For Video Volunteers, this is also the goal of the community video program--that the Community Video Units (CVUs) we set up will be 'owned' by the local communities, the villagers and slumdwellers in whose area the CVU is running. But what exactly does it mean for us? Here's one way to put it: when a CVU is entirely owned and loved by that community, it would mean that if anyone ever attempted to shut it down or the money dried up, local people would be banging on the CVU door saying, 'we will not let this close. This is our media, we need it, and we will do whatever it takes to keep it going.'

As Rehana, a Producer at our Community Video Unit Samvad put it recently, "I got in an auto a while back and the auto driver said, 'hey, I recognize you. You're the Reporter for the films being made for our area. Great job.'" "Right now," she said, "the communities know and recognize us. They know we are from here and we represent them. In time, we want them to need us, to know that this is THEIR media, that's what we are working towards.'

What will a CVU look like when it is owned by the Community? People will be stopping the Producers in the street saying, 'you must tell this story. Come with me now, there is something happening that must be filmed.' People will be offering to contribute financially to the running of the CVU. They will be helping the CVU expand into other geographic areas and other technologies, like running radio stations or setting up internet portals for that community. There will be continuous communication between the CVU and local people that means that the CVU provides the information that is critical to the community, and the community helps them produce the most meaningful journalism for that area, resulting in a much more informed and active local population.

The CVU model is devised to allow that to happen. It works in a tight geographic area of only 25- 50 villages or slums and all research, stories, and screenings happens in that area. The producers are from those 25 slums or villages too. The villagers 'see' the producers constantly and also know that they will be coming back next month, which makes them much more likely to get involved. (this is similar to how we all are much more likely to write 'letters to the editor' of a magazine that you know will appear next month than to the publisher of a book you read.) Our NGO partners, who invest in and manage the CVUs, agree that the goal is to eventually register each CVU as an independent organization. They do not view the CVUs as mouthpieces for their NGOs; they allow the CVUs to address issues their NGO may not work on, and give the CVUs names independent of their NGOs.

As Rehana said above, we are not there yet, but we are getting there. Community members now come more frequently for Editorial Board meetings and give better and more concrete ideas. CVUs have active volunteers in their screening areas, with community members giving electricity for the screenings and even whitewashing the walls of dedicated screening areas so the producers don't have to carry a big screen. Some villages have offered to pay for screenings, and community members are often coming to ask for copies of films they appeared in or would like to show to their neighbors as part of their own activism.

After two years of work, the Producers have understood the key to having their communities 'own' the CVUs: it is only possible when the communities see it is making an impact and delivering results that improve their lives. To date, more than 2000 people have taken action in their local communities as a result of the films, and this is why we believe we will achieve some of the first truly community-owned and led media operations anywhere in the world.

Here's what the digital divide means concretely in Video Volunteers' work. We have trained 75 Community Video Producers from slums and villages of India along with our NGO partners. Every two months they make a film on a different critical issue like health, education, water and corruption and screen them on widescreen projectors in 25 villages.

These folks live in twelve different geographies in India, ranging from the slums of Mumbai to lush isolated rural areas 1000 kilometers away, to villages in the foothills of the Himalayas. They have so much to share and learn about. Every year, we bring them together in two week long group trainings. The ideas fly, and it is an incredible experience to watch them comment on and give feedback on each others' 'video news magazines.'

They tell each other what the situation is in their villages related to the issue in the film they are watching (for instance, health or corruption) and they say how it's different; they tell each other about interesting documentaries (such as Control Room) that their trainer recently showed them. Neither group can understand the content of "Control Room," which is a great film to teach video activism, but the visuals themselves help them see the power of good and bad journalism.

They sit around in small groups and talk about their experiences interviewing government officials, making fun of corrupt local people they've met and getting quite competitive about whose films have made the most impact.

But here's the challenge. We can only bring the Producers together physically once a year or at most twice. Money, distance, time and their regular work grind makes it impossible to do it more frequently. They do stay connected. Producers with access to cell phones will text each other or talk on the phone. Two producers -- one from a rural Community Video Unit ('CVU') and one from an urban CVU -- got married a few weeks ago, so the connections are obviously pretty intense when they do meet at these group training. But it is only the leaders of the group who speak on the phone regularly, and I bet most of what they do is gossip, not talking about what they can learn from each other.

We want to build a "network" of community video producers, but a network that is for collaboration and sharing, not gossip. We think this Network can be strong, because of the unique perspective they have of the issues as people who have 'lived' the issue as opposed to just observed it. Professional journalists have wire services, web sites, and other things to stay in touch. But community journalists in the developing world don't have any of that.

At Video Volunteers, we've increasingly come to realize the only solution to 'networking our network' of Producers is the Internet. The Internet is the only way for community journalists in the developing world to stay connected and be in touch, and it could be a very powerful tool for sharing and learning. In my 'dream' platform, our Producers are posting the rough cuts of their video news magazines to a website for peer review. They are uploading directly from the field, from their cell phones, videos of closed schools or doctors offices, and getting feedback from their peers via SMS on what to say to the officials when they go to confront them. They are requesting music suggestions for their films or other visuals that their fellow Producers email them directly from their own CVUs.

They are talking about solutions to challenges -- how do you get more people to a community screening on a widescreen projector in the center of the village? How can you use local advertising to earn revenue? How do you motivate community volunteers to help in finding stories?

