testing podbean

Sorry this took so long

I have finally posted the final report from this study.

It's been a tumultuous year. I headed off to India right after completing this study, worked with Drishti to devise a social media policy and finished off my masters program. No excuse for being so late though.

The study was limited by a brief duration, but I hope you find something useful in here

Community video can be a powerful force for change

Next month, I'll travel to India as part of my masters program in intercultural and international communications at Royal Roads University, based in Victoria, British Columbia. Among other things, I will spend time with an NGO called Drishti in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

Drishti promotes health, social justice, peace and economic development throughout India by giving voice to both urban and rural poor. It teaches people how to use video to tell their own stories. Drishti has helped several Indian NGO partners to set up community video units to deal with a variety of issues such as domestic violence, economic injustice, poor sanitation, and lack of access to health clinics.

The community video units hold public showings of the films on screens set up in a community or neighbourhood, often outside. The showings give community members a chance to tell their own stories and the community as a whole the opportunity to discuss the issues raised in the videos.

A Newfoundland connection

There is a connection of sorts between Drishti and my home province of Newfoundland, which was the birthplace of an approach to participatory community film making called the Fogo Process. In  the mid-1960s, the National Film Board of Canada and Memorial University Extension Services joined forces to make films about Fogo Island, which was at that time undergoing a serious downturn in its main industry - the fishery. More than half the island's population was forced to go on welfare (Quarry and Ramirez, 2010, p. 72). At the time, the government of Newfoundland under Premier Joey Smallwood had a policy of resettling many isolated communities to more prosperous parts of the province. But the Fogo Islanders didn't want to move.

What began as a straightforward documentary evolved into a process of making several short films in which Fogo Islanders told their own stories. Public showings allowed people from different communities on Fogo Island to see their problems more clearly and to discuss those issues together openly. As well, the film was shown to the premier and his cabinet in the far-off capital of St. John's - and it facilitated more communication between the people and their distant leaders. Many credit the Fogo Process (participatory video, public showings, public consultations and viewings for leaders) as a turning point for Fogo. The fishermen of the island formed a cooperative, unemployment all but disappeared and the government became more responsive (Quarry & Ramirez, 2010).

One of the men responsible for the Fogo Process, Don Snowden, went on to champion the Fogo Process approach in Bangladesh and India, where he died in Hyderabad in 1984. Among the films he was instrumental in making was Eyes See, Ears Hear, which documented how rural people in the village of Taprana, near Delhi, used video and public screenings to discuss their issues and motivate themselves to take action. Similar to the experience of Fogo Island fishermen, milk farmers in the village established their own cooperative.

The Forest People: "This camera is our weapon."

Drishti has been doing work that echoes the Fogo Process. It too enables people to tell their own stories and holds public screenings to facilitate discussion of important issues. For example, the video training it provided villagers in  Addateegalaj, Andhrapradesh, enabled the people to advocate for better health services. Manyam Praja Video (The Forest's People's Video), a video unit of the NGO Laya, produced one video about substandard treatment of malaria in its region.

Here's a description provided by Drishti: 

"The film on health and ignorance named Malaria, Manyam Praja's first video magazine, dealt with ignorance regarding diseases prevalent amongst tribal people and about their exploitation by health care officials. This film aims to inform the villagers about diseases such as malaria and also provide them with the basic knowledge regarding natural alternatives that are easily available to the community people.

"The screening of this film made a huge impact. People questioned doctors about their failure to process malaria samples on time. This made the doctors more responsible toward their duties. 

"After seeing the film, the government ordered that action must be taken to clear water from a group of 20 submerged houses. Most of the villagers don't know that blood samples of those suspected of having malaria have to be checked within 72 hours. During the monsoon season, they are marooned and flooded with water everywhere. If government promises to give samples within 72 hours, then local people questioned the health care centers near by to provide them with this facility and methods to make this happen. Generally this procedure of examining takes a fortnight or 1 month and even the community producers didn't know that within 72 hours blood sample is needed to be examined.

"By the time they send the report back, the person is dead. At times they wouldn't get it back in time. It was like a black hole. People didn't know what happened. People would find out about a month later they have malaria."

