants.

Screenshot of Video for Change Curriculum

With this curriculum WITNESS seeks to expand the reach of its training programs to large and more diverse group of people, organizations, and networks online and offline. You can see a presentation on the WITNESS Curriculum.

Featured Guide: Data Journalism Handbook – A New Approach To Storytelling

Rezwan — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:01:37 +0000

“Data journalism is obtaining, reporting on, curating and publishing data in the public interest.” – Jonathan Stray, journalist and computer scientist.

Last November at a 48 hour workshop at Mozilla Festival in London, a number of journalists and developers started work on the first Data Journalism Handbook. The main focus of the effort was to have a comprehensive step-by-step guide to data journalism as there are a lot of useful resources on the web, but they are not organized in one place. The Data Journalism Handbook was coordinated by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Click on the image to watch a slideshow.

The initial effort subsequently transformed into an international, collaborative effort involving many of data journalism's leading advocates and best practitioners – including from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, the Chicago Tribune, Deutsche Welle, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Helsingin Sanomat, La Nacion, the New York Times, ProPublica, the Washington Post, the Texas Tribune, Verdens Gang, Wales Online, Zeit Online and many others.

Image courtesy Online Journalism Blog

The Handbook has been formally launched on 28th of April, 2012 at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. The first version of the Data Journalism Handbook is now available for download at datajournalismhandbook.org under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License. There will also be a printed and e-book version published by O’Reilly Media.

The handbook explains “What Is Data Journalism?“, “Why Journalists Should Use Data” and “Why Is Data Journalism Important?“among other things. It features case studies and tells how to mine data, analyze it and deliver it via a story.

Rising Voices grantee Friends of Januária from Brazil was featured in the case studies section of the handbook. It shows how ordinary people can use data for citizen journalism:

You don’t need to be in a large newsroom with a lot of specialists to use data in your articles. After twelve workshops, Soraia and Alysson, neither of whom have a background in journalism, were able to work on data powered stories and write interesting pieces about their local situation. In addition, their articles show that data itself can be useful even on a small scale. In other words, that there is also valuable information in small datasets and tables — not only in huge databases.

Data-driven journalism is a journalistic process based on analyzing and filtering with open source tools large data sets, which are freely available online. The goal of this process is to tell journalistic stories based on the data. This connection between data and story tries to bridge the gap between developments that are relevant and to tell a story that is verifiable, trustworthy, relevant and easy to remember.

Data Journalism is a new phenomenon and there is a growing list of examples how it can be applied. Guardian has an extensive list of data stories and of course the release by whistle-blower organization WikiLeaks of huge data set of the Afghan War Diary.

This website is dedicated to providing anyone interested in getting started with data driven journalism with a collection of learning resources, including relevant events, tools, tutorials, interviews and case studies. Also follow its Facebook and Twitter pages for regular updates.

Featured Guide: Creating Facebook Pages with Impact (Arabic)

Rezwan — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:51:36 +0000

The much talked about Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Mid-East heavily relied on the Internet and social media. Egyptian youth Khaled Mohamed Saeed died in police custody in the Sidi Gaber area of Alexandria on June 6, 2010. Immediately activist Wael Ghonim started a prominent Facebook group, “We are all Khaled Said”, which brought attention to his death and contributed to mobilize mass protests leading up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Technologies like Twitter, TwitPic, Facebook and YouTube contributed immensely in the early stages to accelerate these social protests.

Social Media Exchange (SMEX) is a social enterprise that offers training and consulting on social media and online strategy to both nonprofit and for-profit organizations in Lebanon and the Arab world. SMEX has released a new Arabic-language guide Creating Facebook Pages with Impact (Arabic): A Guide for Arab Civil Society Organizations. The 74-page guide shows nine major steps in developing a strategy for a Facebook Page, such as selecting administrators, setting goals, and using Insights to monitor the progress of the campaign. The guide also includes examples of successful Arab-world Pages and is illustrated with screenshots to help navigate the numerous Facebook Page features.

The guide will be helpful to new Arab activists as well as more experienced organizers trying to leverage social media effectively. The PDF guide is free to download and available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, so anyone is free to adapt, remix, and reuse the guide for commercial or noncommercial purposes. Only they have to credit SMEX. An English version will be released soon.

