Dear All,

June was our busiest month ever at Rising Voices. We celebrated our first year of existence with a brief trailer video which looks back at the first ten citizen media outreach projects. The video has been viewed over 600 times on dotSUB alone and over 100 times on other blogs around the world. It is available with sub-titles in 17 languages. Please help us spread awareness about Rising Voices by embedding it in your blog.

http://dotsub.com/films/risingvoices/index.php

June was also a month for Rising Voices projects to show off all they have accomplished over the past year at various conferences. It started in Bogotá, Colombia where over 15 of the young participants from the HiperBarrio project in La Loma, Medellín were invited to Campus Party, one of the most important technology-related gatherings in the Spanish-speaking world. The municipality of Medellín, realizing the many achievements made by the young bloggers, agreed to finance all of the transportation costs from Medellín to Bogotá and back. The HiperBarrio bloggers were minor celebrities at the week-long conference where they were frequently approached by journalists like Aitor Riveiro from El País.

Just a week later, representatives from FOKO Madagascar, Voces Bolivianas, Neighborhood Diaries, REPACTED Kenya, and HiperBarrio gave presentations about their work at the 2008 Global Voices Summit. Rezwan has written an excellent post summarizing their experience and presentations on the Rising Voices website.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, June was a month for looking forward, with the announcement of our six newest health-related outreach projects. Each of the six projects are slightly different than anything we funded during the previous year, which presents both new challenges and new opportunities. Over the next month we will focus heavily on the logistics to get each of the six projects into the Rising Voices website and community.

Speaking of community, this mailing list has grown from around 80 initial subscribers to over 400 in the space of just one year – a tremendous show of enthusiasm to help include new voices in this new global conversation. This week it is worth pointing out one particular member of our community, Nasim Fekrat from Afghanistan who was featured last week in Slate.com for his relentless dedication to train more and more Afghan citizens how to make themselves heard using blogs. I encourage you all to read the article.

Thank you all for your patience and endless support, especially over the past month. We will soon add a new page to the Rising Voices website which will describe ways in which you can help support each of the Rising Voices outreach projects. For now, please visit the website, get to know each of the projects better, and leave comments of support on the participants’ blogs.

All the best,

David