The film Malaria, embedded below, is powerful when you see the denial by a health official that malaria is a big problem, contrasted with the reality of the village. The public viewings helped mobilize the villagers into taking action and, according to Drishti, led to better, more timely testing and treatment of malaria in Addateegalaj. The words spoken by one of the villagers in the Manyam Praja video about malaria ring true: "This camera is our weapon."

Drishti plans to soon launch a new online video platform. It would like the community videos to reach a wider audience - especially those who might have more power to affect change at the higher levels of government. It will be interesting to see how the establishment of an expanded online network will complement the public viewings. I hope the community screenings will continue. Many of the people most affected by the issues covered by the community video units do not have access to the Web. Community screenings still provide them with an opportunity to learn, discuss and spark action.

I wonder if the community screenings have an advantage over social media such as YouTube in one respect: They are an experience that the villagers can share together in a real physical space. The screenings and the ensuing discussions are immediate and intimate. I believe in the power of Web 2.0, but I'm not sure it possesses these qualities in the same way.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Drishti does first-hand. Perhaps I'll get to see a community screening and then compare the experience to watching the video online.

Reference

Quarry, W. & Ramirez, R. (2009). Communication for another development: Listening before telling. London: Zed Books

CORD uses social media to break free of silos

The Coalition on Richer Diversity (CORD) takes an inclusive approach to helping new Canadians and long-term residents integrate into Newfoundland and Labrador society.

On its website homepage, CORD writes, "We respect, appreciate and are excited about what you have to offer - be it a little or a lot!"

It seems to me that CORD understands something essential about building alliances and networks - that a diversity of contributions and levels of commitment can strengthen those networks.

In their excellent book The Networked Nonprofit, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine write that networks are stronger when they include people and organizations with both strong and loose ties to the network. If a network contains only the most gung ho supporters, then there is a danger that it may form into a clique that is hampered in its ability to reach out and expand its influence. If a network contains only those with loose ties, then there is a danger that nothing will get done.

Social justice networks must look to their periphery for expansion, write Kanter and Fine. It is the people on the periphery who have connections with contacts who might not be connected directly with those at the core of a network.

Social media is a great way to keep in touch with friends, but its true potential for change lies in its ability to help people build new relationships and expand their networks.

CORD activists Jose Rivera and Maria Callahan have experienced first-hand the power of social media both to solidify old relationships and build new ones.

Jose Rivera been helping immigrants and refugees adjust to life in Newfoundland and Labrador for the past nine years. He is the executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Advisory Council (RIAC), one of the partner organizations in CORD.

Mr. Rivera says social media have made a significant impact on his organization's ability to pursue its goals of helping refugees and immigrants adjust to life in Canada and to advocate for their issues. He says Facebook in particular has enabled his organization to reach more people more quickly.

For example, Mr. Rivera credits Facebook with increasing attendance at its summer multicultural fundraising event. He says that about 25 per cent of the people who found out about it did so through Facebook.

Social media have helped RIAC reach more people in its awareness raising campaigns and in its calls to action.

He also says that social media enables RIAC to be more proactive than reactive. The organization is able to find things out much sooner and is, therefore, able to act before opportunities have passed.

Rivera says social media have enabled RIAC to get in touch with old contacts such as clients they have helped, interns and allies from years ago.

"In the past, you just lost them," says Rivera.

Maria Callahan, the research and fundraising coordinator with RIAC, says social media has been an essential part of CORD's operations since it was formed in 2007. That year, she was involved in a project with a group of new Canadian high school students and still keeps in contact with many of them through Facebook.

"I'm still friends with almost all of them," says Ms. Callahan.

Anyone involved in NGOs and volunteer organizations knows that people come and go. They move away for work or just get busy with other things. Thanks to social media, however, they need not leave the family. And you never know when they might be able to do that little something that will make a big difference for the organization.

Like Mr. Rivera, Ms. Callahan says Facebook makes it easier to find volunteers for any given event.

"You don't have to pull their arms to get them involved in things," says Ms. Callahan.

CORD and partners such as RIAC provide a range of services to refugees, immigrants and long-term residents - everything from finding furniture for them to helping them navigate bureaucratic red tape to obtain a driver's licence.

Mr. Rivera says the next step in its social media plan is to establish a clearinghouse of information that is useful to anyone adjusting to life in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Being able to easily gather and share information through social media has been extremely beneficial to the coalition and its clients. In the past, said Mr. Rivera,  the individual organizations were in silos. Now, social media have enabled them to break out of those silos. They can more easily draw upon the collective knowledge and contributions of  core network partners and reach out to those on the periphery, who might nonetheless have something valuable to offer.

