Rising Voices » Video

[Video] Interview with Pavel Kutsev of Drop-In Center

David Sasaki — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:13:20 +0000

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Pavel Kutsev is the co-founder of Drop-In Center, a Ukrainian organization which advocates for the rights of the injection drug user communication and for better national policy related to substitution therapy. In this video he gives us a basic introduction to the “harm reduction from injection drug use” movement, and summarizes the outcomes of a recent conference in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine which sought to establish a national network of harm reduction activists.

[Video] Interview with Eric Newton of Knight Foundation

David Sasaki — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:31:30 +0000

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Eric Newton is the vice president of the journalism program at Knight Foundation. He describes the annual $5 million Knight News Challenge, which aims to bring about news innovation by supporting new technologies and techniques to bring news and information to specific geographic communities around the world. He offers some examples of projects that have been funded including Rhodes University in South Africa, Freedom Fone in Zimbabwe, Ushahidi in Kenya, and the Sochi Olympics citizen journalism project in Russia, and also provides some tips for applicants seeking funding.

The deadline for this year's News Challenge is October 15 so if you have a good idea, apply now.

Transcript:

Eric: My name is Eric Newton. I’m the Vice President of the journalism program at Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge is a kind of open, international, research and development contest for news innovation. And the idea behind it is that the digital revolution has turned information and news upside down and inside out, and things are changing so rapidly that no one - not traditional media companies, not even the entrepreneur community - can keep up with the pace of change. So our foundation thought that if we have an open, international contest and collected thousands of entries and picked the very best ideas for news innovation that it would help speed the process of moving good news and information into the digital age.

David: How does the Knight News Challenge relate to media development? Or does it?

Eric: Well, it relates to media development in that each of the entries needs to have four key elements. 1) It needs to involve news and information. The kind of news and information that people need to run their communities and their lives. 2) It needs to involve specific geographic communities. So it is not about technology platforms that aren’t related to a specific community - a place where people live and work and run their government. 3) It needs to involve digital innovation; something new. And because of the fourth element, it is very helpful for media development because the fourth element is that whatever technology is developed is then free and open source, and usable by anybody anywhere in the world for news and information in their communities.

David: Does innovation have the same meaning in all countries and all contexts?

Eric: No. Things that are new in one culture might be quite old in another. But we don’t think that it’s the job of the News Challenge to try to bring all of the new developments to everyone in the world. We think that the governments will do that and businesses will do that. There are already structures involving millions and even billions of dollars in media that will spread the innovations. What we’re looking for are things that no one has tried before. No one meaning no one. Those innovations can be technological, but they can also be innovations of technique. If someone in a culture outside the United States says, ‘hey, we can combine these technologies in a unique way in our community’, that is innovation.

So, when Rhodes University in South Africa says ‘we can develop a cell phone citizen journalism program in the township, we can create a web platform for the English-language newspaper, we can create a new web platform for the Afrikaans radio station, and then we can digitally connect all three of these things so that for the first time this community can have a unified news system’ - well, that wasn’t any new technology necessarily. That was taking things and putting them into action in specific communities because of the unique characteristics of that community.

David: Can you give a couple other examples of News Challenge winners internationally, from outside the US?

Eric: Sure, in Sochi, where the Olympics are coming, a citizen journalism project is in the process of organizing the community to talk about whether the olympics are a good thing or a bad thing for the town, or something in between. A major citizen journalism project in Russia is not the norm - so that should be an interesting experiment. In Zimbabwe, there is an experiment in mobile news distribution called Freedom Fone. In Kenya, Ushahidi is experimenting with data visualization and real-time mapping of citizen journalism contributions so that if major news events are occurring you can see the reports that are coming in from all quarters and get a visual idea of what is happening. Those are just some of the examples.

The News Challenge is open internationally because the idea is that anyone anywhere can come up with a good idea. We haven’t done as many international projects as we’d like to because a lot of people think that they have new ideas, but really they just don’t know that it is already happening somewhere else and the technology already exists, and in fact models already exist. So nothing new needs to be developed. What needs to happen in that case is that aid programs or the commercial sector or any number of other funders need to step in to spread things that we already know work.