But we have two major hurdles to this. One is connectivity. Not one of our CVUs has regular internet access. The other is language. India speaks 16 official languages, and the language of the Internet--English--is not spoken by a single community producer. Our Producers speak at least five languages.

My question to this group is: Does anyone have a solution for how to bring geographically isolated communities with no common language on to the web? Some of the possible solutions our team at VV has imagined are, for instance, creating an SMS-type language (short, telegraph-like) to tag videos or blog that could be translated between regional indian languages via google's translation service. Others are mailing around physically a pen drive onto which the CVUs that have no internet can save their mpegs to be uploaded from somewhere else. but we all know that any solution that makes the web more complicated is a big inhibitor to people really using the web, so I'm not sure this is the 'right' solution.

In brainstorming for a proposal this week--the Macarthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition, which others in this forum may have applied for -- we began thinking about the possibilities of a non-language based, non-verbal digital language of images.

Can photography and video, and music and emotions, become a language for community people who lack a common language and lack literacy, to communicate in? We want to create an online platform on our community video channel, Ch19.org, dedicated to producer sharing and learning and networking. On this platform, community producers would communicate to each other through non-verbal video blogs and through photography. These images would be gotten through cell phone video uploads on the Nokia N95s that were donated to us when we participated in Pangea Day.

The major challenge in a project like this would be setting aside language: how do we share and learn without language? What would the videos LOOK like? What would they say? But this is primarily a creative challenge, and those can be overcome! We think by involving lots of digital and web artists, and students of communications, we dream of creating a new video language for non-literate and non common-language communities to share on the web. This would solve one more piece of the puzzle in creating the network of community video producers, because the producers would be able to connect and share from 100s of different villages of India. My question to any readers would be, do you know of any work going on that is similar to this, trying to connect non-literate communities online through a language based on images?

'We want you to become the CNN for the Base of the Pyramid,' is what we say.

They start to share stories about how their own local papers only cover road accidents and photo ops of politicians. They come up with their own questions that the local media should answer but fails to (who is responsible for the lack of electricity in their area? Have the politicians fulfilled their election promises from last year?) They get out rulers and measure the column width given to the different 'beats'--how much space does health coverage get, compared to celebrity coverage. As training progresses, they will start each day by analyzing today's paper. In this way, the Community Video Producers begin their transformation into media activists.

The Community Producers, at the moment, produce exclusively for a local audience--100-400 people a night who gather in the center of the village to watch the film and discuss what they will do about the issue. But their political perspective--on the politics and economics of the global media--is national. And they just had a small victory.

They are going to be producing for CNN IBN, one of the three leading English language 24 hour news stations in India.

For the next three Saturdays, at 9pm, the Community Producers will have a short segment in a half-hour show called 'Citizens Journalist.' The first story will be a general report on our work. The next two stories will be on garbage and sexual harrassment. Each CNN IBN segment that we do will revisit an issue the Community Video Unit has already made a film about, and will give another demand to the authorities to do something about the problem.

I learned a few things, both about our model of community video, and about the mainstream media, in working out this deal:

Sustainability: CNN IBN is going to pay us Rs. 5,000 for each story ($125). If we can work very efficiently, this can be a break even project for the Community Video Unit ('CVU.') That's a first goal -- to be efficient and break even on new projects they undertake. We talk about a 'media industry at the base of the pyramid' as our big goal. Obviously it needs to be sustainable. but the question is how? I guess not making a loss is a first step, but we need help getting to the next level. How do the CVUs make a profit, so they can expand their number of Producers, raise salaries, get new equipment, serve more people?
A 'Social Media Network' for the base of the pyramid: we designed our model of Community Video with the idea of reaching scale. We aim to partner with 30 NGOs in five years, to train more than 200 Producers, and thereby create a media-producing 'Network' that is at least as large (in terms of number of full-time videojournalists employed) as a single Indian national news Network. Our 'Network' of NGOs and Community Producers is tentatively called 'Channel 19' (see www.ch19.org, though we may need a new name soon.) We were thrilled that CNN IBN has agreed to describe the Producers as part of the Channel 19 Network, and also that our NGO partners have agreed to this experiment in collective identity. For us, this is a chance to test out a hypothesis we have: the TV media has hardly any stories about the poor, that show the situation from their point of view. But yet, there is a lot of social documentary material and social issue content out there. Maybe the solution is this: producers of pro-poor media content need to be networked together, to increase their visibility and lobbying power. CNN IBN is giving us a chance to test out that idea
The poor as Producers as content, not just victimized subjects: over the past two years, we've approached maybe a dozen TV stations asking for collaboration. All of them would say, 'we'd love to do a story ON the Community Producers, but we can't air a story BY them. What quality will the story have? What does our audience care about a bunch of villagers? Who wants to hear more stories about poverty and human rights problems?' CNN IBN was the first one to agree that the Producers could MAKE the program. I think this may be one of the first times (in India at least) where the poor have been paid to produce for a leading television station.

CNN IBN is giving us our first step in becoming the "CNN of the base of the pyramid."

This blog, in particular, would be a great place to address the question of, 'the poor as producers and not just subjects of the news." For me and my colleagues, WHO produces the news, is as important as what is being said. So, as long as leaders in the field of democratizing the media remain exclusively English-speaking, Western (or Westernized), middle class and urban, how much change can we really make?

Here is a video on Channel 19 on garbage in Mumbai slums. This is a five minute version of a half hour film made by the Community Video Unit at Yuva, and it's the first story that is going to be redone for CNN IBN.