Development Gateway Foundation Photo Contest

Development Gateway Foundation, an international nonprofit organization, is looking for "compelling photographs of socio-economic development in developing countries." If you're at least 18 years old and you have photos that qualify under their four categories, then start sending your entries today. Deadline for entries is on September 21, 2007.

How to Enter the First Annual Development Gateway Foundation Photo Contest

WHO: The Development Gateway Foundation photo competition is open to ALL photographers at least 18 years of age, except employees of the foundation and their immediate families. Your entry to the contest constitutes your agreement to allow your photograph, name, occupation, city and state of residence, to be published as the selected award winner; published or used on the foundation Web sites; and used for the promotion of the foundation including, but not limited to, Web pages, brochures, fact sheets, and other materials. Entrants retain ownership and all other rights to future use of their photographs. The Development Gateway Foundation shall have the right to verify, in its sole judgment, winner eligibility.

WHAT: We are looking for compelling photographs of socio-economic development in developing countries. Four types of photographs will be accepted. 1) The images may show information and communications technologies helping ordinary people. 2) The images may show people making something, selling wares, working in a field, constructing a building or type of infrastructure, or acquiring knowledge. 3) The images could be abstract images representing hope, the future, or capacity building. 4) The photographs may also include images of original artwork from a developing country. Please do not include photographs of groups of people posing.

Each entry must include a written statement explaining how that image is representative of development. Images will be judged on technical excellence, composition, overall impact, and artistic merit.

Entrants must not infringe on the rights of any other photographer or person.

WHEN: Deadline for submitting entries is September 21, 2007.

The top 10 photographs will be posted on the Development Gateway Foundation Web site. All visitors to the site will be able to vote once.

The voting will begin at 12:01 a.m. on October 1 and end at 11:59 on October 8. The winner will be announced on October 9.

Prize: $500.00

Individuals living within the United States will receive the prize as a check by the mail. Individuals living outside the United States will receive the prize as a wire transfer. In this case, the winner must provide information on his or her bank account.

HOW: Each participant may submit up to 3 photographs total. Each digital photograph must be uploaded to the foundation server. Original files of camera-made digital photos must be no larger than three megapixels (3 mb). Acceptable photo formats are TIFF, JPEG, GIF or BMP.

Read more about the contest here.

Courses on ICT and Radio

Isis International-Manila is a feminist non-profit organization working in the area of communication. It offers short courses for women (sorry, pang-women lang sila) interested in web design, basic email and internet use, desktop publishing, radio production and library management.

Interested? Read more about their courses here.

Online Community Journalism

Here's a site that offers helpful information to "journalists, educators, students and citizen journalists" interested in covering virtual communities.

Welcome! This site is intended to clear the noise and get back to the basics of journalism.

We’re all members of multiple communities. They look familiar and easy to understand. But communities run deeper than we might think. So, why bother with this site?

If you understand a community's layers, and you’re willing to explore them, you’ll find stories that ring true. If you know how to find the leaders in a community and can ask better questions, you’ll be more effective and efficient.

Log in to Covering Communities to access its modules on interviewing, framing, even blogging and "third places."

Funding for Media Outreach Projects

Here's another source of funding for individuals or organizations interested in empowering communities through the media. Please take note that the deadline is on Friday, June 15.

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for the first round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

As the internet becomes more accessible to more people, as computers become cheaper, and as software applications move from the desktop to the web, the so-called digital divide seems to be narrowing. In its place, however, we see a participation gap in which the vast majority of blogs, podcasts, and online video are being produced in middle-class neighborhoods in major cities around the world.

Rising Voices aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities. Examples of potential projects include:

Purchasing an affordable digital video camera and teaching a group of rural students how to produce an ongoing video-blog documentary about the lives of their grandparents.

Organizing a regular workshop on blogging and photography at a local orphanage. Portions of the budget could be used on cheap digital cameras and internet cafe costs so that participants could describe their local neighborhoods to a global audience with text and photos.

Working with a local NGO or social entrepreneur so that their challenges, successes, and stories are told to a global audience.

Translating our new media curriculum to an indigenous language, like Quechua or Wolof, that is currently not represented in the blogosphere or “podosphere.” Then use the learning modules to encourage bloggers to write in those languages.
The sky is the limit, but unfortunately funding is not. Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $1,000 to $5,000. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets.

Successful projects will be prominently featured on Global Voices.

Completed applications will be accepted no later than Friday, June 15. Please email them to outreach@globalvoicesonline.org

Read more about this funding opportunity here.

Wanted: Innovative Digital Media Projects

For techies who have bright ideas on how to "transform community news," this is your chance to get funding for what you have in mind. I guess I should start learning more about web design and related stuff:-)

Do you have an idea that uses digital media, involves new forms of news in the public interest, and focuses on a specific geographic community? If you answered yes to all of the questions above, then your idea is eligible for funding from the Knight Foundation. Submission deadline: October 15.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will award a total of US$5 million to individuals, organizations or businesses from any country to implement a project that will transform community news.

Applications for the “Knight News Challenge” can be submitted from July 1 until December 31. Winners will be announced in the first half of 2008.

The Knight Foundation promotes journalism excellence worldwide and invests in the vitality of 26 communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. The Knight Foundation supports ideas and projects that create transformational change.

Read more about the Knight Foundation's project here here.

