We want to train and educate 10 young people (18-26 year old) about audio podcast production by using basic tools and equipment, open source software and free publishing services/platform using participants’ creativity. Podcast is one of the most powerful media for sharing ideas and thoughts about problems, challenges and issues in our local communities. It is an easy way for your voice to be heard and one of best ways to connect with other peers and create a network. Sharing podcasts can inspire other young people to podcast production and opportunity for their voices to be heard.
Topical focus:
Country:
What locality or neighborhood will your project focus on?
Novi Sad
Describe the specific population with whom you will be working.
Target population of our project are young people aged 18-26 who live in Novi Sad area. Youth unemployment is one of the biggest problems in our community and giving them additional knowledge can help in their employment or self-employment. A large number of young people in our region follow what Elektrana does and we have a channel of communication with young audience. Many young people are very good with general computer knowledge and they have good internet skills.
Who else will be on your team to help implement the project?
Pedja Novakovic, former music editor at “In Radio”, former music editor and administrator of Elektrana Internet radio and now works as the managing director for school radio station in public school “Milan Petrovic”. He is also author of Indietronix radio show http://indietronixradioshow.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pedjatronix?ref=ts&fref=ts
Radio show Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Indietronix-Radio-Show/154684117880975?fref=ts
Pedja is experienced in podcast production and teamwork with young people and children. He works with open source and free tools. He was also one of the podcast experts during “Remote Youth Voices” training course last November.
What kinds of news, stories and other content will be created?
Participants will create 5 audio podcasts (10 participants working in 5 teams) and publish them on dedicated webpage created for this project. The web page will be under Elektrana.net domain for easier networking with similar content already published. Every podcast will have description containing: Podcast title, Author name, About author, Lenght, Tags for topic, Cover artwork made by participants and detailed description of the podcast topic.
What technologies and digital tools do you plan to use in the trainings?
Describe the connections that you or your organization have already established or plan to establish that will contribute to the success of the project.
Elektrana finished “Remote Youth Voices” project in November 2013, supported by EU as part of “Youth in Action” programme. During 9 days of project activities, 33 participants learned basics of podcast production and recorded podcasts about issues and challenges in their local communities. More about the project: http://www.elektrana.net/remoteyouthvoices/ and page with podcasts http://www.elektrana.net/remoteyouthvoices/?page_id=150. This project and activities around it helped us to further connect with young people in Novi Sad, Novi Sad area and the region.
How many participants do you think will be trained in your project?
With this project, our plan is to train 10 young people from Novi Sad about audio podcast production, open source/free software and publishing tools. We will publish Call for Applications on the 1st of July and promote it on our website, send it over mailing list, Facebook and twitter. Online application form will be created for potential participants. Deadline for application will be 15th of September. After the deadline, our team will evaluate all submitted applications and choose 10 most motivated young people and invite them to a meeting. They will be introduced to the project and detailed info about training will be presented. To sustain their participation we will offer non-formal approach to learning process, friendly and good working environment, equipment and creative freedom.
Describe which technologies, tools, and media you will focus on when training participants.
We will use basic equipment, hardware and software for podcast production. For equipment we will use laptops/notebooks/netbooks as the main platform for podcast production. If some participants are without computers, we will provide ours for them. From software side, we will use Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds available for PC, Mac and Linux. For capturing sound we will have microphones and headphones for previewing/listening/editing recorded audio files. For podcast publishing participants we will use Souncloud service and for web publishing, they will be introduced to Wordpress blogging platform. All these tools are free/open source and available to participants as great tools for good podcast product
Describe the facilities where you will hold the workshops.
We will use one big office space for the project activities with lot of natural light and comfortable for having 15-20 people in it. Facility has a projector and a good sound system. Each table will have enough space for two laptops, microphones, two headphones and seats for two persons. There will be six laptops, one of them connected to projector. Wi-Fi is supported and download speed is 40mbit/s and upload 10mbit/s. There will be available toilet room, room with refreshments. Backyard for team-building activities (if weather allows).
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 ran an Internet radio station from 2009 to 2012 and had big impact on youth in our community and region. Our NGO “Elektrana” is well known in Novi Sad and Balkan region, mostly as we take active role in most progressive regional culture, new media and music festivals (EXIT Festival, Share Conference, Republika Fest…). Having huge experience in field of music, media, culture and work with young audiences, gives us an opportunity to teach young people, through our example, how to use own creativity, energy and knowledge.
What specific challenges do you expect to face when planning and implementing your project?
Challenge we are concerned most with are laptops that participants will have or not have. Earlier experience showed that some laptops don't have good sound cards, and the captured audio is often of low quality or noisy. Also, maybe some participants who apply for training will not have laptops but they will be highly motivated for training, and it would be really bad to discard them because of this.
We will make an introductory meeting with the selected participants and check laptops to see how many we will need to provide when the activity starts. We will bring our laptops to replace participants’ laptops or to give for use to participants without laptops.
How will you measure and evaluate the project’s impact, specifically: your primary participants, the wider regional community, or the global digital community?
We will have a written evaluation form for participants to measure how successful the project was for them and what are their thoughts for improvements and general feedback are. For published podcasts we will measure success by tracking number of likes on Facebook pages, nubmer of favorites/retweets on Tweeter, Google analytic tracking of web page visits and Wordpress Jetpack site stats.
Number of shared podcasts, visits to web page and number of how many times podcasts are listened, should give us great insight about project success. When we had Elektrana radio, we had maximum of 20.000 listeners per month and in that time frame there was 103 podcasts per month.
Having this data in mind we think that having more than 1000 plays (combined) of 5 produced podcast a month will be success
If your project were to be selected as a Rising Voices grantee, what would be the general timeline of project activities in 2014?
15-30 May – Project team preparation phase
1-15 Jun – Facility check, creation of agenda, website
15-31 Jun – Online application test, deploying of application form
1 July – 15 Sep – Call for Applications, press release
15 – 31 Sep – Pre-selection and Selection process
1 Oct – Contacting selected participants for informal meeting, Final agenda
6 Oct – Informal meeting with participants
10 – 12 Oct – 1st Part: Start of training, Team building, Introduction to equipment, How to use, Introduction to Audacity basics, first recordings and exercises, Forming of teams, Brainstorming, Recordings and Editing
17-19 Oct + 2nd Part of Training: Recordings, Editing, Advanced editing, Re-recordings, Final touches, Upload, Publish, Share
19 Oct – 19 Nov – Sharing, Tracking statistics
25 Nov – Evaluation
Detail a specific budget of up to $2,500 USD for operating costs.
300$ – Facility
90$ – Office materials (pencils, flip-chart, papers, tape…)
60$ – Internet
450$ – Website
735$ – Hardware
300$ – Coordinator
350$ – Trainers
100$ – Online Application form
100$ – Refreshments
Besides the microgrant funding, what other support can Rising Voices provide for your project to ensure its success?
We would like to see podcasts and material produced during similar projects as ours. It could be print material or website.
Contact name
Predrag Nikolic
Organization
Elektrana – Centre for the Development of Electronic Arts and Culture
