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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Grassroots Publishing Through Open Source and Web 2.0
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| Kibera, Kenya, by Humphrey Okore |
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When it comes to making print media, the number of options available to grassroots organisations and informal groups can be daunting. Indeed, with the rise of open source software packages, web 2.0 publishing tools, and crowd sourcing sites where one can hire designers for very low prices, the number of options is only increasing. What is exciting about these tools, however, is the ability they give grassroots and non-profit organisations the ability to run effective print media projects at extremely low costs.
With such a wide array of options, it is instructive to see how such tools are already being combined to run low-cost projects. Five Minutes to Midnight (FMM), an organization I founded in 2003, is one example of a non-profit group which has adopted such tools to run a low-risk fundraising project in the form of a photography book. Kibera, the book we recently published, is now available on our e-store, and on Amazon.com.
What is most surprising about our work is that aside from personal time, the initial cost of the book's development was $0. This has allowed us to create a fundraising tool for our workshops in developing nations without any risk of losing funds we already have.
The initial idea for the book came about in July 2007, while we were running journalism and technology training workshops in Kibera, Kenya. Located near Nairobi, Kibera is Africa's largest slum, and often receives negative coverage in the media. There are no formal media operations specifically focusing on the slum itself, and many of its young people are unemployed. We partnered with Shining Hope for the Community (SHOFCO), a small youth-led organisation based in the slum, to provide young people with the technology and training needed to run a newspaper and obtain useful work-related skills.
The workshops were unique to most training programs run by non-profit organisations, as they were run through the use of refurbished computers, open source software, and freely available tutorials and technical content. FMM also strives to incorporate new technologies when running such projects, and one Kenyan result of this is the participants' work to write a Swahili Wikipedia entry on Kibera.
During the workshops, participants were given digital cameras and told to explore Kibera - to visit areas in the slum that they felt were important, and to snap photos from their own perspectives. Hundreds of photos were taken, many focusing on the people and communities that comprise Kibera - things few foreigners get to see. Such photos, both in their visual beauty and in the ways they were taken, represent an important self-reflection on Kibera and the people therein.
Both FMM and SHOFCO are small organisations, and publishing a photography book can be expensive and time consuming. While such a process can be a good fundraising opportunity, developing such a product cheaply can be challenging.
To deal with this issue, FMM decided to choose 80 of the most striking photos taken by participants, and compile them into a short book. Since workshop participants were taught to use GIMP, OpenOffice.org, and Scribus for graphics and layout design, FMM used the same software for its own work in editing the front covers, resizing photos, and writing the text content of the actual book. Everything was finalised in Scribus and exported as a PDF file, allowing us to have an electronic book of photos.
For printing, we decided to use CreateSpace, a service developed by Amazon, which allows one to develop on-demand books, DVDs, and other media products. This service allows one to publish a media product with Amazon taking a portion of the sale price rather than requiring any preliminary payments. In our case, all profits go to run our international workshops.
Creating a book on the site is very simple, and the main content is uploaded as a PDF file for the book itself, and a separate file for the front and back covers. What is most useful about the site is that once the book is published, it can be sold on a personal e-store, or actually listed on the main Amazon website. CreateSpace even takes care of registering an ISBN number for the book itself.
Through the use of content created by workshops in Kenya, editing and layout design through open source tools, and using an on-demand web service for publishing books, FMM was able to self-publish a photography book at no cost to the organisation. Such a combination of tools has a great deal of potential, both for non-profit and grassroots organisations, and individual content creators in general.
tags: kibera-kenya canada media-events non-profit publishing volunteer photography book
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