Rising Voices Project Update

Jalaibi Workshop.

It is rare in Pakistan that things start on time. The workshop started on time as I was a little late and embarrassed to see 60% of the space already occupied. Faisal Kapadia was the first speaker and I have know him a little before because of his social media presence. The topic was “Blogging” and I was glad it was basics and served my purpose. Few of my misconceptions were answered during his session and I would rate it 9/10.

Next up was Norbert Almeida it was my first interaction with him. His topic was Security in the Digital Space, and was quite insightful. Most of the audience never realized before today as how we compromise our personal security on cyber space and how to avoid unnecessary exposure that may lead to risks. He also shared his experience as to how he had added to his professional career by carving out a blogging niche for himself. I would give 10/10.

Last but not the least was Hammad Siddiqui. Hammad is a social media celebrity is his own stature. He spoke to us about creating an online persona, Basics or Branding, Social Media, Career Guru. My ratings 9/10. This workshop has given me the tools I need to work with and given me the inspiration to blog for Pakistan.

The session ended with networking and some juicy shami kebabs. Overall a great effort by Team Jalaibi. Hats Off!

The above is a review of our latest workshop sent in by Muhammad Munawar, one of the attendees. During our planning stages, the jalaibi.com team works very hard in trying to find the right speakers who will not only have the technical know-how of how to introduce blogging into the lives of the targeted audience, but also how to inspire them to start contributing. To begin that elusive dialogue which will shed a positive light on our country. After learning some lessons from our first workshop, we set out to ensure that the next workshop addresses the issues brought to light.

A few of the successes were that we had much better participation with a lot of attendees coming from different religious groups as well (one of our key target audiences). We also tailored the content of the workshop to what we felt was the best content to share with a group of aspiring bloggers.

We feel that the Karachi workshop was definitely better than the first one, and we hope our next one- currently being planned for Lahore, takes all these learnings and brings them together for one fantastic session there. We have not yet had any luck with livestreaming these events due to the lack of bandwidth, however we will make an extra effort to have the Lahore workshop livestreamed as well as utilise that workshop to create blogger training videos.

Jalaibi.com as a website is enjoying some local attention from a few members of the local GV community. The team is very excited at the prospect of collaborating with them as it will give the website's content some much needed boost alongside providing a platform for new bloggers to start writing. Here I would like to add a note of thanks to all those who commented on our last note, your thoughts have been inspiring for our team and given us a direction to work towards! Stay tuned!