Idea Lab

Funding and the Future of Video Volunteers

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the final post in a 4-part series in which Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here. After five years of doing community media in India, we've come to understand what Video Volunteers is good at. We're great at training -- the people we work with keep doing this for a long time after they're trained. And we're great at getting impact in the villages. We know how to produce the content that people in rural...

• February 10, 2012
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Video Volunteers Looks to Mainstream Media for Growth

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is Part 3 in a 4-part series in which Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. In August, the Video Volunteers staff attended an amazing program called the Global Social Business Incubator at Santa Clara University, where we developed a new business plan focused on income from the mainstream media. Our idea is to have one rural reporter in each of India's 645 districts, set up like a rural stringers network, to deliver a pipeline of high-quality, low-cost human...

• February 8, 2012
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Video Volunteers Makes an Impact in India with Incentives for Media Makers

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of a 4-part series, Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. Part 1, which you can read here, was a basic introduction to IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. Part 2 outlines new ideas we implemented into our training programs in 2011. For instance, we set incentives for our community correspondents in India. This triggered a series of valuable positive changes for the communities concerned. Incentives work In October, we held an advanced training session for our strongest community correspondents which focused on activism and getting "impact." (To...

• February 3, 2012
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How Video Volunteers Created a Network of Community Correspondents in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The state of technology today means that nearly every village in the developing world could have someone -- a local changemaker -- who broadcasts his or her issues to the world. It's commonplace today to hear people say the world is flooded with content and that "everyone" can now be a producer. At every community video training that Video Volunteers conducts for people from marginalized communities in India, more and more people are showing up with $15 Chinese-made video-enabled cell phones. It's now possible for rural people without data connections to send tweets via SMS. In India, the government has...

• February 1, 2012
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Video Volunteers Launches 'IndiaUnheard' for Rural Issues

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers recently launched IndiaUnheard, a new project (and website) attempting to create a bridge, through community media, between disconnected rural communities and web audiences who are interested in news on issues of human rights, development and corruption. You can see the result and watch the community videos here. As this is a relatively new venture -- it's only about 4 to 5 months old -- I'd love feedback from the highly knowledgeable Knight and MediaShift Idea Lab community. Here are some videos to show you what it's about: The village of Natpura, featured in this video below, in rural...

• December 7, 2010
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The Need for Cultural Translation with Community Media

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The TED talk of Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the international blogging site Global Voices, provides amazing insight into the challenges of telling international stories online. It's told in the great TED way of painting lots of pictures and using a ton of anecdotes. Zuckerman said it's a big myth that the web is bringing us closer to other cultures or countries -- when we're on the web, we're basically in our own small islands of our social networks. Most of us who are building businesses/non-profits around non-traditional media content know this, but he has some great PowerPoint slides that...

• July 26, 2010
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Social Media and Corporates -- the #Promise Conference

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few days ago Vince Stehle from the Knight Foundation invited me to the Think Social's The #Promise conference in New York, and so I organized babysitting for my new son and came for the day. The conference was about how companies are using social media to advance their goals, and many people (mostly very attractive people, I would add too!) from NGOs, design firms, the corporate world and others turned out to hear the likes of Pepsi, Nokia, MTV, GE and others present their beautiful glossy social media campaigns. It felt like the "place to be" in New...

• June 11, 2010
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Meet 'India Unheard' Producer Zulekha Sayyed

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As Video Volunteers' second program, India Unheard is gathering steam, with some wonderful stories by our new community correspondents, we can't help but think about all the wonderful and dedicated community producers we have worked with in the past - and are still working with. As many of you know, it takes about a year and a half to train our community producers, all of who come from situations of dire poverty. What they have in common is their honesty, passion and intelligence. Our aim in training an individual with immense potential is not just to create a technically sound...

• May 17, 2010
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Community Journalists to Push Neglected Rural Stories in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A big question that we deal with when thinking about the future of locally produced media is how will it ever become financially sustainable? As of right now, Video Volunteers has been supporting local media units in India and Brazil whose basic job is to make video stories about their local issues and then screen them locally -- so locally that most videos are seen in between 25 and 50 neighboring villages. As is obvious by that sentence, geography has played an important part in the manner in which we have built these programs. We believe that national (and to...

