DCI 4.0 PRESS RELEASE

The fourth Digital Citizen’s Indaba (DCI) takes place on 5 – 6 September at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, just before the University’s annual Highway Africa conference. DCI is an annual event that brings together bloggers, online and mobile journalists, citizen reporters, new media practitioners, online industry experts and civil society representatives. The purpose of DCI is to encourage citizen participation in debate about the state of digital media, information sharing and skills transfer using experts in the field. It encourages the use of new media take-up by non-journalists.

THEME
The theme of this year’s DCI is ‘Digital civil society and journalism in Africa’. There has been an explosion of new media at civil society level. Issues around land rights and access to housing and water are finding their way into the digital public sphere. Violence monitoring by civil society has become easier, as mapping technology can be used to warn people about outbreaks of violence. Maps are being used to inform citizens about where to access medicines, and they may warn against shortages in access to essential treatment such as antiretrovirals. As a result of growing civil society usage of new media, mainstream media have a broader array of information to
draw on, and are able to take up issues that would not have otherwise have found their way into the public domain.

LINE-UP
The DCI line-up includes keynote speaker Dubissi Tande, a prolific blogger on African affairs, who will be speaking on the state of social justice digital media in Africa. Elia Varela Serra (Maneno.org) together with Bolivian Voices editor Eduardo Ávila Maneno will enlighten us on the ever pertinent topic of promoting indigenous languages in digital media. Another panel with Nthateng Mhlambiso (Behind the Mask) and Maureen Agena (Women of Uganda Network) focuses on gender, civil society and digital media.

Civil society’s use of mapping tools will be explored by Bobby Soriano (Tactical Tech), Brett Davidson (Stop Stockouts) and Ndesjano Macha (Global Voices). The ways in which technology can be used to promote activism around land, environment and health will be discussed with Stephan Hofstatter (freelance journalist), Peter Benjamin (Cell-Life), Ednah Karamagi (BROSDI) and Bobby Marie (Monitoring Action).

WORKSHOPS
DCI 4.0 this year offers six workshops to ensure that all delegates will, besides knowledge, take practical skills back home to assist communities with digital activism and social justice on a local level. The workshop titles are “Multimedia Tools for Journalism” (Peter Verweij, Hogeschool Utrecht), “Digital Voices to Reconstruct Communities” (Marlon Parker, CPUT), “Successful Podcasting” (Jayne Morgan, Podcart.co.za), “Mapping Tools for Civil Society Use” (Ndesanjo Macha, Global Voices), “Using Mobile Media for Social Change” (Peter Benjamin, Cell-Life) and “Bringing Down the Barriers with Interactive Audio Programming and Mobile Phones” (Brenda Burrell, Kubatana.net).

CONTACT US
Visit the DCI website (www.dcindaba.com) for live updates and more information.
You can also find us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcindaba or use #DCI09 to search for DCI Tweets. Contact the DCI team via the website or email to dcindaba@gmail.com.

For me it is time to get ready for what is now publicly known as a circus. This one does not involve tigers, elephants or horses but just a whole lot of clowns, acrobats and jugglers. Its our own media circus in the African Media Matrix building at Rhodes University.

CueBlog
Cue Media is an amalgamation of media platforms that report on Festival. It is the ultimate real-life learning experience for newspaper, TV, radio, photography and online students.

Its now my third year of involvement and I have to admit that these ten days are marked in my calendar with rainbow colours and some festive, albeit childish, balloons and flowers. I’ll be editing CueBlog, the latest edition to Cue Media.

The idea of CueBlog originated in 2007 and comes from Prof Peter Verwey who lectures at the Dutch School of Journalism in Utrecht. It started as a convergence project, to see if it was possible to merge the separate existing newsrooms to make them more efficient. Why not re- and pre-purpose material? Why not use photographs from CuePix as a slideshow with added sound from CueRadio? Well, CueOnline is set in its own ways so we conjured up a whole new platform to show that we are able to converge all the different media and still do our own additional reporting.

