Idea Lab

Our Friends Become Curators of Twitter-Based News

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I like to listen before I talk. Which means that during my morning routine I read before I write. But where to turn and what to read? One of the most oft-repeated statements I heard at conferences last year: "our problem isn't information overload, it's crappy filters." In other words, we shouldn't complain about all that amazing, free information out there. We just need to get better at finding what we care about and ignoring the rest. The podium speakers suggested that this would happen in two ways. First, through a variety of crowd recommendation sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit,...

• April 2, 2010
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A New Model of Media Research

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

How to piss off the subjects of your research study Everyone who had the opportunity to do so pointed out that we were just a few blocks from one of Beirut's Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods. But we were also just a couple blocks from a Starbucks, snuggled comfortably in a new shopping center with more security guards than window shoppers. Over the next couple weeks such juxtapositions would form the basis of how I viewed most aspects of Beirut. On the second floor of the Hazmieh Rotana Hotel - catering to foreigners, the wealthy, and anyone who enjoys snail-paced internet connections -...

• February 22, 2010
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Announcing the Technology for Transparency Network

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices, the outreach and citizen media training initiative of Global Voices Online, has launched a new interactive website and global network of researchers to map online technology projects that aim to promote transparency, political accountability, and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe.

• January 19, 2010
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Hip-Hop as Cosmopolitan Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Seeking greater social inclusion through new communication technologies is a strategy with a long and accomplished history that has persisted through waves of new inventions including the telegraph, radio, television, satellite, and of course, the Internet. Many such projects are highlighted in Alfonso Gumucio's Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change, which was published in 2001 and features more than 20 case studies of participatory communication projects that use video, radio, theater, and the Internet. Similar projects are featured every week on the websites of the Communication for Social Change Consortium, Internews, The Communication Initiative Network, Panos, and...

• December 29, 2009
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Democratizing the Geography of Information

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As little as a year ago Google Maps had no geographic information about San Javier La Loma, a small working class neighborhood on the outskirts of Medellín where the ConVerGentes group of the HiperBarrio citizen journalism project is based. Some progress has been made, but as you can see from the satellite imagery, most of the streets are still not mapped, much less the parks, buildings and footpaths. Now, compare that to the map of San Javier La Loma created by HiperBarrio and freely available with nearly unrestricted use on Open Street Maps: There is clearly an aspect of amateurism...

• December 5, 2009
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Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sergii Danylenko and Anna Prymakova asked me to speak about "changes in media over the past five years" at MediaCamp Kyiv last week. It's a pretty standard topic of discussion for me, but I felt that it would be more interesting and more useful to look at changes in media over the past 550 years. What follows is a hyperlinked version of my talk. I recently received an email from NowPublic, a popular citizen journalism website in North America, with the subject "Now Hiring." This is a rare thing in the field of journalism these days - citizen or traditional...

• November 14, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part III

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spend your money wisely: this is the mandate given to program officers of philanthropic, government, and multilateral donor organizations. Each year they are given a certain budget, and they are expected to use that money as effectively as possible to further the objectives of their program. But how do these individuals gauge the impact of their investments? How can they cooperate with other donors to seek holistic solutions to complex problems? And to what extent should they be preparing for the likely challenges of the future, or focusing on the urgent problems of today? In part one of this series...

• October 31, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It is a telling sign that Wikipedia has no entry on media development. Rather, the search results suggest that perhaps you are looking for "ICT for development". Indeed, what is the future of media development when we're still unsure about the future of media in general? And, for that matter, where should funders invest their money to ensure that the same social benefits associated with traditional media (a sense of community, good governance, an informed citizenry) remain while journalism increasingly moves beyond broadcast, and beyond financial sustainability. In part one I looked at the history of media development, the major...

