SalaamGarage | citizen journalism + NGOs = social change

Village Batzchocola- Agros and SalaamGarge Summer 2010

By maggie soladay | Published: January 12, 2010

For more beauty from Agros International and the villages, like Batzchocola, they work to help throughout rural Guatemala.
www.agros.org/ag/our-villages/guatemala/batzchocola/

Join Us in Guatemala Summer 2010

Here are the stories we will be working on in Guatemala with Agros International. Choose yours!

Posted in Guatemala, citizen journalism, cultural immersion, media, photography, travel, voluntourism, educational trips | Leave a comment

Mahatma Gandhi poem

By AmandaKoster | Published: November 3, 2009

Even as we serve others,
We are working on ourselves;
Every act, every work,
Every gesture of genuine compassion
Naturally nourishes our own hearts as well.

It is not a question of who is helped first,
When we attend to ourselves with compassion and mercy,
More healing is made available for others.

And when we serve others
With our open and generous heart,
Great healing comes to us.

As we heal the wounds of the past,
We carry less pain into the world,
Less confusion and anger,
And we bring more charity and peace.

It is no longer simply for personal gain;
It becomes our gift,
Our offering to the earth
And the Divine Spirit within us all.

Mahatma Gandhi

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Eduardo in India with SalaamGarage- Identity for the women of Shampura Village

By maggie soladay | Published: October 12, 2009

Eduardo Sciammarella, CEO of Los Angeles based Protohaus, joined the SalaamGarage India 2009 team to help make a difference for disadvantaged women and children. We asked Eduardo what stood out as he worked on his humanitarian stories in a rural village called Shampura outside Jaipur where NGO Vatsalya works.
Eduardo interviewing Santosh with the help of Manju from Vatsalya & local college student interpreter Aditi. Photo by Maggie Soladay

Eduardo said, “the woman I interviewed is Santosh Kanwar, she’s 26 with 4 little ones – Anshuman, Radha, Deepika, and Abnishiek. She touched me as deeply as it gets when she answered my question ‘what has been the biggest change for you since you joined the women’s self-help group?’ She said that she had finally learned the first names of all the women in her village. Up until then they only knew each other as so and so’s wife. Step one on the path to independence – identity.”

Santosh Kanwar photo by Eduardo Sciammarella

Eduardo’s portrait of Santosh and her kids:

Santosh Kanwar photo by Eduardo Sciammarella

-Maggie Soladay, India 2009 trip producer

Posted in India September 2009, citizen journalism, cultural immersion, media, photography | Tagged citizen journalism, India, Rajasthan, SalaamGarage, voluntourism | 3 Comments

Udayan Home for Children, Part of Vatsalya.org

By maggie soladay | Published: September 26, 2009

This past week the SalaamGarage team of storytellers for India 2009 have been hard at work building stories, interviewing, recording, observing and participating in so many of Vatsalya’s great projects around Jaipur, India.

Here are a few flip videos I recorded at Udayan home for children and Anoothi shop run by Vatsalya.org

Posted in India September 2009, citizen journalism, media | Tagged Anoothi, India, Jaipur, Udayan, Vatsalya, Women's Self-Help Group | Leave a comment

Some fun pre-production videos

By AmandaKoster | Published: September 17, 2009

Hello all! Maggie and I are alive and well in Rajasthan. We arrived early so that we could do about a weeks worth of pre-production to be sure everything was in place for our SalaamGarage trip, which starts in a few days. We also make friends and have some fun as well. We will write some more soon, though we thought it would be fun to share some of our videos during pre-pro, shot with a Flip video.

