At WeMedia: Nonprofits and media; activism online and off; telling our own stories

I’m in unnaturally chilly Miami (its projected to get down to the 40s tonight) at the WeMedia Conference and am currently sitting in an afternoon session about “advocacy groups who once relied on journalists are now making the news themselves”. The session is being moderated by John Bracken of the MacArthur Foundation and the discussion includes Jon Sawyer, Executive Director, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Ellen Miller, Executive Director, Sunlight Foundation (who in her introduction referred to herself as a serial entrepreneur).

The Sunlight Foundation uses technology to help bring transparency to the activity of our elected officials in the US. They get behind orgs like http://www.MinnPost.com – started by people laid off at Minneapolis Star Tribune; http://www.Congresspedia.com which, as it sounds, is a wikipedia-like site but where all articles are vetted before being uploaded- its a curated space; and the Center for Independent Media – setting up bureaus of ‘professionalized bloggers’ who are doing investigative stories and driving stories. For Ellen, one model of success of wemedia is John Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

At the Pulitzer Center they’re trying to fund good stories about issues that are not getting coverage in mainstream media. The discussion didn’t actually answer the question between risks and benefits of having nonprofits in the space of media creation- perhaps because its actually nothing really that new. … Then I let another fellow here borrow my computer because she was live blogging the session and her battery was dying on her. There are more notes from the discussion here.

Then it was off to my panel “Activist World: Social Networks for Social Good” – it was a great group of people (Joan Peckolick, Founder, Selfchec;James Carlson, CEO, Bucketworks; Deron Triff, Co-President and CEO, Changents - all projects worth spending time with), most of whom I’ll be going to dinner with tonight but the energy was low (we’ve all been going since 7am and been sitting in a LOT of panels by this point) and there wasn’t much time to talk but there were some good questions that circulated about how best to reach youth (most frequently referred to here as “millennials”) and also about how to keep the internet open, – the question poised to me was because we require a people to log into the Hub if they want to upload, comment, rate, interact. Hopefully the conversation will continue…

The last session was probably my favorite of the day – Indigenous voices discussion “Telling our own stories” ….

Making Our Media Matter

A few weeks ago I attended the Making Your Media Matter conference put on by the stupendous folks at the Center for Social Media at American University. A report is now available produced by the conference rapporteur here which is a useful round up of major themes and ideas discussed, broken down into the various panel sessions and key notes given during those busy 2 days in Washington D.C.

I spoke on the last panel of the conference entitled “Short Shorts and Hot Platforms” about emerging distribution scenarios especially for short form documentaries. I naturally spoke about the Hub and was pleased to participate with fellow panelists Leba Haber, independent online filmmaker who discussed her project Where My Ladies At?; Melissa Robers of Free Range Studios (the masterminds behind The Meatrix and now “The Story of Stuff“) and Leighton Woodhouse of Brave New Films showcasing a new short Mr. Greenwald and co have created called “Fight the War on Greed“. We had some good questions from the audience about translation issues (i.e. for the Hub to be calling itself a global platform what about languages its available in- admittedly its only currently navigable in English, Spanish and French); access issues- people still pointing out that the digital divide makes internet-only based content worthless to many segments of society, perhaps less so in North America, all over the world.

This is where I brought up the question of the mobile platform. The prevailing statistic is that half of the world’s population will have a cell phone by 2009- that is next year- and that is about 3 billion people! Staggering. At WITNESS we’re trying to address that asap by making mobile-to-Hub uploads of video and still image content available – this functionality is going to be available within the next few months. Check back for more details.

I’m sure mobile distribution will be a frequently mentioned topic at the upcoming WeMedia conference I’m attending this week in Miami. The main ideas being explored over this packed 2.5 day conference are: ….

Guest post: Eric Tars’ Latest Dispatch from Geneva

Eric Tars is a staff attorney at the National Law Center for Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), which works to prevent and end homelessness by serving as the legal arm of the US movement to end homelessness. Tars is in Geneva for the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).

You can watch Tars present NLCHP’s testimony to the committee on the committee on the disparate racial impact of homelessness in the United States, here. In addition, Tars has been posing this vlog report-backs and updates on the Hub for the past four days here, here, here, and here.

These are a few of the new ways that we’re seeing individuals and groups use the Hub as a tool for quick report-backs and updates that link to a group’s efforts to advance human rights. Check out NLCHP’s Hub group page and their latest action alert to stop Congress from cutting homeless programs.

Also, you might want to check-out US Human Rights Network’s CERD Project and their CERD blog — and their video reports from their work in New Orleans and their Katrina and Internally Displaced Person’s Campaign.