• October 25, 2009
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Ten Points on Funding Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week the Salzburg Global Seminar organized two back-to-back meetings which brought together passionate enthusiasts in the field of new media for three days, and then traditional funders of media development for another three days. Josh Goldstein of UNICEF Innovation and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi each blogged about the gathering. There has also been a flurry of blogging by Anne Nelson and Susan Moeller on the Strengthening Independent Media blog. During the first meeting I gave the following presentation about my experience funding citizen media projects over the past two and a half years. HiperBarrio began when a Colombian media...

• October 11, 2009
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The New Era of Media Development, Part 1

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Media development as a field within international development has existed for at least 30 years. Broadly speaking, media development organizations provide financial support, training, and resources to groups in developing countries that want build and sustain media organizations. An active and dynamic media ecosystem, the thinking goes, leads to greater government transparency, a more informed public, and greater civic participation. Some of the major players in the field of media development are: Internews, which was formed in 1982 during the Cold War dynamic of international relations. IREX, which was founded in 1968 and was similarly established to promote more free-flowing...

• October 7, 2009
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Blogging Positively Guide Encourages Open Conversations About HIV/AIDS

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices is pleased to announce the release of "Blogging Positively," a collection of case studies, interviews, and best practices about citizen media related to HIV/AIDS. You will be introduced to some of the leaders and veterans of the HIV-positive blogging community, and also to citizen media projects which aim to spread more awareness about the pandemic. The guide contains tips for workshop facilitators and teachers, and points readers to helpful resources for new bloggers just getting started. The Blogging Positively project began two years ago when Kenyan blogger Serina Kalande, volunteered to lead a working group to discuss how...

• August 25, 2009
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Liberian Bloggers Show Everyday Life in Monrovia

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Liberia was afforded a rare glimpse of international media attention this week when United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the capital Monrovia and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Most of the coverage focused on basic facts about Liberia. To learn more about everyday life we must turn to the country's bloggers.

• August 14, 2009
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Making Uruguay's 300,000 Laptops Count - Part I

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Engineering a single laptop to serve the educational needs of young students throughout the developing world is no easy feat. Designers at MIT's Media Lab needed to keep the cost of the machine well below $200, and yet it required many of the same features that owners of traditional laptops have come to expect: a wireless internet connection, USB ports, a color display, a built-in webcam, and a processor powerful enough to record and render video files. There were also special needs to take into account: a durable case that wouldn't crack when dropped, a waterproof keyboard designed for young...

• June 3, 2009
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Maps for Social Change and Community Involvement

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

2008 was the year of aggregating data related to local communities and displaying that information on maps. Knight News Challenge grantee EveryBlock, for example, labored to convince city governments to make their data more open and accessible, and then created a beautiful map interface to display what is happening where in real time. Map of the 132 calls made to police on April 22nd in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. Other examples of projects which have set out to add geographic locations to information found on the internet, and to display that information on map interfaces, include outside.in, WikiMapia,...

• April 24, 2009
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Peace Blogging Along the Colombia-Venezuela Border

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

View Larger Map Map of El Nula, a small village in the Venzuelan state of Apure along the Colombian border. One of the world's lesser-known conflicts has endured for over a decade along the Colombia-Venezuela border. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants' latest report: Colombian guerrillas and paramilitaries, together with the Fuerzas Bolivarianas de Liberación (FBL), a Venezuelan irregular armed group, exercised de facto control over the border states of Táchira, Apure, and Zulia, where most Colombian asylum seekers arrived. Kidnappings, contract killings, forced recruitment, and arms smuggling were common in the border areas. During the year,...

• March 26, 2009
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5 New Rising Voices Grantees in Ivory Coast, Liberia, China, Mongolia, and Yemen

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In January we received over 270 proposals from activists, bloggers, and NGO's all wanting to use citizen media tools to bring new communities - long ignored by both traditional and new media - to the conversational web. Of the 270 project proposals, the following five are most representative of the innovation, purpose and goodwill that Rising Voices aims to support. It was, by far, the highest number of proposals Rising Voices has ever received in its two-year history of supporting citizen media training projects.

