Archive for the 'Community building' Category
Agriculture and us
I attended an Ashoka conference in New Delhi yesterday on rural innovation and farming. There were so many new things I realized about agriculture’s deep rooted connections with our culture and society and economy that I decided to immediately write about it before the memories weaken. Plus I watched Avatar later in the evening, which [...]
Read More..>>Radio News Saves Lives in Haiti
With infrastructure severely damaged after the earthquake in Haiti, a radio show actually saves lives. This underscores the need for rapidly installable radio stations that can be set up in the middle of nowhere after a natural disaster.
Read More..>>Co-casting: An approach to enable participatory information systems in rural areas
Gram Vaani has developed a new concept called co-casting, short for community casting or contextual casting or cooperative casting — a new paradigm for communication in rural areas which is centered around specific communities that share a common informational interest. Co-casting is different from community radio broadcasting in the way it defines a community. Communities [...]
Read More..>>GRINS v0.1 is now out!
GRINS stands for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System, Gram Vaani’s broadcast platform for community radio stations. We are very happy to announce that the first release is now available! You can download and use it free of cost. An open-source release will also be available in just a few weeks.
GRINS is an enhanced automation [...]
Community news as a livelihood for the world’s poorest
This is a piece by Jessica Mayberry, founding director of Video Volunteers. It originally appeared on Idealabs, and is being cross posted here.
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 [...]
Read More..>>Is a CNN for the base of the pyramid possible?
Jessica is the founder of Video Volunteers, an organization working to create a media industry at the base of the social pyramid by training local people to run their own “Community Video Units” in partnership with NGOs. Prior to that, Jessica worked at Court TV, the Fox News Channel and CNN. She is a fellow [...]
Read More..>>Gram-Vaani is a winner in the prestigious Knight News Challenge!
The announcement is finally public! Gram-Vaani is one of the 16 winners in the Knight News Challenge for 2008! This is a wonderful moment for all of us who were involved in the proposal writing and editing process. We submitted the first version of the proposal in August 2007, and after many many iterations and [...]
Read More..>>Khabar Laharia
This is a truly remarkable story! Khabar Lahariya is a rural newspaper run by women in Chitrakoot. It was started in 2002 pretty much as an experiment, but has since emerged as a symbol of women empowerment and democratic participation by the oft-neglected rural and tribal populations of India. They now boast a circulation across [...]
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