Here’s Tars’ Latest Dispatch

Today was a day of ups and downs. Up: we had a great information sharing session this morning with some of the more experienced international activists helping some of the newer folks get a handle on the UN system. We then proceeded to divide up into working groups to work collectively to prepare answers for our briefing tomorrow morning with the Committee. This is so whatever questions we get asked, we will answer the question, but then bridge back to all the essential issues we want to be sure the Committee is paying attention to. This process is important for the actions with the Committee, but the silent benefits of working together, hearing each other, learning that we all have contributions that we can and should make to the joint effort is priceless.

Down: We learned today that the St. Bernard public housing development is being torn down as we speak. People’s belongings that they have never been able to get because the development has been blocked off since Katrina are being tossed out of the apartments in giant heaps. Families lives – photos, childhood drawings and letters, are being trashed and people’s homes are being destroyed. See pictures at: http://bluffton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2008163&l=9f7bd&id=137901119 It makes the work we’re doing here all the more urgent and essential.

Up: we met with the UN staff who are dealing with the new Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism of the Human Rights Council. Under the UPR, every country in the world will be reviewed every 4 years for an entire span of human rights violations – civil, political, economic, social and cultural. The U.S. is first up for review in 2010, so we have plenty of time to prepare. We were told that the U.S. is supposed to engage in a “broad consultative process” to prepare their official report to the UN. I might not speak for everyone here, but I plan to make that happen – I’m envisioning regional and local testimonial panels, collection of stories of abuses, collection of success stories where rights are being protected, and the involvement of all levels and branches of government. Maybe I’m an idealist, but I think this is a great opportunity. One limitation – the entire U.S. report has to be only 20 pages, and the NGO commentary on that report is only 10. If we had trouble getting all our issues into under 700 pages for this report…well, let’s just say it will call for some new forms of creative activism…

Kenya, Cambodia and Australia at the Hub – NOW!

Head on over to the Hub (once you’ve read these great posts from Matisse and Sam, of course) for this week’s Picks… and see the end of this post for further links and info.

As well as images of continuing violence from the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, shot by our Kenyan partners Cemiride, we’ve also got footage from Licadho, a group that participated in last year’s Video Advocacy Institute (applications open for this year, folks…). Licadho’s short video, shot on a Flip camera, shows one example of the daily indignities suffered by residents of Dey Krahorm village in Phnom Penh “in a three-year campaign of harassment and intimidation of the community to coerce them to surrender their land to 7NG in return for new apartments on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, 20km away, or cash payments of far below the market value of the land.”
And after Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, gave a historic apology to the country’s indigenous communities, we have a video from EngageMedia taken on Australia Day, or what some have taken to calling Invasion Day, marking the impact of colonialisation on those communities.

Further links:

Keeping on the Australia theme, I like this audio/photo slideshow from the Sydney Morning Herald, which weaves together photographs taken of the stolen generations by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board with interviews with some of the individuals depicted in them. It’s particularly interesting as an example of how individuals can re-appropriate their oppressor’s archival images of themselves and their histories. More to come on this theme later…

Cemiride // Licadho (background on the Dey Krahorm story here and here) // EngageMedia (Read Kevin Rudd’s historic apology. And if you don’t know the work of Swedish author Sven Lindqvist, you should. His latest book, Terra Nullius, takes his recent theme of European-driven genocides to Australia – read an extract here, et ici en francais.)

DIY video and human rights

I’ve just arrived back in New York after three thought-provoking days at the 24/7, DIY Video Summit, a great event put together by Mimi Ito and a team of organizers and curators at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC. The panels and discussions streamed live in Second Life and were webcast, and they should be going up on http://www.video24-7.org soon.

I was on a panel called ‘State of the Art’ talking about the Hub, and the human rights implication of online video, alongside Alex Juhasz sharing a YouTube video (appropriately) about her experience teaching in the environment of YouTube and the frustrations of it as a venue for higher learning. Alongside us Thenmozhi Soundarajan presented the work of Third World Majority (where her sister, Theeba who used to be our colleague here at WITNESS, also works ) and highlighted for me a particularly clear point about how we’ve been pushing in media justice work for access, but now that is not sufficient – when there are 90 versions of Thriller out there, and no meaningful dialogue about healthcare policy then we’ve gained access but without an accompanying ideology of what we do with it. Juan Devis from KCET highlighted local video and mapping initiatives in L.A. and showed his excellent Departures project which provides an immersive experience of an L.A. neighborhood, Boyle Heights.