• March 9, 2009
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Mobile Voices and the Ethical Responsibilities of Citizen Journalism Training

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week I gave a guest lecture to USC's COMM620 "research seminar on mobile phones, online community, and social change." The course is the academic component of an ambitious project called Mobile Voices, funded by the Annenberg Program on Online Communities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Nokia Research Center. It is a great example of academia, for-profit, and non-profit coming together to work on something that stands to benefit them all as well as the community they are targeting - in this case, migrant day laborers. In partnership with the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California the...

• March 5, 2009
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Social Networks for Doing Good

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At Rising Voices we are getting ready to announce the newest grantee projects. We received over 270 proposals from non-profits, NGOs, and activists from around the world who want to use citizen media tools to bring new and under-represented voices to the conversational web. In addition to seeking small amounts of funding for digital cameras, internet access, and related workshop costs, many of the proposals we received also expressed a desire to connect with like-minded groups, reach new funders, and spread information about the work they are doing. Fortunately, a number of social and project-based networking platforms have arisen over...

• February 25, 2009
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Voces Bolivianas Makes 'Web 2.0 for Everyone'

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Despite Bolivia's low internet penetration (among the lowest in Latin America at 4.4% compared to neighboring Chile's 36.1%, according to El Deber), the citizen media project and Rising Voices grantee Bolivian Voices is determined to spread Web 2.0 well beyond Bolivia's connected elite. Their latest initiative, Web 2.0 for Everyone, began Friday with a public event in Cochabamba followed by a day of intensive workshops aimed at teaching more Bolivians how to make their voices heard and gain social capital from tools like Twitter, blogs, and various photo- and video-sharing websites. Friday's public event began with an introduction to the fundamentals of Web 2.0 by Anne Arrázola. Hugo Miranda then moderated a panel on the history of Voces Bolivianas and their training workshops.

• February 1, 2009
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Protests in Madagascar and the Importance of Citizen Journalism Training

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The recent coverage of Tropical Storm Eric, Cyclone Fanele, and the ongoing protests and political turmoil in Madagascar by local citizen journalists reveals the importance of 1.) citizen journalism training programs, 2.) the translation and contextualization of local content for a global audience, and 3.) networks of media groups so that local voices can be amplified and understood when breaking news hits.

• January 28, 2009
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Rising Voices: 2008 in Review

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2007 Rising Voices, an outreach initiative of Global Voices aimed at bringing under-represented voices from the developing world to the social web, got its feet on the ground. 2008 was a year of scaling up and defining processes. In 2009 we plan on becoming more inclusive to build a global resource and knowledge network centered around citizen media training.

• January 15, 2009
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Gates Foundation Invests $2 Million in Chilean Social Web

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in March last year I pointed to Contenidos Locales ("Local Content"), a program of Chile's national library network, as a model example of how public institutions like libraries can foster more civic participation by training their local users how to take advantage of new media tools: Examples include Buscando Mis Raices ("Looking for my Roots") by Rosa Tromilén, which offers a personal history of the Mapuche-majority community Juan Calfumán; Conjunto Folklórico Renacer de Cucao, a youth-group on Chiloé Island dedicated to preserving local folkloric traditions; and the website of the Asociación de Artistas Plásticos de Puerto Montt ("Association of...

• January 13, 2009
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Rising Voices Seeks Micro-grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Application Deadline: January 18, 2009 Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own. As the internet becomes more accessible to more people, including mobile phone users, the so-called digital divide seems to be narrowing. In its place, however, we see a participation gap in which the vast majority of...

• December 23, 2008
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Online Filmmakers Offer New Glimpses of Iran

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The last time we checked in with Iran Inside Out, project leader Shaghayegh Azimi had just finished a trailer video to whet our appetite for what was to come. As she details in a two-part project evaluation, Azimi intended for Iran Inside Out to become a full-time venture to spread awareness about and raise the profile of young Iranian filmmakers by introducing their works to an international audience. The project has encountered several obstacles, but it has also made important progress over the past six months, including an attractive and interactive website. Iran Inside Out has also managed to publish...