Outside the window of our hotel in Udapiur. Women and little girls were doing there washing in Lake Pichola. The view of the Lake Palace Hotel is great, at night the scene is captivating and romantic:

Jaipur Train Station waiting for the Udaipur train:

Crossing the railway tracks in a auto rickshaw:

believe me, lots more soon!
amanda

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Making peace with Dad's war

By maggie soladay | Published: September 7, 2009

By Guest Blogger, Journalist Daysha Eaton

The very first interview that I ever conducted was with my father. It was a high school English assignment to interview a veteran of a war. My dad was a Vietnam Vet so, naturally, I went home on May 20, 1993, sat down in the living room of our house in Port Townsend, Washington, set up a tape recorder and started asking questions. I didn’t know it at the time, but the assignment set in motion something bigger, putting me on a path that led to graduate school in journalism, a career reporting about social justice issues, and now to an upcoming trip to Vietnam to explore the legacy of war with SalaamGarage.
Photo not found
In January I will go with SalaamGarage to Quang Tri Province, which is considered the most severely bombed battleground in the history of the world. Today people in Quang Tri are still being injured and killed by undetonated explosives leftover from the Vietnam War. And instead of avoiding these dangerous devices, many farmers, unable to cultivate their land, now hunt out the explosives to sell on the scrap metal market. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines estimates that there have been nearly 34,000 deaths and more than 65,000 injuries in Vietnam since the war ended in 1975; the majority of deaths and injuries have been in Quang Tri Province.

This Project has special meaning to me since my own father is a vet. My dad, Charles ‘Bud’ Eaton went to Vietnam in 1967, at the height of some of the most violent fighting of the war, arriving just days before the battles that preceded the Tet Offensive. “It was hot, and it smelled like sewage,” he told me. “I was 18 years old and I was afraid … they put us on a bus and they told us, if anything happens stay low.”
1967_C_Eaton

During our interview back in the early ‘90’s Dad explained that he was stationed near the Cambodian border in North Vietnam where he quickly went into combat. “I was there a week and we were mortared and we were under a ground attack … we had a 140 guys dug in and we were firing at them.” He explained that part of his job was to sweep for landmines. He said that there was a lot of boredom, boredom that was broken up by attacks, mostly at night. “You would wake up in the middle of the night and the siren would be going off on the little compound that we lived on and so then you’d go get in the bunker, and we’d go do that every night.”

Night after night of such attacks in Vietnam added up to problems when he came home, including nightmares, mood swings and unpredictable reactions to everyday life. When I asked my dad if he felt he had PTSD, he clammed up and said only, “I’ve always said that it really didn’t bother me to much … my situation was nothing compared to a lot of people that I’ve talked to … I felt as though I was lucky.” I’d heard this line before and I didn’t buy it.

Dad may have been lucky, as he says, but now that he is in his sixties he is suffering more frequent PTSD attacks. He’s tried to get help from the Veterans Administration, but they wanted to give him drugs. My dad is one of these guys who doesn’t even take aspirin, so he has not had any help and he continues to suffer anxiety and confusing episodes in the middle of the night. Then dad told me that if he had to go to war again he would never do it. And he firmly told me that his one wish for his children was that they would never join the military.
1967_C_Eaton

One of his biggest laments was how the war affected the people of Vietnam. “You take the poor people, what it did to their country. You know you just have to see not only the aspects of war, but the aspects of the military and what it brings into a country and what it turns people into. You have to see it and you never forget it.” What he meant, I didn’t quite understand. And, like any budding journalist, I pressed him to be more specific, chiming in that, after all, he could tell me, now that I was 18, exactly what he meant. Taking a deep breath dad continued, trying to find a way to explain war to his teenage daughter who was so determined to know. “This is the thing that always kind of bothers me,” he said “that you get people who are right in the middle … you know they wiped out whole villages … its always the poor innocent civilians,” he explained.

In 1993 we were watching a new war on TV, in the Balkans. “Its just like in Sarajevo and Bosnia,” he said. “Whenever I see war now, I see these poor innocent women and children who are raped or murdered … because one side or the other felt as though they were on one side or the other … the poor innocent women and children are always the ones that suffer and that’s the sad part about war.” He closed our interview by explaining that his experience in Vietnam reinforced his belief in diplomacy, and that he hoped in the future the world’s problems would be hashed out in the political arena rather than on the battlefield.

I know going on this reporting trip to Vietnam won’t reverse my father’s PTSD or bring back the lives that were lost or the limbs of the people who were injured on both sides. But maybe it will help those of us who are still affected by the war, in various ways, not to forget. And it is my great hope that by remembering we can move forward, building a world where leaders and people reflect more carefully, and employ every possible alternative before sending someone’s son, daughter, brother, sister, mother or father into battle. As America is currently on the tail end of one war in Iraq and continuing yet another in Afghanistan, let us reflect on how war affects us. As dad said during our interview, “the sad thing about it is that people forget … so then the same thing ends up happening again.”

