From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, Rising Voices received 1175 proposals from 124 countries from around the globe. This welcome increase in the number of applications as compared to last year demonstrates the ongoing interest and need in bringing citizen media to local underrepresented communities. While we are reading over these project proposals [1], we thought our readers might be interested in some of the initial demographical results from this open call for proposals.
The East African nations of Uganda and Kenya led the way in the countries with the most number of applications. For a closer look at what other countries were represented among the applications, please take a look at the word cloud created by the site Wordle [2]. The size of the country name corresponds with the number of applications received from that country.
[3]Countries Represented Word Cloud – Click for a larger image.
Ninety-five percent of applicants submitted a proposal for the first time, meaning that the remaining five percent participated in past Rising Voices [4] microgrant competitions [5] beginning in 2007. We also asked applicants to best describe the focus area of their project, and Education, Women and Gender, Indigenous Communities, and Development were the categories mentioned the most.
It was also interesting to input the text from the project descriptions from all of the proposals. Again using a word cloud, one can see which terms and concepts were used most often.
[6]Project Term Word Cloud – Click to see a larger image
These are just some quick demographical details gathered from an initial look at the 1175 proposals. In the near future, we will be developing a map that will help visualize the specific locations from which the proposals came. We will also help show places around the world that share similar interests based on the topic of their citizen media outreach projects. Only those projects which gave permission to Rising Voices to publicly share that information will be included in the map.