For those who wants an English guide can download from here DigiActive's first guide: A DigiActive Introduction to Facebook Activism. You can read about the guide in Global Voices Advocacy. You can also use these tools to revamp your Facebook campaign.

[Live Chat] Next Steps for the Blogging Positively Guide on December 2

Janet Feldman — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:40:55 +0000

Please join us on December 2, 2010, for a chat about the “Blogging Positively” project and e-guide. The chat will start at 11am EST, and we enthusiastically welcome new participants, in addition to friends who have already joined the global conversation.

Details:

Blogging Positively Chat: December 2, 2010, 11am EST (USA)

The chat will begin at 11am EST (Boston-New York).

This is 2pm (Buenos Aires), 4pm (London), 6pm (Cape Town, Beirut), 7pm (Nairobi), 9:30pm (New Delhi), 12am (Dec 4) (Beijing, Manila), 1am (Tokyo), 3am (Sydney).

World AIDS Day 2010 – Rising Voices Chat

Background:

Two years ago, a World AIDS Day chat on the subject of citizen media and HIV/AIDS–sponsored by Rising Voices–revealed a strong interest in a guide on blogging about HIV/AIDS-related topics.

The e-guide, “Blogging Positively,” was published last year, and can be downloaded here. And here for our map of people and groups who blog about HIV/AIDS.

Now that the “Blogging Positively” guide has launched, we want to find ways to make it as useful as possible. Suggestions include development of a curriculum that would accompany hands-on experience, expanding the guide to include other forms of citizen media (“blogging and beyond”), and other topics such as gender violence and HIV/AIDS, and linking it to other kinds of communication, such as art.

We have developed a list of possible “future scenarios”, including:

* Collecting best practices and adding blogs to our growing map.
* Devising ways to involve people living in areas less Internet-accessible.
* Including more individuals and groups directly affected by HIV/AIDS, and empowering HIV+ bloggers.
* Organizing an international corps of local bloggers focused on HIV/AIDS.
* Creating advocacy campaigns and “crisis blogging” teams for global hot-spots.
* Implementing training programs on citizen media and HIV/AIDS.
* Storytelling by and about people affected by HIV/AIDS.
* Bolstering health education campaigns.
* Encouraging use of citizen media other than blogging and the Internet.

The December 2nd chat will focus on gathering feedback about the e-guide and project, creating a curriculum, and some of the topics listed above (as time permits). Hopefully you can join us!

[Live Chat] Next Steps for the Blogging Positively Guide on December 2

Janet Feldman — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 23:02:37 +0000

Details:

Blogging Positively Chat: December 2, 2010, 11am EST (USA)

The chat will begin at 11am EST (Boston-New York).

This is 2pm (Buenos Aires), 4pm (London), 6pm (Cape Town, Beirut), 7pm (Nairobi), 9:30pm (New Delhi), 12am (Dec 4) (Beijing, Manila), 1am (Tokyo), 3am (Sydney).

World AIDS Day 2010 – Rising Voices Chat

Background:

Two years ago, a World AIDS Day chat on the subject of citizen media and HIV/AIDS–sponsored by Rising Voices–revealed a strong interest in a guide on blogging about HIV/AIDS-related topics.

The e-guide, “Blogging Positively,” was published last year, and can be downloaded here. And here for our map of people and groups who blog about HIV/AIDS.

We have developed a list of possible “future scenarios”, including:

The December 2nd chat will focus on gathering feedback about the e-guide and project, creating a curriculum, and some of the topics listed above (as time permits). Hopefully you can join us!

Working with photos in your blog

Rezwan — Fri, 16 May 2008 05:18:32 +0000

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.

As a citizen journalist you will be using a lot of photos for your reports, blogs and photo blogs.

What I will discuss here today is specially targeted for the citizen journalists who work on computers with low bandwidth internet connections. Large and high resolution images eat up a lot of bandwidth, which means it will take longer both to upload your images to the internet and longer for your local readers to load the webpage. It only takes a second to download a 100KB image using T1 connection but for the same image it can take more than a minute with a 14.4k dial-up connection.