-Daysha Eaton, SalaamGarage Vietnam 2010 participant and subject of the previous post, “Daysha Eaton is Superstringer.com”

In January, reporter Daysha Eaton and documentary Photographer and SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster will collaborate to file stories with GlobalPost, World Vision Report and other media outlets and to come face to face with the legacy of war.

Posted in Vietnam January 2010, cultural immersion, media | 5 Comments

How I Pay for my Projects

By maggie soladay | Published: September 6, 2009

by Amanda Koster, SalaamGarage founder

from the original post on her personal blog

passion. commitment. focus. talent. intuition. faith. trust.

many people ask me ‘how do you make your projects happen?’ what people really want to know how on earth i fund them. well, with money of course. but that’s not the real question. anyone can run a credit card. i know several millionaires who are miserable, lost, spent it all, searching, drunk, still working. it doesn’t take money to follow your passion.

it takes having, trusting and following your passion.

that’s the real struggle for most everyone i meet. their initial question ‘how did you/do i fund this’ isn’t the real question. their real question is ‘how do i discover my passion?… how do i know this is my real passion?’ I say if you are asking the question, you are pretty darn close.

at first i charged everything. didn’t dig credit card debt so i discovered grants. i started applying for grants, and was awarded several: The GAP grant, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Puffin Foundation, to name a few. i took a fund raising class and learned it’s faster to raise the money myself. i held fundraisers. raised money from my own community who wants to support me. i literally threw parties and made my intentions very clear: ‘this is a fund raising party. I am going to morocco to work on project x, and am looking for financial support. i need to raise x amount of money by x date. this is what i plan to do and this is why it is a good idea.’ then started meeting with universities and now corporations. There are also viral ways to raise money, using the social media tools we are already familiar with. it all works.

amanda working in morocco thanks to her self-taught fundraising skills

its all a collaboration in my eyes, and my work has always been about the greater good. i have found that people want to help. they want to be involved. they too want to get those orphans off the streets in to a legitimate home, put that aids orphan through school, give female, sufi muslim musicians some praise and honor. they just may not know where to start. some people, like me, choose to go to kenya an create these documentaries, these stories. others can help fund it, others can help get it published, get it on tv, in books, on gallery walls, etc. This has all happened for me.

key has been to share the project, and also ask for support. its all a collaboration and once i shared my passion i found they had it too, and were happy to collaborate. then, as if by magic, it all came together. it helps me a lot to be very clear and articulate about my intentions. not only does that help me find support, it helps me pinpoint my vision.

now with SalaamGarage trips people are emailing me asking how to work out the money part.

many of the participants have raised the money on their own, just the way i did. by raising money via blogs, twitter, Facebook, paypal, personal communities, etc., this creates the viral/social media platform and a system of accountability for participants. the people who support them to go on the trip then look forward to seeing results. in turn, this creates goal for the participant to create a project, follow through and share it upon return, which then gets the message of the NGO out there. this also creates a sense of ownership, and also the trip starts when they register vs. when they land in say, Guatemala. helps them pinpoint their vision. (see?)

to break it down it looks like this:

1. discover the passion

2. commit

3. come up with a plan

4. share the passion

5. ask for support

6. get support

7. do the work

8. share the work

9. watch the magic, the whole time.

-Amanda Koster

Posted in How-To, Resources, Self Publishing, about, fundraising, media, photography | Leave a comment

Get Funded

By maggie soladay | Published: September 4, 2009

Apply for a Grant
For the professional journalist, your best exposure and most support could come from applying for a grant.

Center for Investigative Reporting Grants
and
Pulitzer Center Grants

We talk about SalaamGarage team member Daysha Eaton and her grant application with Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and her fundraising efforts here.