Convergence Challenges
And so CueBlog was born in 2007 and with the help of Dutch students and a group of Highway Africa News Agency reporters we were off to a quick start. We didn’t foresee some of the challenges. The daily converged diary meetings did not work as well as we hoped and there was a lack of understanding from the other platforms. Why do we need a blog, don’t we have online already? Are they just going to use our content and that’s it? Do they really need a space in the newspaper to show off their most read posts?

Moving Forward
In 2008 the relations changed dramatically. It was the same-old challenges for the first two or three days but after some well-thought over chitchat with the other editors we finally felt as though we were becoming part of Cue Media. First of all, we got our column in the newspaper, secondly we also received National Arts Festival goodies, thirdly we managed to get some of our stories linked to stories from the newspaper and vice versa, we also sold three advertisements (a clear indication that we are taking this blogging seriously and we are also able to add to the pot).

For this year’s edition of CueBlog we have decided to start on the right foot. We are not in competition with CueOnline and will therefore this year collaborate more closely then ever before. One Dutch student from the blog will team up with one online student on a daily basis and make a multimedia production for both platforms. This exchange of skills and knowledge should be an important underlying characteristic of the whole project, just as testing the boundaries of convergence is.

It’s back!
This year the much-loathed daily converged diary meetings return. But for now we’ll just call it the “editors teatime” as to not enforce that scary word ‘convergence’ into anyone’s mind. It does not make sense to run separate newsrooms that are under the same heading without knowing what everyone is doing. Off course a CMS would sort this out but with no funding for that we will continue working with the good-old folder based system.

We have also purchased Cue Media shirts, just to visually become a part of the circus.

I’ll be posting updates on the NaFest CueBlog project on this site as we go. In the meantime, if you have any enquiries or comments about CueBlog you can get in touch with me.

Cheers,
Elvira

This article was published just after I co-coordinated the Digital Citizen Indaba in Grahamstown, South Africa in September 2007.  It was a follow-up story, in 2006 I wrote about the South African blogosphere and commented about its invisibility.

Another update!

The third Digital Citizen Indaba in September 2008 was another great opportunity for African bloggers and new media workers to get together. We focused on creating and sustaining the African digital voice. Click here for the DCI 3.0 wrap up. You can find the presentations of all speakers on the same site.

Unfortunately Habtamu Dugo (Ethiopian blogger, lecturer, journalist, friend and old classmate) had to run from the oppressive regime in Ethiopia. I dearly wish him strength for the upcoming year.

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The article translated:

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The African blogosphere: it is time for an update

By Elvira van Noort

22 September 2007, Grahamstown, South Africa

It’s not easy to host and organise a blogging conference in Africa. Is there such a thing as a blogosphere in Africa and shouldn’t we concentrate on eradicating malaria or focus on protecting endangered mountain gorillas in Congo? Only during the second edition of the Digital Citizen Indaba it became clear what impact blogs have on the continent.

The Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) took place in Grahamstown, South Africa on the 8th and 9th of September. The crème-de-la-crème of the African blogosphere, numerous Internet professionals, and media workers converged to discuss topics running from Web 2.0 to blogs in rural areas and from cyberactivism to monetising your blog.

But did the African blogosphere really change since last years’ DCI?

Arthur Goldstuck from the South African Internet research company World Wide Worx argues that it did. By the end of August he counted 25 037 South African blogs. To explain this phenomenon Goldstuck refers to the launch of five webtools that simplify the lives of bloggers and readers of blogs. The first one is Afrigator, the first-ever African blog aggregator on the continent. The launch of Amatomu and My Digital Life, both South African blog trackers, and the start of the new daily The Times newspaper that uses multi-media and social network tools are the other tools. There was also a rise in the number of South Africans on Facebook: from 80 000 at the end of June to 244 000 on the 5th of September.

A more practical example of the impact of blogs in South Africa was given by Guy Berger, Head of the School of Journalism at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. During his presentation at DCI he referred to a blogger who published a list of prominent South Africans on his weblog and stated that he had sex with them when he worked as a sexworker.

The story turned out to be a lie but within a week newspapers, online news websites and the blogosphere were writing about it. What we couldn’t think of a year ago now happened: a South African blogger faced criminal charges and a member of parliament shouted that the South African blogosphere needs to be regulated. This takes South Africa down a long dark path of the old endless discussion: how to regulate information on the Internet? And what are bloggers allowed or not allowed to publish?