By optimizing your pictures, you can save both your own time and that of your readers while still publishing attractive and compelling photographs. The JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group, pronounced “jay-peg”) format is the standard for working with compressed photographs online.

The megapixel myth

Digital cameras have become much more affordable in recent times, and many mobile phones also have cameras that allow photographs to be saved and uploaded to the web via USB cable or MMS (similar SMS, but with photo or video).

Some new cameras often charge more because they have more megapixels, but what actually does that actually mean?

Ken Rockwell says:

It's all a myth because the number of megapixels (MP) a camera has, has very little to do with how the image looks. Even worse, plenty of lower MP cameras can make better images than poorer cameras with more MP.

(Image courtesy: Logan S.)

The most important thing about shooting photographs is the use of light and composition. A three megapixel camera is enough if you do not want to print a large version of your photo. A five megapixel camera has little difference with a three megapixel camera in quality but a lot in price.

And most importantly the more megapixels an image has, the more space it takes up, and the longer it takes to upload to the web. A three megapixel image takes up an average of 500KB space in JPG format whereas a five megapixel image will take up an average of three times more (1500KB). So use lower megapixel settings in your camera if you have to upload photos with a slow net speed. Or, alternatively, you can optimize your photos so that they are smaller in file size before you upload them to the internet.

Optimizing pictures

The best way to get your images ready for the internet is by optimizing them. There are many online and offline image editing tools available. While online image editors like Picnik and Photoshop Express offer many of the same features as expensive software you have to install on your computer, the web pages take a long time to load on slow internet connections. If you are able to install software on your computer, Picasa is a great free image editor and organizer by Google which easily allows you to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, a free photo-sharing service. Picopti offers some tips on how to improve your photographs using Picasa.

The best way to reduce the size of your photos is to resize them. A three megapixel photo will have 2048 X 1536 pixels and will take a space of about 500KBs. If you reduce that to 500 X 375 pixels you will see that the size has reduced to almost 100KB and with tools like Adobe Photoshop or Picasa you can even reduce it futher to 20Kbs or less, though this can affect the quality of the image.

(Image courtesy: Oso)

If you don’t have the software on the PC in a cyber cafe, don’t worry. You can even do it with MS paint, which is included for free on Windows. Try image-> stretch/skew-> 25% – horizontal / 25%- vertical (or other attributes) and save the result. See how the image size is reduced.

Now while posting the picture in your blog you can adjust the length and width with the tools in your blogging platform. If you want to do it manually according to your need you can use this tutorial about adjusting height and width and using the align=”left” “right” or “center” tags. You can also directly link to the source of the photo from another website (or your photo archive in Flickr). It is advisable to only use the same or a smaller version of the image when using these adjustments. Remember if you make the photos look bigger than their actual size, the image quality will be very poor.

If you have multiple photos in a page you can use the tools of blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger to upload the picture and posting thumbnails. By posting “thumbnails” (smaller versions of the original photograph), you can let your readers load your web page faster and then click on the images that interest them to see them in larger sizes.

It is important to use the ALT tag to describe each image so that it shows up in search returns as well as make your blog more accessible to blind users who depend on programs that read the text of a web page aloud.

Postings other’s images and copyright issues

If you want to post others’ pictures in your blog, you can use photo sharing sites like Flickr to search for a suitable image. But one thing you need to be aware of is that those pictures are the property of others. So before using them you need to get their permission.

Increasingly, people are assigning creative commons licenses to reserve their rights while also letting people use the photos for free under some conditions. The most important of these conditions is the attribution policy. That means you have to give the creator of the image credit in the manner specified by the license. Another important condition is to mention whether the photos can be used for non-commercial purposes.

Usually personal blogs are non-commercial initiatives so crediting the photo owner saves you a lot of trouble if you are not sure of the license or can’t contact the author. The author will contact you if he/she feels you are violating his/her right and the photo can be taken down. But it is always important to give credit where credit is due.

You can search for photographs published with Creative Commons licenses at Open Photo and on Flickr.

Photo hosting

You can upload, organize, and share your photographs using Picasa Web, Flickr, and Photobucket. All three websites allow you to easily publish the photos you upload onto your blog. A list of more photo sharing websites is available on Wikipedia.