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About Tobias Eigen
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Founder of Kabissa. Live in Berlin. Passionate about social media empowering people in the global south.
Ceasefire Liberia: Multimedia web project connects Liberians on both sides of the ocean
BY: Tobias Eigen DATE: 13 November, 2009 - 08:29
I was pleased to learn about Ceasefire Liberia, a terrific example of the type of social media connections Kabissa seeks to promote.
From the website:
"Ceasefire Liberia is a multimedia project which aims to document the Liberian experience on both sides of the ocean. It includes a book, documentary film work, and now a blog. The goal of the blog is to connect the Liberian community in Liberia with the rest of the Diaspora in order to create a dialogue between those who fled during the war and those who remained."
The founder, Ruthie Ackerman, was recently interviewed on Media Bistro, which you can listen to online here. (via Rising Voices mailing list)
I recommend the interview if you have the bandwidth to listen to it. In it, Ruthie explains Liberia and the project to an American audience - her perspective is very interesting and she's clearly committed to Liberia and to providing a platform for Liberians to have a voice and to connect with each other, both in Liberia and in the Diaspora.
The blogging project is described as "hyper local" which I found illuminating and worth emulating in other communities, the idea being to create blogging clubs in local communities that meet regularly and encourage more people to get involved in blogging - in this case in Staten Island, New York and Monrovia. The benefits then are larger since it is a social media powered online project, so people around the world can participate.
I am very excited by what this model might mean more broadly and would like to learn more about the operational aspects of it.
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4 Comments
Hyperlocal journalism
Submitted by Ruthie Ackerman (not verified) on 16 November, 2009 - 13:59.Thank you Tobias for highlighting the Ceasefire Liberia project. I think this project is a prime example of how hyperlocal, community-driven journalism is the wave of the future. Like I said in my interview on Mediabistro, I do not believe in the type of old-school journalism where the reporter is the authority on the story. Instead I believe in the model where the journalist works with the community to tell a story that gets at a larger truth. For me, writing and storytelling is about learning something new in the process. Ceasefire Liberia lets me do that because all of our bloggers are equals. I write stories, the bloggers write stories and only through putting the pieces of all our work together can the reader understand the story of Liberia. The job of Ceasefire Liberia is to dispel the myth of the single story and show the reader the shades of grey inherent in storytelling. I hope Kabissa readers will check out our website www.ceasefireliberia.com and share in the dialogue. We also have a Ceasefire Liberia fanpage on Facebook and I tweet at @ruackerman.
Hyperlocal journalism
Submitted by mendi (not verified) on 17 November, 2009 - 10:36.This is an excellent summary of what I believe we as NPOs can contribute to the greater human rights discourse. There are a lot of first hand narratives of voices from the field e.g. Global Voices who do an outstanding job of capturing citizen media voices, but the challenge still exists for NPOs trying to build readership around a single issue, or individuals trying to follow a single issue, as these voices are usually not compiled in one place. Typically one has to search and compile their own individual reading lists in order to do this.
My organization, The Advocacy Project (AP) and The Undugu Society of Kenya (USK)- Kenyan organization that works with children who live and work in the streets, created the Digital StoryTelling Project where youth blog about issues that affect them and through this, the youth craft self-advocacy agendas. Ruthie's words capture what we were aiming for where through consolidating the individual voices of the youth bloggers, the entire body of blogs start to reveal what we hope is a more complete story of the children and youth of USK.
Hyper-Local ... and Community Analytics (CA)
Submitted by Peter Burgess on 6 January, 2010 - 17:07.My contact with Liberia goes back to the 1970s ... the Tolbert era. I was around Liberia in the early days of the Doe administration ... and have stayed in touch fairly solidly ever since. What I learned as a result of this association with Liberia is that good people can get swept up in awful things ... and it is critical that good people are in control of the future. This is not easy.
I believe in the idea that "what gets measured, gets done" ... but most of what is measured in our modern society is money profit and wealth, and much less the idea of social good and happiness.
The hyper-local idea is very powerful ... and it is very compatible with the Community Analytics (CA) initiative that is under development. CA complements an idea like the hyper-local initiative in the following way ... CA is about performance and progress of a community, the least amount of data that will serve as a measure of how well the community is doing, what is right and what is wrong, and what needs to be fixed! CA is best when the data are relevant ... management information ... the least amount of information to get the right decisions made. Initiatives that encourage communication are good ... but they may result in data overload. CA aims to offer a small amount of data that are useful to help a community go forward.
I am happy to answer any questions that come to mind ... and happy to cooperate in setting up a CA initiative that works for communities in Liberia!
Peter Burgess
Your post
Submitted by Ruthie Ackerman (not verified) on 8 February, 2010 - 20:29.Hi Peter,
This sounds great. I'd love to hear more. Please email me at ceasefire@ceasefireliberia.com so we can chat.
Looking forward to it,
Ruthie