Oso (a.k.a. David Sasaki) – friend and great source of inspiration – has been running the Rising Voices project, a spinoff of Global Voices, one of my all time favorite initiatives on the web. Rising Voices is successful because it arms real people with the tools to tell their stories. The projects usually focus on marginalized communities, usually far from mainstream media’s interests.
When do you get to hear about life in Madagascar? Or those communities recovering from the war in Bolivia? or even about daily life in Iran. Rising Voices provides micro-grants to a chosen number of projects on a bi-yearly basis. All projects deal with one major topic – providing regular people around the world the knowledge and toolset to share their stories; amplify their voices.
Rising Voices seeks to empower under-represented communities to make their voices heard online by 1.) providing financial support to outreach projects, 2.) developing a series of participatory media tutorials, and 3.) cultivating a network of passionate citizen media activists to help encourage and support the replication of outreach trainings.
Below is a trailer highlighting several of the Rising Voices projects. David has challenged the GV community to translate it into over 50 different languages. I did my share – Hebrew text available (using the fantastic dotSUB service). I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to translate subtitles.
Keep up the amazing work David!
[tags]risingvoices, rising, voices, GVO, globalvoicesonline, citizen, journalism, third, world, citizen, media [/tags]