Prominent media activist Jane Duncan, professor in the Chair of Media and Information Society at Rhodes University, is co-convenor of this year’s Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) taking place on Wednesday 7 July 2010 and is now open for registration. DCI will celebrate its 5th anniversary in 2010 with the theme for this celebratory Indaba being ‘Africa’s Underdevelopment: Digital Citizens Speak Back’.
The annual DCI is a gathering of international citizens and media practitioners who are trying to empower themselves and others through using new media technologies. Bloggers, podcasters, vodcasters, mobile journalists, citizen reporters, new media practitioners, online industry experts and civil society representatives, will all be present at the event.
Amongst the speakers at this year’s event will be Haitian radio DJ, Carel Pedre, who will discuss how media can be utilised during natural disasters; and media and technology expert, Bobby Soriano, who will explore how citizens can turn information into activism.
DCI hopes that by gathering a diverse group people, providing a platform for debates about the state of digital media, and offering skills sharing workshops, both citizens and professionals will be empowered to utilise media to further advocacy initiatives.
The DCI takes place at Rhodes University as a sister event of the annual Highway Africa Conference taking place from the 5 to 6 July of this year. The DCI was established after it was recognised that Highway Africa could do more to encourage new media take-up by non-journalists, thereby ensuring that citizens have a (digital) voice too.
Citizen journalists have become central to exposing the ‘development of underdevelopment’ in many countries, often giving a voice to communities that would otherwise not be heard and exposing deals that may be against their interests.
In Nigeria, for instance, citizen journalist are tracking and analysing the exploitation of the country’s oil reserves, the complicity of local elites in negotiating deals with multinational corporations that may be disadvantageous to many, and local resistance to these deals using digital media.
Citizen media fills a media void on these issues, as mainstream media may be too afraid to expose powerful actors in these industries, or may be unable to owing to censorship. The DCI will profile some of the most important citizen media projects in this regard, and encourage an interaction between these projects and full-time journalists.
The first Digital Citizen Indaba on Blogging took place in Grahamstown in 2006. Prolific speakers like social media entrepreneur Mike Stopforth, co-founder of Global Voices Online Ethan Zuckerman, Kenyan activist blogger Ory Okolloh and many more discussed the African blogosphere over one day of heated debates. Then the Indaba sparked a bit of controversy but there was no way back: DCI was here to stay.
To register for the DCI go to www.dcindaba.com