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.

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…