Proposals from April 2, 2013
Finalist – Greece: Citizen Journalism Against Ore Mining in Halkidiki
Radiobubble/Hackademy will train 25 residents of northern Greece on the development of citizen media. This will enable the protest movement against ore mining in Halkidiki to bypass the media blackout on issues faced by locals and to challenge the image of this struggle in corporate media, in order to inform the rest of the country of the political and financial scandal, slow-motion environmental disaster and excessive police brutality that have come to rule people's lives. The 4-day workshop will be organised around a planned rally in order to include real-life coverage of a protest event.
Finalist – Albania: Waste in My City
The project is an emergent and prevention response to survival conditions of 92% of the Roma community working and living with waste in Albania. It will encourage participation models and listening to Roma’s voice, through use of social networks like development mechanisms. Informing on social media, building the denouncing directory at Riciklimi.al; the competition with photos and blogs from Roma and for the Roma will accompany this initiative.
Finalist – Macedonia: Wild Herbs Exchange Network
Macedonia is a country with lush nature and a large number of medicinal herbs and teas. People that live in remote villages have a natural remedy for every ailment but they have very little contact with the rest of the world. We plan to educate these people on the importance in sharing this knowledge by exchange of information and cures using the internet. We will also ask young bloggers to photograph and write about these wild herbs. This way we also produce the first eco journalists in Macedonia that can speak for people from remote villages.
Finalist – Mexico: Dizha Kieru for SMS
We are proposing to work with a team of community FM radio operators from Dizha Kieru Radio in the indigenous Zapotec village of Talea de Castro, Oaxaca, Mexico to integrate their ongoing work, particularly as community news gatherers, with online and offline mobile-based technologies such as SMS and Twitter, taking advantage of not only the community radio station, but also the independent, community-operated GSM base-station that provides low-cost cellular service to the townspeople and an interesting platform on which to try new ideas.
Finalist – Swaziland: Artists Go Public
This project will provide local artists with a platform to promote themselves, their work and their creative process to a greater local and international public. Artists will be given a camera and laptop for 3 weeks each, to record their inspirations, creative processes, challenges, successes and photos of artwork. They will be assisted in creating & managing a blog and accounts with facebook, twitter, & pinterest. Each artists’ various online activities will all be recorded on a parent website for the project, and they will be urged/taught to continue their online presence after their 3-weeks
Finalist – Ecuador: Rural Citizen Podcast
The 13 rural parishes of Loja Municipality (Ecuador) do not have the same development as the urban area of Loja city. Because Internet access is more limited and costly in rural parishes that in the city, access digital content and production tend to be lower, and citizens voices of these areas has no impact in digital environments. We intend to provide digital skills to non-political leaders of six rural parishes of Municipality to be themselves who produce content, and amplify them in a podcast that #LoxaEsMás collective has been producing with great impact.
Finalist – Burundi: Conn@cting People: Rural Internet Kiosk
Conn@cting People is a project which will connect rural people (with no electricity neither internet access at all) from a war-displaced camp to others all over the world. It is an integrated project with 3 main activities namely, 2workshops on peace photojournalism and the use of internet, the installment of the first solar powered Rural Internet Kiosk (3 desktops) in Burundi and a photo competition and exhibit. The project aims at linking two different worlds and helping the targeted community and our country to move towards the Millennium Development Goal of Bridging the Digital Divide.
Finalist – Uganda: Rise of a Voice – #TweepsHelpBududa Experience
The project proposes a unique program to identify, teach & encourage the youth from Bududa who have been affected by landslides to innovatively use social media to share their experiences, culture & calls for action for social change through citizen media training workshops and effective support systems to ensure project success in form of local content generation. The project’s ultimate goal is to create a vibrant network of a new generation who appreciate and learn from the huge success of #TweepsHelpBududa to sustain better, informed use of citizen media to share information and network.
Finalist – South Africa: Crowdmapping Environmental Health in Hospital Hills, Johannesburg
To collaborate with residents of Hospital Hills, a deprived informal settlement in Johannesburg, to gain a voice to define their environmental health challenges, communicate them to decision-makers and bring about change. Six participants will be trained in citizen reporting skills, provided with necessary equipment and supervised to work with other residents to document concerns in multimedia micro-reports. These will be uploaded and visualised on an online Crowdmap, which will be disseminated widely, but particularly targeting decision-makers with the power to bring about necessary changes.
Finalist – Uganda: Right To Speak Ik
The Right to Speak Ik will mobilize, build capacity and create awareness for a handful of remaining Ik speakers in Karamoja sub region (one of the least developed and under-reported areas in the World) to use Digital technologies particularly mobile phones, digital cameras and micro blogs to not only document and preserve important ancestral knowledge and cultural wealth found in the endangered Ik language but also encourage the next generation of speakers. Invisible even in their own country, this project will bring the lives of ordinary Ik, to the global digital community.