• December 19, 2008
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Toward a National Journalism Foundation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amid so much talk of federal bailouts for the banking and auto industries, what would a national bailout plan for journalism look like? If you were given $700 billion to save journalism, how would you use it? How would you fix the system? The End of Commercial Media Several months ago I watched Roger Alton, the new editor of the Britain daily, The Independent, get absolutely skewered by Stephen Sackur on the BBC evening talk show, Hard Talk. Their 30 minute discussion boiled down to 15 minutes of Sackur asking how The Independent planned to stop losing money and 15...

• November 17, 2008
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What Bloggers Are Saying About the U.S. Election

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tomorrow's American election stands out for many reasons; among them that a large percentage of the world's 6.5 billion people will have something to say about who wins. Never before have so many individuals shared so many opinions about any other single topic in the history of humanity. Thanks to the constant curation of Amira Al Hussaini and her team of contributing authors, the Global Voices' project Voices Without Votes has become a one-stop shop to discover what bloggers from other countries have to say about America's presidential election. Like for so many others, I found Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic piece...

• November 3, 2008
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South African Seniors Speak: Age Demands Action

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Originally published on Rising Voices. Which group is most affected by today's digital divide? The poor? Those who live in rural communities? The so-called Global South? Women? To a greater or lesser degree, they have all tended to benefit less from the advantages and opportunities afforded by the internet than, say, young men living in urban North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. But there is another demographic whose online exclusion trumps all others: the aged. According to a study by Jonathan Gardner and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, "almost three in five of the 18 to 24...

• September 29, 2008
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Participatory Philanthropy, Part II

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the second of a two-part piece which examines how participatory media can help streamline and democratize philanthropy. In the first post we saw three examples of how philanthropic foundations are relying on public input to help decide which proposals receive funding. This post will examine how participatory media can redefine the evaluation process after a project has already been funded by giving the targeted community a greater say in how the initiative has (or has not) had an impact on their lives. As far as development work goes, the Millennium Villages project based at Columbia University's Earth Institute...

• September 1, 2008
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Participatory Philanthropy, Part I

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the first of a two-part piece which examines how participatory media can help streamline and democratize philanthropy. First we'll look at how collaboritive tools can help draw out the brightest ideas and most capable project leaders. Next we will examine how participatory media can redefine the evaluation process after a project has already been funded by giving the targeted community a greater say in how the initiative has (or has not) had an impact on their lives. Imagine you have just started working for a philanthropic foundation that is about to request proposals that aim to strengthen community...

• August 29, 2008
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Barcamps in Bolivia and Madagascar

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tellingly, when you search for "barcamps" on Google, the first location-specific reference is not San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle. No, it's Bangalore, once known for its large British military station, and today the so-called Silicon Valley of India. BarCamp Bangalore has already held six events over the past couple years, starting in April of 2006. Barcamp Bangalore 7, held once again at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, will take place on September 13 - 14 and include a "hack night" to develop web applications using open web frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails. In February I wrote a...

• August 27, 2008
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Can Bloggers Shape Health Care Policy?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

M.D. Leaves Profession to Blog Last week one of the most emailed stories on the New York Times website was about a medical doctor who traded in his profession for a more lucrative one: blogging. No, Arnold Kim M.D. does not blog about kidney diagnosis, his specialty, but rather, rumors about future Apple products. His blog, MacRumors.com is listed as the second most valuable blog ($85 million) on the internet right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, according to 24/7 Wall St., a financial news blog. But what if Arnold Kim M.D. did decide to blog about...

• July 29, 2008
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Polymeme Diversifies the Echo Chamber

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The iPhone is released. The world stops. While surfing around on the Internet today, you would be entirely forgiven for assuming that the only news worth talking about is the release of Apple's 3G iPhone. Of course, there are plenty of other notable and interesting conversations taking place online (among them: the ethics of for-profit fundraisers, a Danish island's march toward energy independence, and how English is "evolving into a language we may not even understand") but most of us don't know how to find those conversations as we navigate through our personal echo chamber of bookmarked websites, subscribed RSS...