• April 26, 2010
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What's Wrong with the Stringer System in Rural Areas?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One area that has recently started occupying our attention at VV is the business of newspaper stringers in rural areas in the developing world. Another one is the way that news stories get out, and the difference between a journalism system where stories get "pushed out" and one where they need to be "pulled out." It seems to me that only when stories get pushed out - ie, when someone attracts media attention to some local event the news media wouldn't know about otherwise - is journalism increasing the quantity of events that are known. Below are some interesting things...

• February 11, 2010
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Video Volunteers Gets some Boost from Bollywood

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers had a great moment a couple weeks ago - we got our first celebrity ambassador for the organization, a very popular Indian film actor named Abhay Deol, who has acted in some of the best "art" films of the last few years. We organized a screening in one of the bastis (slums) in Mumbai where two of our Community Video Units in our Knight-funded project have been working for the last few years. Slum residents from all over the area turned up, as well as all the major Bombay TV stations and of course our community producers. They...

• February 1, 2010
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Creating Community Video Entrepreneurs in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Late last year, Stalin K., my partner in the Knight-funded project Video Volunteers, and I were seated in the video laboratory of VCU.br in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We were joined by nine of VV's new Brazilian Video Fellows. We were there to conduct a workshop about entrepreneurship in the creative field of video. The purpose of our recently-launched program in Sao Paulo is to create "video entrepreneurs," and this post is a snapshot of one of the exercises we did while we were there. The nine young people were all from favela/periphery areas of Sao Paulo, and on that day...

• January 29, 2010
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An Overview of Community Media in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Almost undoubtedly, Brazil is the country with the largest public investment in community arts and culture. There are dozens of groups teaching video, hip-hop, graffiti, circus arts, carnival-related arts and digital media to youth from the favelas. In Rio alone, we visited five groups doing community arts, and between them we calculated there were roughly 500 kids from favelas this year alone learning video up to a semi-professional level. By contrast, when we started Video Volunteers in India, there were only two other groups in the country running permanent programs in community video. So the difference in Brazil, where we...

• January 27, 2010
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Lessons Learned When Expanding Video Volunteers to Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers recently started a new program in Brazil that is focused on using video as a way for young people from favelas to earn a living. Starting a project in a new country has been an interesting, but also challenging, process. When I started VV in 2003, we did a few projects in countries such as Brazil, Rwanda, Uganda and the U.S. in addition to India, where we are currently based. But at that point, what we were doing was relatively easy: identifying volunteers, designing some basic video training modules or film script ideas, and sending them off. Once...

• January 11, 2010
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The Fascinating Innovators of Brazil Community Media

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

During our month in Brazil working on our new project VCU.br, my partner Stalin and I met with more than a dozen different community media groups. Every meeting was too short, with us starting off by explaining why we had called them and explaining our work, and then them explaining theirs, and then a brief -- too brief -- discussion about what we could do together. All the while we typed away at our laptop, eager to capture all the innovations and unique stories of the Brazilian community/alternative media innovators. Below are our meeting notes, which we hope give a...

• January 4, 2010
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Video Volunteers Launches in Brazil

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How can the disadvantaged earn a living from their creativity? Why are nearly all the "base of the pyramid" micro-businesses supported by microcredit agencies based on manual labor, or super-local activities like driving a rickshaw or running a small shop? Since much of the music we love today, or design that we see in stores, has its roots in folk traditions, why don't the rural and urban poor today earn much of a living through their creativity? This is the question Video Volunteers is asking with a new program we've launched in Brazil, called VCU.br. We're exploring how video can...

• December 16, 2009
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Video Volunteers Talks Technology and Non-Profits at TED India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I just returned from TED India, where I was one of the 100 TED Fellows invited to attend the event. My head is spinning with all the new ideas and my pockets are heavy with business cards. This was undoubtedly the best networking event I've been to. The people on stage were only marginally more spectacular than the people I turned to for chit-chat on the police-escorted buses from Bangalore to Mysore, where the conference was being. The chap sitting next to me, for instance, told me as an aside that he had invented a needle that can only physically...

• November 12, 2009
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Video Volunteers Creates a New Kind of Sustainability Using Community Video

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

"You mean to say that sending the email is free?! I don't have to pay for it?" Laxmi was amazed that there is no equivalent on the Internet to paying for a postage stamp to send a letter. The first twenty minutes of this workshop on digi-activism being held in Goa, India were over her head, but when she saw her own language, Telugu, appear on the Google.co.in search page, she jumped to attention. For the first time, Laxmi is seeing something on the Internet that she can actually read. She smiles and begins chattering away in her own language...

