mediaville Montreal

Montréal’s 2nd Citizen Media Rendez-Vous, which was held yesterday, Monday, August 23, at the Palais des congrès de Montréal. (http://citizen-media.ca).

Bringing together bloggers, engaged filmmakers, citizen journalists, media experts, independent media practitioners the event featured a morning invite-only mash up networking session, and two panel discussions during which attendants learned about how citizen media is being practised around the world to better inform and mobilize the public.

The morning panellists examined the themes of access the appropriation of citizen media, two highly important elements of this rapidly growing media force.

A recurrent theme throughout this engaging discussion was that, while for the largely urban dwelling audience, issues of appropriation, comprehension utilisation and delivery of citizen media is paramount, it is easy to overlook the huge digital literary development divide that, for reasons of geography, demography or financial capacity, leaves many who would gain most from new media streams, with the least access to them.

Speakers on the panel:

-          Norman Cohn co-founder of IsumaTV, an interactive network of Inuit and Indigenous multimedia using new networking technology that specializes in low-bandwidth accessibility.

-          Tim McSorley of the Media Co-operative, a network of member-supported, news organizations across Canada, is rapidly increasing membership.

-          Georgia Popplewell, Managing Director Global Voices is coming in from Trinidad & Tobago to share her advocacy expertise with citizen media training, Open-source tools and freedom of expression.

-          Craig Silverman co-founder of Toronto-based crowd-sourcing news funding project, OpenFile and Managing Editor at MediaShift.

-          Jean-Noé Landry co-founder of Montréal Ouvert, a new open-data standards project to make Montréal civic data accessible to all Montrealers.

The afternoon panel focused on the growing citizen use of new media for the defence of human rights, and illuminated a great many points about the deployment and implications of social and web 2.0 media.

Speakers examples of the uses of new technologies in several highly effective ways, as well as addressing safety and privacy concerns that arise from the deployment of these new assets. Of particular note and drawing much attention was the phenomenon of the tools of surveillance being placed in the hands of the masses. Where once a video-camera was a price-prohibitive tool for the individual media producing citizen, today almost every mobile phone has one built in and 24 hours worth of independently produced footage is uploaded to Youtube every minute.

But while the tools to record and deliver are in the hands of the many, control over production and consumption – by who, to deliver what message and for what end? – become ever more pressing issues in the struggle to ensure privacy and often the safety of those in the frame.

Speakers on the panel:

-          Jaroslav Valuch, Haiti Project Manager at Ushahidi, an open-source web application built for information collection, visualization and interactive crisis mapping in post-election Kenya that is now used around the world.

-          Priscila Néri, Program Coordinator, Witness in New York, shared knowledge of Witness’ video advocacy training and distribution hub to the discussion.

-          Shubhranshu Choudhary, (via Skype) is a Knight International Journalism Fellow from India who is creating a news outlet for tribal communities to share reports about tribal issues with local and national media: CGNet Swara.

-          Martin Lessard, Montréal-based blogger, published author, radio reporter, WebCamp host and social media guru.

-          Amanda Garcés shared her media project Mobile Voices, a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones.

Discussions between the panellists and the audience were moderated by Patricia Bergeron, independent producer and blogger, and Frederic Dubois, a reporter and independent media activist and web coordinator on the National Film Board’s GDP project.

Over the next few days, I will be posting further here on Mediaville, detailing further the ideas mentioned above and more discussed at the event.

I’ll also look into interesting information about citizen media happenings and developments as they apply to you, the Montreal freelancer.

For more details about the event and wrap ups, visit: http://citizen-media.ca.