Time for initiatives…and cynical debates aside

I’ve been going on about using mobile phones as citizen journalism tools for the past two weeks.  Well if you look at my last attempt on this debate, it is pretty obvious that I have a bone to pick with those who blame our continent’s lack of proper technical infrastructure as an excuse for not practicing citizen media. 

Though, I must say that being part of the mobile active 08 conference last week in Johannesburg opened my eyes to a thriving mobile world out there.

For one, I had to overcome my fear of technology in one day by using a mobile phone as a reporting tool. As if my personal phone is not giving me enough headaches already. I could have been warned earlier about this. Well to be quite frank, the little gadget I had to use was higher grade for me. From the applications to use to Twitter, download and upload pictures and videos to the features of the actual phone.  And I thought technology was meant to make ones life easy.

But by day two, I was thinking that this is actually not bad at all once you get the grip on it. Considering that lobby groups such as Greenpeace have taken activism literally to their hands on mobile phones, there is certainly some social good coming out of these devices.

Nonetheless, I managed to put together a vlog (watch vlog) based on a presentation on mobiles and citizen media using this phone.

My talk with Juliana Rotich from Global Voices, an online citizen media initiative that gives citizens from across the globe a voice, exposed me to another perspective of citizen media that I was not aware of.

Well not that I’m ignorant, but I was not aware of cases where mobile phones have evidently empowered citizen journalists, especially in Africa.

During the conference, I listened to Rotich’s presentation on Ushahidi.com, a website which was initiated to map the violence in Kenya that broke out post the elections fallout  earlier this year. It’s a simple website that uses user-generated reports and Google maps to gather citizen generated crisis information. Citizens can send information via email, web or mobile phones.

Another project was born from Ushahidi.com when South Africa was engulfed with xenophobic attacks in May this year. Ushahidi was the driving force behind citizens reporting on crisis incidents around the country. Rotich explained how the site was also used as a platform to lobby support from international governments against the violent attacks.

If you look locally, mobile citizen media will soon become a reality. Grahamstown youth will start using phones as interactive journalistic tools through the Indaba Ziyafika,  a citizen journalism initiative which will roll out within the next four years.

To my surprise, this is all manifesting right in my country and I’m only getting the details of the whole story now.

The presentation also touched on developing mobile applications that could be used to send MMS’s on all mobile models, without only using GPRS enabled phones. Relevant, considering the fact that these fancy phones can be pricey to the more than half of Africa’s population which lives below the poverty line.

We forever lambast at digital citizens, blaming the  lack of resources and funds to roll-out such projects. But grassroots media projects are starting to run, even in small scales in our continent.

Technological encumbrances aside, and lets start looking at what we have because really now, we’ll wait for aid until Jesus comes, if we keep making technology an excuse for citizen media. Is it not time that citizen’s started taking news-making of their community news into their own hands?

The success of these projects can only stem from the volunteers who constantly avail their resources to these citizens so they could to tell their stories and of course the grassroots communities who also take the initiative of telling their stories.

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