• July 11, 2008
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Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Imagine your own blogging community for just a second. Go ahead and put yourself at the center of your personal blogosphere - those you read and those who read you on a regular basis. What does it look like? Where do they live? What languages do they speak? What are their ethnicities, interests, political leanings, sexual orientations? What religions do they practice, or for that matter, not practice? Now, imagine that community, that sphere of burning blogstars, expanding like the universe itself. Imagine that it encompasses your entire city, and keeps expanding to include every citizen of your country, and,...

• July 4, 2008
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Voces Bolivianas Featured in Vamos Magazine

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices aims not just to get new communities actively participating in the conversational web, but also to introduce their voices to mainstream media outlets so that, for once, under-represented communities are portrayed by their own residents. While the majority of the ten current Rising Voices outreach projects have been covered by mainstream media organization, Voces Bolivianas takes the prize when it comes to attracting national and international media attention. The citizen media outreach project, which trains new bloggers in El Alto, Santa Cruz, and other sites around Bolivia, has been featured in El Deber, the BBC, Argentina's La Nación,...

• June 10, 2008
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Laptops in the Most Disadvantaged Areas of Uruguay

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The following is a translation of a post by Rising Voices grantee and Plan Ceibal coordinator Pablo Flores, who details some of the upcoming challenges and opportunities as the OLPC project in Uruguay spreads to the capital city, Montevideo. If we look at how the next phases of expansion of Plan Ceibal (OLPC in Uruguay), it is apparent that we are about to face some new challenges. The arrival of the plan to the capital, Montevideo, next year will bring a new unprecedented dimension to the project which involves the most marginalized communities in the country. For the first time,...

• June 7, 2008
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Prisoners Become Media Makers in Jamaica

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. "Murder capital of the world", sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life? Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S.E.T.) has set out to accomplish with its new citizen media initiative, Prison Diaries. S.E.T. first began in 1999 when two former prisoners created the organization to...

• June 4, 2008
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Rising Voices at the Global Voices Summit 2008

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What is the state of the global blogosphere? Where is participatory media growing the fastest? And where, for that matter, are new voices being restricted by state censorship? Is social media actually changing the electoral landscape in emerging democracies like Armenia, Kenya, and Venezuela? Has the promise of an international, barrier-free, multilingual conversation finally become reality? Most importantly, where do we go from here? How do we encourage dialog in times of heated international debate? How do we bring new voices from new communities into the universe of web 2.0? And how do we protect their rights to free speech...

• May 23, 2008
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Ceibal Jam! Developing Apps for the XO Laptop

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the '$100 laptop') to recreate the student computer's user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. That decision led to the defection of Walter Bender who had been OLPC's president of software and content and a longtime colleague of Negroponte. It also led free software guru Richard Stallman, who ironically switched to a XO laptop himself just before the announcement, to ask out loud, "Can...

• May 14, 2008
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Rising Voices Seeks Micro-Grant Proposals

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, in collaboration with the Open Society Institute Public Health Program's Health Media Initiative, is now accepting project proposals for the third round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects focused especially on public health issues involving marginalized populations. Rising Voices and OSI aim to bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities. Examples of potential projects include: Working with a tuberculosis or HIV clinic or local drop-in center...

• April 30, 2008
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A Year of Rising Voices

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

With this week's introduction to Iran Inside Out, a video-blogging project led by Shaghayegh Azimi, all ten Rising Voices grantees have now been introduced. Some of the earliest projects, like Nari Jibon in Bangladesh, have been active for nearly a year now. Here is a comprehensive run-through of some of the successes and challenges they have met along the road. Nari Jibon Introduction Feature Posts Happy Pahela Baishakh! Last Monday marked the first day of year 1415 according to the Bangla calendar. Nari Jibon students and staff celebrated with songs, poetry, and a brief skit. They started the evening by...

