USAID | Hoipolloireport

The human connection, and the grassroots involvement is a preamble to this story which was published this month in LMD Magazine.

A few months ago I interviewed a program manager at a major grass roots organization in Sri Lanka. Isura Silva’s story is fascinating. It’s about a pilot project involving smart phones in a very small village in Kurunegala, about 45 miles from Colombo.

The project, by Sarvodaya Fusion, put 21 Google Nexus phones in the hands of the entrepreneurs, because -despite a very high penetration of mobile phones in Sri Lanka –that village wanted education, and the ability to digitize the information they were generating.

The ‘information’ in this case was details about the coir brushes that they were making on very (very!) small scale. Tweaking the laws of demand and supply effects are not enough for a product to achieve scale. If no one knows you have an awesome product, no one wants to buy, and you could remain a small business forever.

Soon the producers were photographing their coir products and uploading it to a Facebook page, using the smart phones. Within a short time, a major marketing and distribution company, Hayleys Exports (which exports textiles, tea, construction material and coir products) had seen the product and began a conversation. They agreed to buy one million items a month.

Was it the power of a smart phone, or the power of conversations they enabled?

Smart phones are opening up a dialogue with those involved in much more than e-commerce.

In another town, Fusion holds blogging classes, and in another, they show young adults how to use a phone to teach themselves English.

Outside Sri Lanka this model is being tested by grassroots organizations using mobile technologies. UNESCO and Nokia held a Mobile Learning Week in Paris in 2011. Stanford and USAID has a program known as mobile 4 education 4 development.

While all this is going on, Silva is busy trying to find the next big thing for his organization,and how it could further mobilize the grassroots. He accidentally stumbled on Twitter, and has some ideas on that, but that’s a different story.

In 1999 (before we many of us began thinking deeply about the role of the Internet on the media as we know it), USAID foresaw a trend, or rather a need for citizens to be able to “make informed decisions and counter state-controlled media.”

They talked of nurturing ‘alternative media,’ which at that time made many people uncomfortable. Mainstream media journalists, especially, thought that this would be lead to erosion in standards.

USAID may have never dreamt that something called social media would sow up and deliver this ‘alternative’ into our laps. Later, in 2005, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which tracks newspaper reading habits, recorded a curious shift. They observed that people were turning away from traditional news outlets, particularly those “with their decorous, just-the-facts aspirations to objectivity.” And what were they gravitating toward? They were turning toward “noisier hybrid formats that aggressively fuse news with opinion or entertainment, or both.”

News infused with opinion? That sounded like heresy!

Not anymore! Dozens of news organizations have begun using a combination of social networking, citizen journalism and traditional reporting to do just that.

I mentioned Internews. It may not be ‘noisy,’ but it is definitely a hybrid format. Internews is an international ‘media development organization’ that empowers local media worldwide. Meaning it not only becomes a distribution channel for global voices, but it gives people the tools to connect, and thereby be heard.

A similar organization, Global Voices, is a nonprofit foundation comprising an international team of volunteer authors, and others who are active in the blogosphere. In fact, one of its divisions, Lingua plays a sort of the amplifier role. Lingua, it says, “amplifies Global Voices stories in languages other than English with the help of volunteer translators.” They translate content into more than 15 languages.

Pew’s recent State of The News Media Report talks of how media consumption in a world of increasing mobile devices forces news companies to follow some messy rules (of device makers, for instance) to deliver their content. The news ecology is getting uneven, it says.

This is where hybrid, alternative media has taken root. Let’s get used to it!

A longer version of this is published in LMD magazine.