David: We are about one week from the deadline of this year’s News Challenge. What recommendations and advice would you give to applicants?

Eric: Well, I think that the main thing to remember is that we’re looking for projects with all the elements: great news and information, great digital innovation, specific geographic community and free and open source sharing of what is learned and developed. We frequently will get project proposals that are very strong in one of the categories, but weak in the others. The best thing that anyone can do is partner with experts in the other areas and do their homework in the other areas if they themselves are only experts in only one of the areas.

[Video] Interview with Amadou M. Ba of AllAfrica.com

David Sasaki — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:55:26 +0000

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Amadou M. Ba is the co-founder and president of AllAfrica.com, the largest online aggregator and distributor of news from Sub-Saharan Africa in English and French. He is also the acting executive director of the African Media Initiative, which aims to strengthen Africa's media sector by bringing together owners and operators of major media outlets to collaborate on training programs, seek investment opportunities, advocate for better policy, and improve media research. Amadou tells us about the history of AllAfrica.com, the major challenges facing African leaders in the media sector, and how funders can most effectively support a vibrant media space in Africa.

[Video] Interview with Felipe Vaz from Instituto Overmundo

David Sasaki — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 08:08:59 +0000

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Felipe Vaz is the coordinator of Instituto Overmundo, which promotes access to knowledge and cultural diversity in Brazil through innovative practices in communication, intellectual property, and technology. Felipe describes Brazil's “LAN house revolution.” These LAN houses initially began as local networks where (mostly) young people would go to play multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. More recently they have connected to the internet and are used for social networking, chatting, and job searching. The estimated 90,000 LAN houses across Brazil account for 50% of available internet access in the country. These are illegal operations which don't have business permits and don't pay taxes. The Brazilian government so far has taken an adversarial position toward the LAN houses, arguing that they encourage young people to miss class. But others, like Brazilian blogger Jeimy Remir, think that LAN houses have a positive impact both for their owners and customers.

[Video] Interview with Vanessa Mazal

David Sasaki — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:12:44 +0000

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Vanessa Mazal is a program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Global Development Program. In this interview she talks about the differences and complementary nature of media development and media for development. She also tells us about a new Gates Foundation initiative in partnership with Highway Africa.

[Video] Interview with David Hoffman of Internews

David Sasaki — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:32:20 +0000

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David Hoffman is the founder and president of Internews, one of the first media development organizations. In this video David explains how Internews got its start by coordinating a two-way satellite link-up between Soviet youth in Moscow and Americans at the 1982 US Festival sponsored by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak. He goes on to describe more of the history of the media development field, how funders can both help and hurt, and the role of citizen journalism in media development and civic participation.

[Video] Interview with Ramsey Tesdell of 7iber.com

David Sasaki — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:24:51 +0000

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Ramsey Tesdell is the founder of 7iber.com, a citizen journalism community and training project based in Amman, Jordan. We met up with him at the Strengthening Independent Media program in Austria, which aims to map the new era of international media development. Ramsey explains the goals and activities of 7iber, his latest training efforts in Gaza, and the current state of donor investment in participatory media projects. You can learn more about Ramsey and 7iber at MediaShift and on Global Voices.

[Video] Does New Media Outreach Lead to Westernization?

David Sasaki — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:25:29 +0000

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It is always easier to criticize than to get involved and one of the criticisms we hear most often at Rising Voices is that helping under-represented communities join the online global conversation will inevitably lead to their westernization. Álvaro Ramírez and Diego Gomez, co-founders of the HiperBarrio project, addressed this question while they were in Austria to pick up their Golden Nica award.

Transcript:

Are these kids getting very Americanized because of the internet? Now they finally have access to it on a daily basis from the library, or from a home connection.

