Last updated on Nov 24, 2017.
Use the Hypothes.is toolbar on the right side of the screen to add comments to the text below.
Please note that you will have to create a Hypothes.is account to add comments.
Alternatively, send your comments to this proposal by email to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org.
If you want to join a session team or present your work as part of a session, please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org so that we can connect you to the session team/lead.
Every smartphone is a media making platform and a personal device. While Internet services let people connect, share and network with others they do not deliver when it comes to collaborations offline. Traditionally, media making has been a studio activity when expensive radio or TV studios have come to mind. With whatsapp and social media, it's now common to find funny and interesting snippets being shared among people. It is now understood that such media can be made by anyone.
On the other hand, schools have not found a way to provide a context to excel among the rural and indigenous communities. With lack of context, students find it hard to relate to the classroom teaching - especially in rural public schools. Girls dropping out of middle and higher secondary schools is often high in these demographics, hence a need for making them the voice for their communities.
Media Maker Spaces is an exploration for them experience a creating, editing, storing. publishing and streaming media to their peers and to their immediate context. A media kiosk encourages peer-group learning, investigative journalism and exploration of community knowledge and heritage. They share these with other students and also with larger community in the village. The makerspace further encourages making of kiosks by students. Then to bring these out so others can use these to make media.
These offline kiosks serve as local collective repositories. The quality of content is determined by the curators and the community of listeners. We seek a comparison of local content creation in such kiosks and publishing content on online spaces by projecting into the context of a conflict region of Kashmir and the context of an office of a high profile minister.
A media maker kiosk will be setup at the conference location, where offline discussions and informal interactions lead to content creation, editing, stream and sharing as an activity.
Session will delve into the mediamaker work with sample content from a number of contexts and locations. Various short term and long term pieces of the project will be set into a frame. These include the several aspects of creating and editing using open source tools setup on a Raspberry Pi and using it as a server, an fm transmitter and a wifi connector for browsing or streaming. We also peek into the possibility of live streaming. Then we delve into the aspects of ways students can put together such kiosks in their schools and what it means for the content to be shared or published on the internet.
Nidhi and Aishwarya will also share their communication and journalism work in the areas of Kashmir - a conflict area, and a chief minister's office as offline spaces. We open the space for comparing such contexts to those of kiosks as offline media services. And bring to discussion aspects of scale, resilience, encryption and the need for collaboration at different levels.
We then briefly connect these to the discussion on offline archives and ground this by opening the question of how all handmade producers can be present online (automated and industrialised productions) today.
Dinesh is the Technical Director of Janastu(.org), a non-profit organisation. As technical director of Janastu, he works from Bangalore, India on issues like Web content accessibility for the low-literate, use of 3D methods for location interpretation, methods on using social semantic web concepts for storytelling and developing open source social platforms. He was part of the W3C Web Annotation Working Group defining a technical recommendation for a standard.
Janastu has been providing Free Open Source Software (FOSS) solutions and support to small nonprofits (NPOs/NGOs) for about 2 decades and some necessary R&D. Janastu is actively working on archives for Indian needs such as diversity of literacy and negotiation of community archives by all. Lately, Janastu has been exploring introducing makerspaces to rural craft centers and media making activity at rural public schools and women cooperative as ways to enhance peer-group learning and local economy.
Girish has many years of experience in delivering in the media industry -- T.V./content editing, publishing, content management and translation. He is proficient with non-linear and computerized video editing systems, including digital edit controller, digital video mixer and title generator. His passion for bringing radio into schools has culminated into mediamaking project at schools. He has been lately working with open source components and tools into make it fun and inexpensive way of building the media maker studios/kiosks. He also uses his mobile media maker studio, which is a van converted to house a few students to cover events or to visit other schools in the area for dissemination and collection.
Nidhi Suresh correspondent with Newslaundry, graduate from Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. Currently posted in Kashmir. She has also done an internship summer with the community where on the MediaMaker Kiosk is now set up.
Roshni graduated in the Communication studies course in Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. She has experience in internships in reporting for The Hindu, and in travelling and research with the Bodo and Maldhari tribes for brief periods. She will be part of the MediaMaker team at the UNESCO Transforming Education Conference for Humanity in December.