Spot.Us is a nonprofit project of the Center for Media Change. Spot.us gets its funding from the Knight Foundation who also fund Printcasting.com, which I write about on this blog. Spot.us is “an open source project, to pioneer ‘community funded reporting.’ Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. All donations are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, the donation is reimbursed.”
If the story you post is not purchased with exclusive rights by a news organization then it is the made available to all through a Creative Commons license. Spot.us calls itself “a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and collaborate. Choosing Spot.us to tell your story is probably not the first place a SalaamGarage humanitarian citizen journalist should post their stories. Because we believe the stories created with SalaamGarage need to be read by as many people as possible, one would have to create a story specifically aimed at sale for exclusive rights. But I do recommend Spot.us for independent and personal projects in your community. To read more about Spot.us check out this “Lessons in Crowdfunding” article by Spot.us founder DigiDave

Raise the money with a campaign here:
Kickstarter.com is a very fun very clean way to raise funds for your project, story, or idea. The website is full of musicians, photographers, journalists, activists, and some total nuts!

ThePoint.com Easy and Effective Group Action
“Whether you’re raising money, organizing people, or trying to influence change: if you can’t do it alone, you can do it on The Point.”
The great thing about campaigns on The Point and at Kickstarter is that no one is charged for their pledge to your project until the minimum pledge action or financial amount is met or exceded. So people can donate and feel good that their money is going towards the project they are supporting.
Hint: if you are raising funds in different ways like events along with an campaign online keep the Kickstarter or The Point campaign minimum amount lower than your actual ultimate fundraising goal.

Idealist.org run by Action Without Borders
If you take one thing away from Idealist.org, it will likely be that you are not the only one working to cause change in the world.
Action Without Borders runs the website Idealist.org. “Idealist.org is a website that facilitates connections between individuals and institutions that are interested in improving their communities.” This is a great place to build a network around your; cause, community problems, or to find a cause to work for or with. Idealist.org hosts podcasts and a news blog, as well as multiple in-depth forums. I also saw listed about 5,000 jobs, about 18,000 volunteer opportunities, and almost 89,000 organizations listed.

http://www.globalgiving.com/open/

GlobalGiving is an online marketplace that connects people to the causes and countries they care about.
nominate your own project at GlobalGiving
Provide them with details about your organization and your work through the self-recommendation form. If you meet eligibility requirements, you will be invited to participate in an upcoming Open Access Challenge event.

Hold a fundraiser- sell tickets through Eventbrite to look slick and official while keeping track of your benefit’s attendees

Also see the detailed instructions in the previous post “SalaamGarage Funding your Project Guide” where you can learn to create a Sponsor Me page at Facebook and how to start a campaign on WordPress.

-Maggie Soladay
Maggie Soladay |

Posted in Engagements and Events, How-To, Resources, Self Publishing, citizen journalism, fundraising, media | Tagged fundraising, grants | 1 Comment

The SalaamGarage Funding Your Project Guide

By admin | Published: September 3, 2009

For a well formatted link to this article please click here:

http://wootastic.org/funding-your-passion/

SalaamGarage – Funding your Project with WordPress or Facebook Campaigns
You might be reading this because you feel called to participate in a trip with SalaamGarage. I am going to detail a few specific tools and technical resources available to help you with raising funds for your project, but I want to stress that the success of these tools is going to rest first and foremost on your passion. People have a natural desire and attraction to support people in their vision and dreams. Your intention is the fuel that will drive you towards success in your goal.
The two methods for raising awareness and money documented here each have their advantages. Facebook is quicker, easier and does not require any technical background. Hosting your own site and blogging with WordPress is more technical, but it provides more customization options. I would suggest reading through the process to get started with each method and moving forward with which feels the most comfortable, or even developing both.

Facebook
Anyone who has used Facebook knows that one of the greatest aspects of the site is that you can not only reach your friends, but can expand your message into each friend’s own network of friends. If your message resonates with others, it has the potential to grow viraly well beyond the scope of your immediate friends and family. There are a couple of ways to use Facebook to help raise awareness of your SalaamGarage project and help raise money for your trip. I believe the best way is to make use of the Facebook fan pages, the Sponsor-Me application and PayPal.