Please note that any feedback may be used in a study into the use of social media for development. Please see my Disclosure of Study.

Power to the People?

A Washington Post article challenges five myths about social media. First, author Ramesh Srinivasan questions the idea that social media give power to the people. Oddly enough, he begins by giving examples in which social media have given power to the people: "bloggers using social media to document human rights abuses, activists communicating via social media during the Arab spring, and indigenous people in Mexico using online news groups to promote their struggle for sovereignty." However, he argues that in order to take advantage of technology such as social media, people need "dependable physical infrastructure and human capital - including electricity, education and media literacy. Of course, he's right. Social media aren't much use to people without electricity, let alone wi-fi access. Are they?

Yes, there is a lot of hype out there about social media. It is true that social media alone will not empower people if they don't have access to it, but I don't know anyone out there who is claiming otherwise. Srinivasan's argument naturally leads into a discussion about the digital divide. A recent post in ICTs for Development suggests the digital divide may not be as wide as previously thought. There is not a clear dichotomy between haves and have-nots when it comes to ICTs. In the blog, Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester's Centre for Development Informatics notes that there are four categories in the digital divide:

1. non-users who have no access to ICTs
2. indirect users, who don't have access to ICTs themselves but obtain information from those who do.
3. shared users, who use ICTs owned by someone else such as a friend, co-worker or community group.
4. users, who have direct access to ICTs.

Of course, there must be infrastructure. At the very least, people must have access to a cell phone signal. Armed with cell phones and other new technology, Tanzanian farmers have been able to obtain market information on prices and increase the price they receive per tonne of rice to $600 from $100 (Communication Initiative, FAO, World Bank, 2007, p. XXXII). Srinivasan himself points out that new technology has enabled farmers in Kenya and India to do the same, cutting out corrupt middlement. I would imagine that the extra income in Tanzanian, Kenyan and Indian the farmers' neighbours as well.

Of course, he's right about the need for infrastructure, but it's sort of like saying that cars don't empower people without roads. It's obvious but hair-splitting. Social media have the potential to connect people in ways that are still being discovered. The power is latent, waiting for the right circumstances, but it is there nonetheless.

What has been your experience? Have social media empowered you or your cause?

Communication Initiative, FAO, World Bank. (2007). World congress on communication for development: Lessons, challenges, and the way forward. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Retrieved from ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/ai143e/ai143e00.pdf

Social Ways of Being

I'm doing a course on organizational culture and communication, and every now and then it strikes me how my own culture affects my approach to work. I tend to think first of results and then of means to attain those results. I sometimes don't think as much as I should about process - and being.

I've volunteered to help an NGO in India develop a social media plan. Immediately, I began looking for the best ways to use the toys - blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I started this blog as a means of gathering information experientially - with the intent of learning by doing. I've gathering "how to" information to help me with my long-term mission. For a "late adopter" such as myself, learning how to use social media effectively is challenging enough, but learning to change one's way of thinking, one's cultural programming is a different thing altogether.

I'm about half way through "The Networked Nonprofit" by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, and the book isn't quite what I expected. It does have sound practical advice about how to use social media for social causes. But there isn't a chapter on using Facebook or a chapter on using Twitter per se, though there are practical examples of how these social media have been used for good. Rather, the emphasis is on the mindset and philosophical approach to social media.

"Tools will come and go," they write, "but strategies sustain organizations. Using social media is more of a way of being than a way of doing" (p. 6).

Organizations, corporate or non-corporate, have a tendency to think of themselves as the centre of the universe. Their cause, their immediate needs, their priorities must take precedence over everything else. They must compete for the attention of prospective donors. The traditional marketing approach is to use a medium to promote one's aims from this perspective. To tell the truth, many individuals are like that too.

Rather than looking out at the vastness of cyberspace and thinking, "How can I build a community around my cause," a truly networked person or organization will recognize that there are already networks of people with similar values. These people can be valuable allies if approached in a spirit of reciprocity and trust.

It strikes me that this emerging network culture runs counter to old ways of all kinds of organizations - corporations, governments, NGOs, and, yes, universities.