DZWT Goes Online

I was tuned in this morning to Country 99.9 (DZWR), "the forerunner of folk, rock and country format in the Philippines," when I heard an ad announcing that DZWT is now online. The ad mentioned the site's URL, adding that DZWT can now be heard anywhere in the world. Wow, isn't this great news for kakailians living abroad who'd like to listen to the latest events here in Cordi?

The site offers not just Cordi news but Cordi music as well. As I write this post, I'm listening to a Kankana-ey version of the country song "Someone Else's Star" on DZWT's site. From Monday to Friday between 8:30 to 10:00 in the evening, they play Cordi songs in their program "Aweng Ti Amianan." Apart from playing "translated" versions of popular English country songs, they also play original Ibaloi, Kankana-ey, Ilocano, and other ethnic songs. Check out their program schedule here.

By the way, DZWR (FM) and DZWT (AM) are both run by the Mountain Province Broadcasting Corporation (MPBC), owned by the Diocese of Baguio. MPBC was founded in 1966 by the Belgian Catholic Missionaries Of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (CICM).

To sample DZWT's fare, click here. Happy listening!;-)

Young People and Cultural Diversity

Here's a great site for young people interested in knowing more about other peoples' culture. Taking It Global is one of the biggest online community for young people, with some 140,000 members from all over the world. It has various programs that promote cultural diversity and international understanding.

To share about your own culture, interests and concerns, click here.

Media Literacy Lessons Part 2

The authors of Five Key Questions that Can Change the World assert that the media is basically Big Business. For us to be more discerning consumers of the media, they offer five key questions we should ask whenever we access a media product.

The fifth (although to me, this is the second most important) question we should ask ourselves when watching news or reading an article is this:

Key Question No. 5: Why is this message being sent?
Core Concept No. 5: Most media messages are organized to gain profi t and/or power.

With Key Question #5, we look at the motive or purpose of a media message – and whether or how a message may have been influenced by money, ego or ideology. To respond to a message appropriately, we need to be able to see beyond the basic content motives of informing, informing persuading or entertaining.

Much of the world’s media were developed as money making enterprises and continue to operate today as commercial businesses. Newspapers and magazines lay out their pages with ads fi rst; the space remaining is devoted to news. Likewise, commercials are part and parcel of most TV watching. What many people do not know is that what’s really being sold through commercial media is not just the advertised products to the audience – but also the audience to the advertisers!

The real purpose of the programs on television, or the articles in a magazine, is to create an audience (and put them in a receptive mood) so that the network or publisher can sell time or space to sponsors to advertise products. We call this “renting eyeballs.” Sponsors pay for the time to show a commercial based on the number of people the network predicts will be watching. And they get a refund if the number of actual viewers turns out to be lower than promised. Exploring how media content, whether TV shows, magazines or Internet sites, makes viewers and readers of all ages receptive target audiences for advertisers creates some of the most enlightening moments in the media literacy classroom.

Examining the purpose of a message also uncovers issues of ownership and the structure and infl uence of media institutions in society. Commercially sponsored entertainment may be more tolerable to many people than, say, a commercial infl uence over the news. But with democracy at stake almost everywhere around the world, citizens in every country need to be equipped with the ability to determine both economic and ideological “spin.”

But there’s more. The issue of message motivation has changed dramatically since the Internet became an international platform through which groups and organizations – even individuals – have ready access to powerful tools that can persuade others to a particular point of view, whether positive or negative. The Internet provides multiple reasons for all users to be able to recognize propaganda, interpret rhetorical devices, verify sources and distinguish legitimate websites from bogus, hate or hoax websites.

Media Literacy Lessons Part 1

While searching for media education sites, I discovered Center for Media Literacy. It is an excellent website that provides different modules on how to educate young people about the media.

One helpful resource I found was entitled "Five Key Questions that Can Change the World."

According to the authors, here's the first key question we should ask:

Key Question No. 1: Who created this message?
Core Concept No. 1: All messages are constructed.

To explore the idea of ‘authorship’ in media literacy is to look deeper than just knowing whose name is on the cover of a book or all the jobs in the credits of a movie. Key Question #1 opens up two fundamental insights about all media –“constructedness” and choice.

The first is the simple but profound understanding that media texts are not “natural” although they look “real.” Media texts are built just as buildings
and highways are put together: a plan is made, the building blocks are gathered and ordinary people get paid to do various jobs.

Whether we are watching the nightly news, passing a billboard on the street or reading a political campaign fl yer, the media message we experience was written by someone (or probably many people), images were captured and edited, and a creative team with many talents put it all together.

The second insight is that in this creative process, choices are made. If some words are spoken; others are edited out; if one picture is selected, dozens may have been rejected; if an ending to a story is written one way; other endings may not have been explored. However as the audience, we don’t get to see or hear the words, pictures or endings that were rejected. We only see, hear or read what was accepted! Nor does anybody ever explain why certain choices were made.

The result is that whatever is “constructed” by just a few people then becomes “normal” for the rest of us. Like the air we breathe, media get taken for granted and their messages can go unquestioned. Media are not “real” but they affect people in real ways because we take and make meaning for ourselves out of whatever we’ve been given by those who do the creating.

The success of media texts depends upon their apparent naturalness; we turn off a TV show that looks “fake.” But the truth is, it’s all fake – even the news. That doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy a movie or sing along with a favorite CD or tune in to get the news headlines.

The goal of Key Question #1 is simply to expose the complexities of media’s “constructedness” and thus create the critical distance we need to be able to ask other important questions.