The combination of these tools will allow you to publish your intentions, share this with friends and families and raise money to help support your desire to experience the trip.
There are several steps required to build the infrastructure. If you already have some of these in place, you can skip the directions for that step and proceed to the next.

Building the infrastructure:
-Create a PayPal Account
-Create a Facebook Account
-Install the Sponsor-Me Facebook application
-Create a Facebook “Fan” page
-Publish and Promote

Creating a PayPal Account
A PayPal account can be created at http://PayPal.com. There will be an option to “Sign Up” for an account. There will be several options for the type of account to create. As of the publish date of this document, the correct option to receive donations is a “Premier” account. The PayPal site itself will
have the latest information and can guide you through completing the registration process. Also take note of the latest fee schedule for PayPal as they will charge a small fee for you receiving payments/donations.
There is no need to create a new PayPal account if you already have one, but you should upgrade it to “Premier” if it is a “Personal” account. A “Business” account is fine if that is what you already have.

Creating a Facebook Account
A Facebook account can be created at http://www.facebook.com. Part of the registration process includes adding Facebook “friends”. There are tools that will assist you in adding friends who are already in your address book. I highly recommend making use of these tools to quickly build your Facebook social network.
Install the Facebook Sponsor-Me Application
Here is where things get fun! The first step is to install the Sponsor-Me application at http://apps.facebook.com/sponsor-me/. From this page there will be an option that states “Click here to add Sponsor-Me”. This will take you to a page where you will be prompted to “Allow” the application to be installed and have access to your profile. Selecting “Allow” will take you to the application page.
From this page there will be an option to “Create a Campaign”. This is similar to creating a group page for Facebook. There are several fields to fill out, including some optional ones. Most of these fields can be edited after you create the Campaign, with the very notable exceptions of the Campaign Title and the PayPal email.
Once you have customized this page with pictures, descriptions, fundraising goals, etc., the next step is to start inviting friends!! There is a limit of 20 friends per day, so make sure you visit every day and send out invites to build your network of support. Of course, you can also always post a link to your campaign via your status, or by adding the link to your profile.

Create a Facebook “Fan” Page
The next step is to create a Facebook “Fan” Page. This step is not required to raise funds via Facebook, but it greatly increases the chances of expanding your audience beyond your current Facebook “friends”.
Begin by navigating to the Facebook “Ads and Pages” application. The quickest way to find the “Ads and Pages” application is to select the “Ads and Pages” icon from the Facebook website. The icon will be bookmarked on the bottom left hand corner of the Facebook navigation tool.
From the “Ads and Pages” application, select to create “Create Facebook Page”. There will be several options for the type of page. To create a “Fan” page, select “Artist, Band or Public Figure”. You are the artist, and should name the page with your name.
A Fan Page is very similar to a user page. You can publish a variety of information about your project and yourself. I would highly recommend that you set your webpage to your “Sponsor Me” page so that people are directed to the location where they can make donations towards your project.
I would highly recommend using the “Edit Page” function (link just below the page picture) to add custom functionality to your page, including setting up and publishing events and video.
Publish and Promote

Your “Fan Page” will not be viewable until you select to “Publish This Page”. Once published, you should start to aggressively promote the page. This includes suggesting the page to your Friends, adding the “Fan Page” to your personal pages ‘favorites’ and publishing regular updates.
Once your page is setup you can always use the “Ads and Pages” application to track views, fans, etc.
Keep the content steady and compelling, and link back often to your Sponsor-Me page. Publish pictures, ideas and other content to keep people visiting the site. You should take advantage of the “Send an Update to Fans” functionality to keep your fans engaged and active. The Events functionality is a great way to inform your fans of fund-raising or other social events related to your project.

Host your own Website and use WordPress
WordPress is a powerful and free tool for managing your blogging website. There is a wealth of free themes and plug-ins that allows you to customize your site and that can be used to help raise funds and automatically provide recognition to your donors.
The directions for setting up your website and WordPress will make use of many external links. The technology and options change quickly and the external websites will have the latest information for installing and using their applications.
It should also be noted that this path is best if you are familiar with web publishing and technologies. Although most of the steps are automated, if there is a problem you will likely have to work with several different sources to troubleshoot (including your host, WordPress and the authors of specific themes and plug-ins). The good news is that the latest version of WordPress provides wonderful tools for customizing your site with a minimal need for using other web management tools including cPanel and an FTP client.

