Community media
People like to express themselves. We have seen how social media tools like YouTube, Flickr, and blogging have revolutionized creativity, knowledge sharing, and even political discourse in the world. How can similar tools be made available to the rural populations of developing countries? Clearly, a different approach is needed because much of this population is poorly literate, economically backward, and infrastructurally deficient in access to technology.
Through various pilot projects of our own and by our colleagues, it has been found that voice and video are suitable collaboration media for this demographic because of its accessibility across illiteracy barriers. Non-profit organizations such as Video Volunteers train community members in video recording, editing, and reporting and interviewing skills. These videos are then telecast in public gatherings, and also sold on CDs and DVDs. In other places, the proliferation of mobile phones with \emph{reasonably} good cameras have also helped many villagers turn into citizen journalists and report happenings from extremely remote regions. Community radio is another popular medium in which radio station staff and volunteers create relevant programs by engaging with communities. Local production of content automatically makes it highly contextual, and restricting the range of broadcast to 10-15km helps to supplement the broadcast with in-person interactions. In a process termed as \emph{narrow-casting}, staff visit or organize public gatherings in which they play programs over loud speakers and TV screens, and directly interact with people. In other settings, people are able to make phone calls into a local number and leave comments or questions that can be answered by experts or other community members. The following links below talk about many such projects and interesting insights.