Kanter and Fine make a fascinating point that effective networks are made up of actors with loose ties as well as strong ties to the network. If a network is made up only of those actors with strong ties, then it tends toward the formation of a clique and would ignore the valuable contributions that those with loose ties can sporadically or with less consistency make to the network's cause. If it consisted only of actors with loose ties, very little would get done (p.29).

This revelation runs counter to the elitism that can exist in traditional hierarchical organizations and networks. The authors recognizes that one need not be a core network member (CEO, professor or even a techno geek) to be valuable to the network.

So, when Kanter and Fine speak of embracing new social ways of being, they aren't just talking about embracing social networking with old friends on Facebook or business associates via LinkedIn or even fellow social activists on Change.org The implication is for the creation of networks that are much more diverse.

Kanter and Fine also urge nonprofits to look to the periphery of their networks for people who may be core actors in other networks, thereby expanding networks. As we venture into the periphery of our networks, we also expand into new frontiers of networks. The implications for an even more interconnected world are obvious. How will old power structures cope with this change? Perhaps they won't - as we have recently seen in the Arab world.

I am becoming more and more fascinated by where this is all heading. It's nice to have people like Kanter and Fine who can shine a light on it.

A contrast in priorities?

UPDATE: Change.org has won its fight with J.C. Penney. The U.S. retailer has agreed to compensate families of victims who lost their lives in a Bangladeshi sweatshop fire and has pledged to take "a leading role in improving fire safety standards in Bangladesh." 

Social justice organizations have more power than ever before to bring attention to causes they care about - thanks to social media. They are no longer at the mercy of corporate controlled mass media to reach a large audience. Yes, there has always been an "alternative press." But how many people could be reached via Mother Jones as opposed to Facebook?

Yet, there continues to be a gap between the issues covered by social justice organizations and the mainstream media. For example, the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF)) has set up an online petition on Change.org to force J.C. Penney not to renege on a pledge to compensate families of a fire at a factory in Bangladesh in 2010. Never heard of it? Not surprising. I did a Google News search, and it seems the only people interested are social justice and "alternative" websites.

The victims worked in an unsafe sweatshop for a company called That's It Sportswear, which produced clothing for major chains such as Target, Gap, Abercrombie and Finch, and J.C. Penney. Following pressure via means such as Change.org, seven of the eight companies doing business with the Hameem Group, the parent company of That's It, signed a pledge to compensate the victims. According to the ILRF, J.C. Penney, one of those seven, has backed out of compensation negotiations.

In fairness to J.C. Penney, the ILRF does not give the company's side of the story. But neither does J.C. Penney. There is not a mention of the negotiations on the company's corporate social responsibility news release page or anywhere else on its site. (If you enter the words 'Bangladesh fire' in the company's search field, you end up with a Melissa and Doug firefighter puppet." I wonder who made that puppet and where.)

J.C. Penney is no stranger to controversy. You may recall it had to apologize following the heat it received for selling a t-shirt with the logo "I'm too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me." It also was blasted recently in a New York Times article for allegedly using "black-hat" search engine optimization techniques. Google's search ranking for any given website is based in part on the number of other sites that link to it. The Times article alleges that somebody paid a lot of sites to link to J.C. Penney pages. It's not an illegal activity, but it is one that goes against Google's standards of fairness. J.C. Penney was quick to respond to that allegation, calling it "misleading and unwarranted."

The sexist t-shirt and the allegations of "black hat" SEO tactics both pale in comparison to contracting with unsafe sweat shops and not living up to a commitment to compensate relatives of those who died in a fire at one of those sweatshops. But neither J.C. Penney nor the mainstream media seem that interested in the story - so far.

I know that the media has to be skeptical about claims of any organization, including NGOs. But according to change.org, more than 93,000 people have signed a petition. Online petitions are tricky things for the news media. Even if an IP address is limited to one signature, there's nothing to stop someone from going to another computer and signing it again. Even - perhaps especially - the mainstream media's own online polls - should be treated with skepticism.

But the allegation of a corporate giant balking on its responsibility to victims' families is significant. I hope the media has at least looked into it.

The ILRF's use of change.org illustrates how social media can be used to gather support for a cause. And, if you wish, you can start your own petition. Why don't we petition the media to look into industrial accidents in sweatshops and the companies that do business with those factories?

Please note that feedback to this post may be used in a study into the use of social media for development. Please see my Disclosure of Study.