Building the infrastructure:
-Create a PayPal Account
-Find a host and create your website
-Install WordPress on your site-Install the Donate Plus plug-in and activate it on your website
- Using the Donate Plus widget and shortcode
- Play and Publish

Creating a PayPal Account
Creating a new PayPal account is not required if you already have one. Click here to see the directions earlier in this document on creating a PayPal account. IMPORTANT NOTE: Please make sure the email address you associate with PayPal is the same one you use when installing/registering WordPress (during the WordPress install).

Find a Host and create your website
You will need a host for your new website, or use your existing host to install WordPress.
WordPress itself has a list of sites that support the “1-click” installation of WordPress. I would suggest choosing one of these hosts if possible as they all have the required versions of PHP and MySQL.
http://wordpress.org/hosting/
For my testing, I used JustHost.com. The pricing was reasonable, and I was able to quickly build the site.
http://stats.justhost.com
Please follow the directions from whichever host you choose to specify a domain name, and start hosting your site.

Install WordPress on your site
WordPress 2.8 was released on June 11, 2009. There are a number of enhancements in this version, including the ability to install Themes without having to upload to your site via FTP.
The latest version can be found at http://wordpress.org/
If you selected a host that supports “1-Click” install, please login to the web sites admin tool and run the tool. For example, if you are using JustHost.com: Simply navigate to your site name and append /cpanel to the URL (yoursite.com/cpanel) and enter your username and password (provided to you by your host when you signed up). Under “Popular Choices”, select “WordPress”. Then follow the directions to install “WordPress” to your site.
If you chose a host that does not support 1-click install or you wish to custom install WordPress to your site, please visit the WordPress site (http://wordpress.org/download/) and refer to your website documentation for details on installing WordPress in that environment.
NOTE: As WordPress 2.8 is a recent release, the 1-step install process may install an older version of WordPress. Simply navigate to the WordPress admin page and select to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress page (http://yoursite.com/wp-admin) before moving on to the next step. If you do not see the option to upgrade on the WP-Admin main dashboard, simply select “Tools, Upgrade” from the menu options on the left sidebar.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please make sure the email address you use when registering WordPress is the same as the email address associated with PayPal.

Install the Donate Plus plug-in and activate it on your website
Installing WordPress plug-ins has greatly been simplified in the latest versions. Simply navigate to your sites WordPress admin page (http://yoursite.com/wp-admin). Click on the “Plug-Ins” option on the left menu, and choose “Add New”. There are several options for searching and choosing Plug-Ins, but the simplest is to simply search for the term “Donate Plus”. You may get a message stating that the Plug-in has not been tested with the latest version of WordPress, but I have confirmed that it works with 2.8
Once the Donate Plus plug-in is installed you can activate it by navigating to the Plug-ins section of the WP-Admin tool and choosing to “Activate” the plug-in.
If you are running an older version of WordPress that does not support installation of the Plug-in via the WP-Admin tool, you will have to manually install the plug-in via FTP. Please refer to your website host
for details on authenticating to FTP, and review the installation instructions below for information on uploading/installing plug-ins to your WordPress site.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/donate-plus/installation/
http://www.village-idiot.org/archives/2008/06/19/how-to-upload-a-wordpress-plugin/

Using the Donate Plus Widget and shortcode
Once the Donate Plus Plug-in is installed and activated, you can start to add the functionality to your site. The first step is to navigate to the Appearance, Widgets section of the WP-Admin tool. Installing Donate Plus will have added several widgets that you can drag to various sections of your blog page. Experiment by dragging either the “Donate Plus Total” widget, “Donate Plus Wall” widget or “Donate Plus Form” widget to one of the sidebar or footer sections. Once done, you can select to “Visit Site” to see how each widget looks when added to different sections of your site.
Each of these features can also be used directly in your blog posts or pages by using “shortcode”. For example, I created a separate page for people to send donations and simply added

in the blog text to activate the donor form.
There are two other shortcodes available in Donate Plus. The

shortcode allows you to list all those who have contributed via your WordPress blog. Donors decide if and what info they wish to share when making a donation. This is a nice way to show some recognition to your donors.
The $0 USD shortcode keeps a running tally of donations made via your WordPress blog.
Shortcode can be used within individual blogs, or on dedicated pages within your blog.
If you find the Donate Plus plug-in to be of value, please consider making a donation to the developers. http://skullbit.com/donate/

