It's time for the biweekly newsletter filled with citizen media news, opportunities, and other resources that can help encourage more voices to join the global conversation.

From the RV blog

We are pleased to republish the first in a series of blog post from Transom.org about Story-Making Machines highlighting tools and resources that assist with digital audio content creation. Here they featured the audio sharing site, Audioboo.

Getting Offline for Digital Security: Working with Tibetans in Exile – How does a small organisation go about promoting digital security awareness amongst the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India? The Tibet Action Institute explores the use of both offline and online spaces to help people to learn more about communicating online securely.

Community radio program “Los Inestables” by the RV grantee project in Córdoba, Argentina

24 Hours to Hack for Mexico – FreedomHack, a 24-hour hackathon taking place in Washington DC, tried to tackle some of the problems facing Mexico's journalists. Coming up with new, simple ideas, to help journalists to stay secure and to get their stories out, the apps will be taken to Mexico for testing on the ground.

Soap Operas for Cultural Preservation: Mexico's First Indigenous Telenovela – A new telenovela debuts in Mexico – and for the first time, in an indigenous language. Baktún tells the story of Jacinto, a young Maya man who must face the problems of immigration and while holding on to his roots. It's also debuting on YouTube and thus accessible by mobile phone, reflecting the ways local access to media is changing.

A Journey Towards Social Entrepreneurship – Kofi Yeboah is a Ghanian blogger who often writes for Global Voices. Recently he attended a summer course for young innovators at the Amani Institute, and wrote to us about his experiences and about the influence of training programs like this.

Opportunities

The McGraw-Hill Data Journalism Program is open to English and Spanish speaking applicants in the US, where the ICFJ will help journalists master this new set of tools and produce data-driven stories that raise financial literacy in underserved communities in English and in Spanish.

Google is offering grants for women working in technology, for conferences and travel grants to female computer scientists.

Calling All Indian Social Entrepreneurs to apply for the Google Impact Challenge, inviting Indian nonprofits to tell how they’d use technology to help solve a critical human challenge. Four winners will be selected to each receive an approximately $500,000.

Acumen Regional Fellows applications are open, a one-year full-time program that begins with two months of intensive training in New York followed by a 9-month field placement with a social enterprise in South Asia or Africa. Deadline is September 2, 2013.

Reminder! State of the Map 2013, the official annual conference for the OpenStreetMap community is set for September 6-8, 2013 in Birmingham, UK.

The +Acumen network is sponsoring the Picture Dignity photography contest, and it is asking for entries that illustrate the concept of dignity. Deadline is September 1.

Resources

FrontlineSMS has announced FrontlineCloud, helping organizations to manage SMS using a web-based platform anywhere, to anyone.

Check out last week's New Tactics’ conversation on Powerful Persuasion: Combating Traditional Practices that Violate Human Rights. They say:

“Traditions and rituals are often supported by strongly held cultural beliefs which can make it very difficult to change behaviors that are harmful and violate the human rights of a community or individual. Often, the key to this kind of cultural shift is respectful, patient, community-led persuasion to create movements for change.”

Environmental journalists worldwide can apply for a US$20,000 grant to cover the next big idea for forest conservation. Mongabay.org is launching a competitive grant for in-depth reporting on innovation in tropical biodiversity conservation. Top proposal will receive US$15,000 as a stipend + up to US$5,000 for reporting and travel costs. Sept 30 deadline.

Citizen Media News

#PorTodosLosDesaparecidos (For all the missing) is a direct initiative, without intermediaries, which seeks to create a direct contact between the victims, citizens, family and the media of the disappeared in Mexico. The goal is to document the 27,000 people missing that the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has registered. Check it out on GV Latin America.

Anne Nelson reflects on the “two Cambodias” and how digital technology reaches some, but not others at Tech President.

In its efforts to take down as much infringing content as it can, Microsoft has started to censor legitimate links to competing software. Hoping to remove pirated versions of Microsoft Office from the Internet, the software company has sent several DMCA takedowns to Google, listing copies of its open source competitor Open Office as copyright infringements.

Journalism and video games come together as a new form of digital storytelling in Brazil.

ICFJ Knight Fellow Babatunde Akpeji helps to give citizen journalists of the Niger Delta a voice.

And…

Special thanks to the Endangered Languages Project for republishing our recent post “Pop Song Covers in the Inuktitut Language” http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/blog/

We're also excited to take part as a Friend of Beyond Access at the regional gathering in Medellín, Colombia in September.

If you want to share a citizen media opportunity, resource, tool that may be of interest to the Rising Voices community, please send to rising [at] globalvoicesonline [dot] org.