OneWorld.net (U.S.)

© Narendra DeoOneWorld South Asia conducted a five days workshop on new media for twenty eight participants from PACS partner CSOs from the state of Madhya Pradesh from 5-9 February 2007 at Bhopal.

The workshop opened with an session on how Millennium Development Goals are linked to our national programmes on poverty reduction, ensuring food security, rural health and urban renewal and how Information and Communication Technologies such as Radio, computers and Internet if used coherently with other media such as print and folk media could help escalate the reach of these programmes and supplement to it’s effective implementation.

The group then learned about the vast oppourtunity of community radio that has been made available for the community based organizations. The session detailed how a CSO could begin it’s own radio programme and could establish it’s own radio stations in their work areas. Most of the participants were curious about the registration process and other requirements of setting up a radio station.

Later during the workshop participants had the oppourtunity to do hands on practice of producing a radio programmes. They underwent a process of familiarization of various radio formats, script writing, voice modulation and recorded their first ever radio programme using a hired local audio studio. Participants produced radio programmes on National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, Right to Information, Water and Child Immunisation.

During session on computer and Internet, hey learned how to use computer in hindi, how to use email for personal communication and how to manage content of a website using a content management system. All the participants typed their profile and uploaded their profile along with individual photographs to http://owsa.ekduniyagyansagar.net site. They can not only publish content using open enrich – a software developed by Oneworld South Asia, but can also be in touch with each other through direct content syndication made possible by the software.

Session on writing skills covered basic communication principles and gain experience in good writing.

At the end of the sessions, oppourtunity to use these skills were discussed. Participants discovered that most of the work on radio and computer could be started by individual support and the trained persons shall sensitize and train further people in their own organizations to take it further.

To begin work on radio the trained person can train two other people in the same organisation or from the community using a tape recorder. The recorded community voice around a particular issue could be played back to the community with an expert interview on the identified knowledge gap. The tape recorders could be purchased from the unutilized funds from the PACS Programme.

Similarly, most of the participants do have access to computer and internet. They were advised to configure their own office computers to use Unicode Hindi. They can also install open enrich in their own computers and start typing the content and uploading to the website developed for them.

They can also plan some dissemination workshop to showcase the collected digital content among the community members of interest.

There are some oppourtunities of working with other programmes. Gyanvani has audio studios in Bhopal, Indore and Jabalpur that could be used by NGOs to record and produce programmes for Gyanvani. Edusat programme has also been launched in Madhya Pradesh. Bhoj Open University is coordinating this ISRO project in MP. NGOs could partner with them on this project.