Play and Publish
WordPress has a wealth of customization options available via themes and plug-ins. Many of these tools are available for free and allow you to create some incredibly professional looking sites. http://wordpress.org/showcase/ is a good place to review some WordPress sites and get inspiration for creating your own site.
Experiment and play with themes and plug-ins to find the right mix to showcase your project goals. Look ahead to determine how WordPress can be the avenue for publishing your project when you complete your trip. Visit the http://wordpress.org site and view the docs section for information on getting started, and the forums section to request assistance with specific issues or functionality.

-Michael Armijo

Posted in How-To, Resources, Self Publishing, fundraising, media | 5 Comments

Hey Citizen Journalist, Get Published

By maggie soladay | Published: September 2, 2009

Citizen Journalism Sites
Opportunities to get your stories and projects published online are exploding just as traditional media outlets implode.
CNN and Reuters
Submit your stories to the citizen journalist components at major news outlets like CNN.com/iReport and Reuters/YouWitness, are publishing photos, videos, and stories by ….anyone. CNN’s iReport “is a user-generated site. That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked or screened before they post. Only the stories marked “On CNN” have been vetted by CNN for use in CNN’s global news coverage.” An incredible opportunity to report on the under-reported and unknown stories you care about. Follow CNNiReport on Twitter.

GroundReport
GroundReport is “hyperlocal news and opinion from around the world.”
240px-GroundReport_logo
The Ground Report website says: “GroundReport is an world news platform that combines digital reporting tools and a selective human network to power the best global citizen journalism on the web.” From wikipedia: enables anyone to publish news reports and videos and earn a share of ad revenues. With a mission statement to ‘democratize the media,’ GroundReport’s 4,000 international contributors report from the scene of world events to add local, on-the-ground insight to international news. To establish trust, GroundReport uses a Wikipedia-like model of volunteer editors and community feedback, combined with a 5-star rating system. Contributors retain rights to their work, and can choose from a range of Creative Commons licenses. The New York-based company was founded by Rachel Sterne in 2006, inspired by her work reporting on Darfur for the United Nations. Follow GroundReport on Twitter

NowPublic
NowPublic, just acquired by the Examiner.com, is called “an innovative Web site for citizen-generated media” in a NYTimes article announcing the deal by Brian Stelter from Sept 1, 2009. NowPublic’s site says that “by harnessing the wisdom of crowds and tapping into the news creating potential of the hundreds of millions of Internet users, bloggers and photography enthusiasts, NowPublic is changing the way news is made and distributed.”

Current
Current.com is the place to find and share stories and videos that are interesting to you. It connects to Current TV, a global cable and satellite TV network. “Current is about what’s going on in your world: all the things you and your friends are actually interested in — that you won’t find on any other news site or cable TV channel.”
Current.com Make TV link How-To produce your current tv show or news program.

Causecast.org
Causecast, dubbed “a one stop philanthropy shop” by TechCrunch, is a platform where media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.
People want to do good, want to be inspired, and want to inspire others to join them in giving back. Causecast makes this easy by providing users with means to CONNECT with people, leaders, charities, nonprofit organizations, and brands that inspire them. Follow CauseCast on Twitter.

OhMyNews International -OhMyNews is a Korea based news organization made up entirely of citizen journalists reporting on news and issues around the world.

The Glimpse.com allows you to share your story if you are living or have lived oversees.
The Glimpse.com CORRESPONDENTS PROGRAM
is supported by National Geographic. Once accepted,Glimpse corespondent’s receive a stipend and support to tell their story. Any skilled photographer or writer can qualify if they are going to be in a place; working, studying or traveling for at least 10 weeks, are between the ages of 18-34, and have an original story to tell.

-Maggie Soladay

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