Yes and no. In the group - when we created it - there were already four or five tribes. There were hip-hoppers, punks … and this is music that is not from La Loma, not from Colombia. Cumbia and Merengue and other things are in Colombia. But what happens is that they appropriate. One thing that they do is - the hip-hop that is done in La Loma is in Spanish and it talks about their realities. They adapt it to their needs. It's not the same Americanized version - it's their version of it.

A good example of what is happening on the other hand … is how Cati Restrepo through learning English on LiveMocha has begun to make friends. And she was telling me one night how she has a very good friend in Pakistan now and they talk a lot, and they practice English between the two and actually she is influencing this guy a lot. Because he can not understand that a woman like her is going out so much, is blogging, is not praying all the time … how come she's playing the violin, which is a profane instrument. So actually she is influencing other people. in other areas of the world. And she's getting influenced by him too. He's telling her about Muslim culture about how they pray. So she's learning about this guy too.

So I think that in that sense it's quite interesting because they also are not communicating necessarily with the big stars. Now they are communicating with regular people. I think that in this project especially they have been influenced not just by Americans they now begin to think about India, Dubai, and other cultures that they didn't know existed before. Or they didn't have much reference. With the guys in Voces Bolivianas sometimes. At least they read sometimes Foko Madagascar too. They get a hint of what is going on in Bangladesh. They have heard them singing. We can not understand it, but we think it's beautiful the way they sing in Bangladesh. So, it's both ways. And I think that they decide. They have the possibility to decide much more now. Before with the big television channels and the big enterprises … they were the ones deciding what we had to hear in Colombia in a way. And now the kids have a menu of possibilities and they can choose.

[Video] Interview with Pablo Flores

David Sasaki — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:32:42 +0000

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The day after Pablo Flores gave his presentation at the Ars Electronica Symposium about cloud technologies and education we were able to sit down with him for a few minutes to find out more about his projects and his current year-long sabbatical in which he will be visiting OLPC projects around the world and creating a multimedia website which compares his observations from one to one computing programs in different countries. You can find out more about the Blogging Since Infancy project and explore the blogs of participating teachers and students.

[Video] Pablo Flores at Ars Electronica

David Sasaki — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:23:47 +0000

Enabling Cloud Learning

Pablo Flores from Plan Ceibal, Uruguay's One Laptop Per Chile project, and Blogging Since Infancy presented at this year's Ars Electronica Symposium on Cloud Intelligence.

Pablo asked the audience to consider how those who have the most to gain can benefit from the information amassing online. The value of intelligence, after all, is in solving problems facing society. Flores points to housing, nutrition, and education as three major social issues which can be improved with more access to better information. In order to bring intelligence and information from the cloud to everyday citizens in Uruguay, for example, they need a network of connectivity and devices.

The Uruguayan government was the first to sign on completely to OLPC’s vision of providing a laptop to every school-aged child. The government has also worked with national telecommunications companies to provide free or discounted access to students and their parents around the country. But Flores emphasizes that technological change by itself will not automatically lead to social development.

In order to take advantage of participatory tools a culture of participation must exist. Research studies in Uruguay have found that parents who don't know how a laptop computer and internet access can benefit them are more likely to just let the machines sit unused in the corner. To help parents, teachers, and students better understand the uses and possibilities of the computers, volunteer university students from Montevideo have formed Flor De Ceibo, a club which sends teams of university students and professors out to rural schools to lead workshops with teachers, parents, and students. As part of their workshops they show how the EduBlogging platform - developed by local Uruguayan programmers - can be used to promote participatory learning both inside and outside of the classroom.

Flores points to a class which set up a blog to interact with fellow students across the border in Brazil. Of course such pen pal projects have existed for decades, but the blogs allow the students to interact in real time and incorporate other tools to learn Portuguese and Spanish. His presentation concludes by emphasizing the importance of avoiding black boxes - technological gadgets which function properly, but don't allow us to understand how they function. Plan Ceibal values open source technologies as a way of promoting curiosity so that students are encouraged to look “inside” the programs and adapt them to their cultural needs.

Ethan Zuckerman live-blogged Pablo's presentation. Pablo's conference statement was published in the Ars Electronica 2009 Catalog.