As part of the activities of the recent Global Voices Citizen Media Summit held in Nairobi, Kenya on July 2-3, Rising Voices partnered with the local organization Map Kibera Trust to bring together groups from both communities to share experiences and to participate in a joint citizen journalism activity.
Map Kibera Trust [1] is a local organization with its roots in mapping using open-source data and tools. Originally founded in the slums of Kibera, the project soon expanded to the slum of Mathare. In addition to mapping these areas using Open Street MapOpenStreetMap [2], teams of citizen journalists also help provide context through the use of citizen media publishing reports on the Voice of Kibera [3], Kibera News Network [4], and the Mathare Valley Blog [5].
On the afternoon of July 1, two groups of Global Voices members took part in an excursion to the neighborhoods of Kibera and Mathare to meet members of Map Kibera [6] and Map Mathare [7]. Here they learned about their work and also introduced them to the work of Global Voices. Following this briefing session, groups of approximately 4-6 comprising of Global Voices members and members of Map Kibera and Mathare went out into the community to search for interesting stories.
Members of the Global Voices community and Map Mathare
Together they gathered information via interviews, photos, and videos in order to be compiled into a piece of citizen media content. This content will be featured on Rising Voices over the next month and will be shared and republished on the Voice of Kibera and Voice of Mathare blogs.
[8]Global Voices community members in Kibera. Photo by Laura Schneider
More photos here [9] on the Global Voices Flickr account.