e-News, 2009
GROUNDVIEWS
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Groundviews was launched in November 2006 and is the first citizen journalism website in Sri Lanka. The central idea was to use a blog to publish compelling content in the form of text, audio, video and photos in English, Sinhala and Tamil. The strategy was to raise awareness of the blog virally. Key authors were asked to contribute pithy and provocative articles that pushed the boundaries of polity and traditional media and forced readers to think outside their comfort zones. Up to 27th May 2009 alone, the site received 235,000 pageviews and now gets around 2,250 page views a day.
JUROR’S EVALUATION
Groundviews fosters citizen journalism and is accessed widely around the world. It’s a website which was started in Colombo, Sri Lanka. What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes everything. It’s a new age media for a new Sri Lanka. Groundviews offers a multiple perspective on the civil war, by writings, pictures, eye-witness accounts, unbiased blogs, etc. It is the first website from Sri Lanka which fits into a mobile and thus, is accessible to a lot of citizens. Free media at its very best!
To watch other Manthan Award South Asia 2009 Winners’ Films, Kindly log on to – http://youtube.com/manthanawardtv
TARAKASH.COM
PRODUCT
Tarakash.com is world’s first and only infotainment [Information and Entertainment] portal in Hindi. Tarakash.com updates 4 to 5 times daily. It provides articles on Science, Technology, Internet, Robotics, Environment, Society, History, Entertainment etc. Not only this, Tarakash.com also covers all the latest news in and around the globe. As the site is in Hindi, more and more people can read and get benefited from the informative articles. The language used is easy to understand and gasp. The site has Podcasting section, where visitor can listen to some podcast as if they are listening to online radio. There is a Free Blogging platform attached to the site. Readers can subscribe RSS syndication feed to their reader. Tarakash.com has accounts and pages on all the popular social networking sites viz. Facebook, Orkut and Twitter. Users can also subscribe to the mobile alert and can get SMSs about the latest articles being posted on the site daily free of cost.
JUROR’S EVALUATION
Tarakash.com, being in Hindi, is a unique website which disseminates information in a local language, using a mass medium like the Internet. This task was initiated in Ahmedabad, India. All the information is categorized in well-defined sections. People can access many links through this edutainment site.Tarakash.com caters to that segment of population in India which is more comfortable in Hindi than in English. Tarakash has its own unique way to charm the audiences with its content and delivery.
To watch other Manthan Award South Asia 2009 Winners’ Films, Kindly log on to – http://youtube.com/manthanawardtv
TOOLS AND TACTICS FOR ADVOCACY
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Message in-a-box and Mobiles in-a-box are toolkits that have been developed to support citizen journalists, small NGOs and rights advocates to use information and create digital media for positive social change. Message in-a-box gives you everything you need to make and distribute your own media. The toolkit includes free and open source software tools and video and text ‘how-to’ guides. Mobiles in-a-box is a collection of tools, tactics, how-to guides and case studies designed to help rights advocates use mobile technology in their work. The toolkit supports users to design and implement their own mobile advocacy strategies and projects using free and open source software.
JUROR’S EVALUATION
The growth of the ICT is not uniform and it is all the more right in region specific context. If the handsets are high end the software tools available aren’t compatible and vice versa with not all pockets of population having the same gadgets or technical knowhow. To address this disparity, Tactical Technology came up with this mobile-in-a-box advocacy tool as a solution. Rights activists have been beset with many resource problems since long. Mobiles-in-a-box comes as a boon to such people worldwide especially with many of them coming from South Asia.
To watch other Manthan Award South Asia 2009 Winners’ Films, Kindly log on to – http://youtube.com/manthanawardtv