• August 21, 2009
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How Video Volunteers Improved Women's Rights, Sanitation in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

How do you teach creativity and critical thinking to people from very disadvantaged communities, with little formal education? Doing this is a major goal of Video Volunteers' work in training community producers. If organizations don't develop these training tools, the world could find itself in a situation where technology allows the poor to produce content, but the vast expressive potential this could release is still left untapped. VV gives writing exercises to community producers to help them develop their ability to think through an argument. I am sharing below two recent pieces of writing by community producers. These were written...

• June 7, 2009
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MTV Iggy and Community Video Coming Together

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Video Volunteers has partnered with MTV Iggy to produce videos in Kashmir about life in the refugee camps of Jammu. Here's a link to one of the videos, about a boy who watched his entire family be slaughtered: mtviggy.com | desi MTV igg is a new channel/show of MTV that is focused on Diaspora youth. The partnership unfolded as follows: in December, I did a small fundraiser in NY for Video Volunteers. At events like that, when people as ask how they can help and what we need, one of our appeals is, 'we need connections with the mainstream tv...

• April 17, 2009
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Community News as a Livelihood for the World's Poorest

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can a Community Producer like Samata, from a slum in Mumbai, ever become fully competitive in a mainstream market? In thinking about Video Volunteers' future work, I'm realizing we need to develop new models of community video that are scalable and allow for video to be a livelihood for thousands of the world's poor. We've developed a new idea for a program - a fellowship program where up to 200 community members across india (and when we have the resources, many other countries) would be trained in using flip cams to produce very short, very simple advocacy videos on different...

• March 7, 2009
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Pink Chaddi (Underwear) Campaign in India

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am posting here a blog written by Ruchika Muchhala, the online manager of Video Volunteers' website "Channel 19", ch19.org, where we post the videos made by the community producers. This is a blog she wrote for Rising Voices, where she has also recently started blogging -- courtesy of connections made in the Knight News Challenge community. I'm including it on Mediashift Idealab because the campaign she talks about -- the 'pink chaddi (underwear) campaign' -- is one of the cleverest and funniest uses of social networking and the internet I've seen in India. The campaign was started by a...

• February 17, 2009
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Each Culture Should Communicate News Their Way

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I finished a field visit to one of the Community Video Units Video Volunteers has helped to set up, in rural Rajasthan, in villages outside Jodhpur. Rural Rajasthan is an incredibly colorful and culturally rich area, and so the "Community Video Unit" has lots of potential for great programming on arts and culture. But rural Rajasthan is a deeply conservative and feudal place, where the women are veiled, and there is very high incidence of child marriage and female foeticide. My hat goes off to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, the NGO who has set up this Community Video Unit...

• January 24, 2009
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Community-Owned Media: What Does It Mean?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working. Instead, they favor the idea of 'community-led development', in which communities themselves design the social programs, and interventions only arise from the stated needs of the communities. The goals of all these programs is the idea of eventual 'community ownership' of programs themselves and of the social change process. It means that communities won't only participate, but they will be able to...

• December 24, 2008
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The Challenge of Bringing Net Access to Poorest Areas

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week, I've given a lot of thought to how poor communities on the other side of the digital divide are able to connect. The Internet is now only accessible for a tiny portion of humanity. Probably less than 20% of humanity has regular internet access, and in rural India, where 700 million people live, it must be a far, far smaller number. When all of us English-speaking urbanites have forums to share and learn and grow, but vast numbers of people don't, it only increases the inequality of the poor. In addition to their financial poverty, they are becoming...

• November 3, 2008
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Is a CNN For the Base of the Pyramid Possible?

by Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When we and our NGO partners initiate community members--young men and women from the slums and villages of India--into their new full-time jobs as 'Community Video Producers,' we often start the training sessions by drawing a triangle on the board. 'This pyramid,' the Video Trainer says, 'represents the global media.' The Producers then divide up the triangle into different layers--the nightly news programs at the top. Then, going down, CNN. Then India's Murdoch-owned English language stations. Then India's regional language private news stations, then India's national televsion, 'Doordarshan,' etc. etc. At each layer, a slightly wider percentage of the global...

• July 11, 2008
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