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.
What locality or neighborhood will your project focus on?
Loja
Describe the specific community with whom you will be working.
Rural population of the canton Loja is a 5th (20.7%) of municipality jurisdiction. Of the 13 rural areas (parishes) we will work with six of them, one every two months until complete a semester. We will focus on young people who have minimal skills working with a computer, or with some previous experience of working on radio.
What kinds of news, stories and other content will be created?
Podcast recording will be the meeting point to generate their own content to be contributed to the web, starting with contributions to Wikipedia, motivations for blogging, up to producing the podcast itself. We want every of six rural parish leaders achieve channeling the voice of the people becoming citizen reporters.
What technologies and digital tools do you plan to use in the trainings?
Describe the connections that you or your organization have already established that will contribute to the success of the project.
We will talk with a school director in each of the six rural parishes of Loja municipality. In those parishes where there are no schools, we will call the Parish Councils to select the best profiles. We will name a responsible in each parish to coordinate activities.
How many participants do you think will be involved in your project?
We will select the 5 best profiles for each parish, reaching 30 people in total.
Describe which technologies, tools, and media you will focus on when training participants.
- Collaborative tools to creating documents online (podcast scripts), e.g. Google Docs
– Software to recording and editing audio, e.g. Audacity or GarageBand
– WordPress and HTML to creating and editing blogs
– FTP, RSS and XML to podcast basic management
Describe the facilities where you will hold the workshops.
The workshops will be in each school or Council Parish of each parish, there is no need for participants to be moved to Loja city.
What is your current relationship with the community with whom you plan to work? What makes you the most appropriate individual or organization to implement this project?
We do not have a direct relationship with schools or Council Parish. As the project progresses, we would like to develop other projects including technology, as well as continuing this project (Rural Citizen Podcast) with the 7 parishes remaining.
What specific challenges do you expect to face when planning and implementing your project?
There are two main challenges: a) we do not have the necessary reception in the parish, but we would generate expectation through our previous podcast, and b) that those responsible be discouraged during the project, to which we must respond with perseverance.
How will you measure and evaluate the project’s impact, specifically: your primary participants, the wider regional community, or the global digital community?
Direct evidence will be reflected in the production of audio segments for #LoxaEsMás collective Podcast. Indirectly it can measure the contributions to Wikipedia, or active blogs that have been created by the project.
If your project were to be selected as a Rising Voices grantee, what would be the general timeline of project activities in 2013?
See http://x.loxaesmas.org/CitizenPodcast under “Timeline” tab
Detail a specific budget of up to $4,000 USD for operating costs.
See http://x.loxaesmas.org/CitizenPodcast under “Budget” tab, including five comments
Besides the microgrant funding, what other resources and support are you seeking for your project to ensure its success?
A great help for this project will be that Rising Voices outreach across their communication channels.