Changes across the continent

Besides the obvious changes in the South African blogosphere the rest of the continent is also moving. There are still many challenges but most delegates and speakers at this years’ DCI are positive.

Remmy Nweke, senior ICT journalist in Nigeria, argues that “prices of owning a personal computer and other Internet tools continue to reduce and more and more journalists grasp the opportunity of blogging to increase local content on the continent”. Nweke gives his own blog as an example.

The situation is different in Ethiopia. Habtamu Dugo, a lecturer from Ethiopia, explains that there is still a filtering regime in place. “Because of the filtering system Ethiopians don’t have access to numerous popular blogs and news websites”. Dugo blogs anonymously because of the press freedom restrictions he encounters.

Blogging in kiSwahili

KiSwahili, an African language spoken in fifteen countries, has found itself a place in the African blogosphere. It was not a point of discussion at last years’ DCI but this year Ansbert Ngumuro from Free Media explain clarifies its importance: “it makes blogs accessible to around 100 million people who all speak kiSwahili, most of them do not master English or French”. Examples of kiSwahili blogs are Ngumuro’s and Ndesanjo Macha’s from Global Voices Online.

A list of the speakers and their presentations is available on the DCI website.

The journalism students are joined by eight media technology students who can help with the make-over and redesign of the blog. It’s a real life exercise in crossmedia journalism.

A lecture about blogging is for most students an eye-opener.  A weblog is not just a tiny space on the web where people write crappy diary-style stories. It’s also a place to show the world your work (a portfolio style weblog) and a gigantic source for journalistic stories.

Out of a group of 25 students only one is blogging and no-one uses Twitter or other microblogging applications. However, most of them are part of social networks like Hyves. Well…this situation will change soon. Within the next 6 weeks all these students will be blogging and thinking crossmedia.

All students produce items for CampusTalk (television and radio) as part of their study, adding another media like CampusBlog means they will need to think across three different journalistic platforms. Integrating or converging these media will take place mostly in the students’ minds. And that is where I come in: do not only make the students THINK multimedia but make them DO it. Only time will tell…

Before you realise it’s Friday and a whole week of publishing about fact checking is over. The first year journalism students in Utrecht were taught to work in a Content Management System, to phone journalists and sources to confront them with the facts from the articles, upload their post and multimedia onto the blog and interview guest speakers.

The week combined practical work, journalistic basics (fact checking) and multimedia blogging in one. Some of the findings are remarkable, like press releases that newspapers just copy and paste without checking  (also copying mistakes) and publishing graphics about the US elections with the wrong amount and numbers.

There are also newspaper articles with only one source (while we all know that one source equals no source) and articles were the opinion of the journalist is difficult to distinguish from the facts.

Most students are positive, giving responses like

“I couldn’t believe that we were able to find so many mistakes and write so many blog posts in just one week”

to

“I’m glad that I now understand how a CMS works, I can now post my own blog and that is good to know”

It was a great pleasure to work with about 25 enthusiastic, clever, first year Journalism students and to be able to pass on my practical knowledge and examples. I would also like to thank our guest speakers Miro Lucassen, Patrick Pouw, Peter Olsthoorn, Thom Meens and Patricia de Rijck who were all able to keep the students motivated and answered all their questions patiently.

These practical lectures can easily be adapted into a Master Class in journalism or be part of a media training for beginning journalists. If you need more information you can always e-mail Elvira.

This upcoming week the first-year students of the School for Journalism in Utrecht, The Netherlands, will experience their first Orientation Week.  The students have the whole week to get familiar with a certain journalistic medium, in this case new media.

We have organised a week around the theme ‘Fact Checking’, an important topic to deal with in a journalism department. During the week all students will research Dutch regional and national newspapers and check the facts. Guest lectures by Miro Lucassen, Patrick Pouw, Peter Olsthoorn, Thom Meens and Patricia de Rijck will give the students examples from ‘the real world’.

After one week of research the students will publish the results on our new weblog, factchecking.nl