• April 21, 2008
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Iran Inside Out

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Shaghayegh Azimi is the epitome of what is often referred to on Global Voices as a "bridge-blogger"; that is, someone who uses his or her weblog to bridge two or more cultures. There is only one catch - Azimi isn't really a blogger. As a former film producer in Iran, video has always been her preferred medium of expression. And she's not alone. In an interview over Skype, Azimi says that thousands of Iranian youth yearn to become filmmakers, but that limited access to equipment, along with Iran's few channels of distribution, mean that only the very best, luckiest,...

• April 19, 2008
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Fire Eagle and the Future of Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Buenos Aires Leads the Way Two months ago I was back in my old stomping grounds, Encinitas, California. It had been several years since I last coasted along Highway 101 as it sucks in its asphalt belly between San Elijo Lagoon and the near-perfect surf break, Cardiff Reef. I pulled off the side of the highway, rolled down my window, and inhaled the salty air tinged with the sweetness of coastal sage scrub. More than anywhere else, this was home. I still knew the names of the best surfers bobbing up and down in the Pacific as they waited for...

• April 7, 2008
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The Read and Write Library

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

From cataloguing books to training users how to blog At least six times a week, Gabriel Venegas, a dedicated and underpaid librarian in Medellin, Colombia, rises from bed while the world outside is still dark royal blue and heavy with the silence of early morning to in order to make the 45-minute bus ride that begins in the valley center and eventually climbs up the city's northern slope to the isolated community of San Javier La Loma. Five years ago it was Vanegas' responsibility to make sure that the library's book collection was catalogued and well-organized. Occasionally he would help...

• March 28, 2008
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Can the Knight Legacy Lead to Sustainability?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is a story about who foots my paycheck. It is a story about who funds this very blog, along with all of the projects that we write about here. It is the story of the transformation of media and the efforts to make that transformation sustainable. From the Akron Beacon Journal to National Media Conglomerate It is a story that begins in 1896, when Charles Landon Knight, a recent graduate from Columbia University Law School, took a job at the Philadelphia Times. Four years later he moved to Akron, Ohio where he worked his way up from advertising manager...

• March 5, 2008
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BarCamps Without Borders: The Unconference Spreads Globally

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

OK, So you've got your own blog. You've started taking pictures and posting them online. But what's more, you've also trained some of your friends, family, and neighbors how to publish online. And, via the blogosphere, you've been able to get to know others in your city who you otherwise never would have met. Great! It gets even better. Through this new online community and conversation you have discovered that many of your daily concerns are also the concerns of your neighbors and friends. You want better public transportation. So do they. You think it would be cool to organize...

• February 17, 2008
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XO Laptop Turns Kids into Media Creators in Uruguay

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It's an amazing thing to watch--at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn't get to witness the miracle of birth every day. But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal's Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student's XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine's arrival at...

• February 12, 2008
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Michael Wesch: Toward an Ethnography of YouTube

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm currently at DIY Video Summit, a well-organized gathering of academics, video-bloggers, and other web enthusiasts and critics. The first panel provided an overview of the state of academic research regarding online do-it-yourself video. A lot of the conversation centered around theoretical definitions of what constitutes an "amateur." All of the panelists and many from the audience observed the blending of the professional and the amateur. Now commercial endeavours use 'amateur' as a hot marketing buzzword (think porn, American Idol, Laguna Beach) while amateurs try to represent themselves as professionals. I thought the most interesting speaker was Michael Wesch. Wesch...

• February 8, 2008
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Explore New Videos at Rising Voices

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first round of Rising Voices outreach projects have already been training participants in underrepresented communities how to use the tools of citizen media for just over seven months now. Of course in the beginning they started slow. First each of the project participants created their blogs and learned how how to link to other information on the internet. Slowly, the projects then explored digital photography and photo-sharing websites like Flickr. Now many of the projects are taking their media production skills to the next level by using Windows Movie Maker to produce short video documentaries that reveal the realities...

• February 2, 2008
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Kenyan Bloggers Innovate to Heal Country

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The post-election crisis in Kenya has received a good deal of blogger coverage, both at Global Voices as well as the wider blogosphere. Some say the ensuing violence boils down to ethnic animosity. Others insist that such a viewpoint is overly simplistic. Kenya's post-election crisis has taught us that cell phone airtime can become currency in times of need and that bloggers on opposite ends of the earth can collaborate on a moment's notice to push the limits of online innovation and usefulness. There has even been a meta-conversation in the U.S. tech blogosphere about whether or not tech bloggers...

• January 31, 2008
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An Introductory Guide to Global Citizen Media

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices proudly announces the first in a series of outreach guides meant to explain the fundamentals of citizen media to a non-technical readership. The first guide, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers context and case studies which show how everyday citizens across the world are increasingly using blogs, podcasts, online video, and digital photography to engage in an unmediated conversation which transcends borders, cultures, and differing languages. From the introduction: A change is taking place in how we communicate. Just ten years ago we all learned about the world around us from newspapers, the television, and radio. Professional journalists...

• January 16, 2008
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Will Online Video Make the World a Better Place?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The impact of the digital divide (or at least the bandwidth imbalance) is most pronounced when it comes to online video. In regions where lightening-fast internet connections are taken for granted, such as North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, it has become a common occurrence to observe teenagers watching YouTube videos on their iPhones or Korean businesswomen watching the nightly newscast on their mobile phones. Even those who have yet to transform their mobile phones into television sets, still regularly catch up on the latest and most popular YouTube videos. In fact, much of the world has already moved...

• January 5, 2008
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Congratulations to the New Rising Voices

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The inaugural group of Rising Voices citizen media outreach projects have given us new and powerful voices from communities that previously were rarely seen participating online. Last month we put out a call for new citizen media outreach proposals, of which five would be selected to join our current projects based in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, India, and Sierra Leone. In total we received 63 project proposals from over 35 different countries. Although the quantity of applications was less than the 142 we received in July, the quality and innovation that stood out throughout all of this round's proposals made the...

• December 28, 2007
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Rising Women's Voices

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago I interviewed Cristina Quisbert of the Voces Bolivianas project in El Alto, Bolivia. She made the point that in Bolivia - and across much of the world - women often have less access to new technologies than their male counterparts. Furthermore, once women are empowered to use new communications technologies such as blogs and online video, they are often subject to harassment in the form of comments and unsolicited, lewd emails. At Rising Voices we don't only want to help teach under-represented communities how to make themselves heard; we also want them to feel safe and...

• December 26, 2007
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Training a New Generation of Citizen Journalists Around the World

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Just three years ago, 'citizen journalism' and 'citizen media' were unknown phrases for more than 99% of the world's population. Slowly, but surely, a considerable movement is starting to help change that. Many of the Knight News Challenge winners are at the forefront of this movement. The Media Mobilizing Project of Philadelphia just recently finished their first round of video production training for a group of 20 Spanish-speaking immigrants poised to take advantage of the city's free wi-fi cloud. Similarly, Chi-Town Daily News will recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists - one in each Chicago neighborhood -...

• December 18, 2007
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Introduction to Rising Voices Outreach Initiative

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rising Voices is a new citizen media outreach project of Global Voices, which aims to spread the benefits of citizen media to regions, languages, and communities that are currently underrepresented on the conversational web. It serves as the third arm of Global Voices' triad of amplifying independent voices worldwide, advocating for their right to free speech, and providing universal access to citizen media tools as is described in our founding manifesto. For nearly three years now Global Voices has served as the web's leading network of bridge-bloggers from around the world who serve as cultural ambassadors of their countries' blogging...

• October 15, 2007
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