On Running Rising Voices

My friend David Sasaki, writes cogently about the challenge of running Rising Voices, a project that supports online media activists throughout the developing world. Money quote:

The most difficult challenge I’ve encountered so far with Rising Voices hasn’t been training new communities with little online experience how to effectively use new media tools like blogs, podcasts and video- and photo-sharing sites. Nope … that has turned out to be surprisingly easy...The most difficult challenge has been getting people to pay attention to the great content they’ve been producing.

One basic trait I've witnessed over and over again in global advocacy work is the profound difficulty in communicating 'empathy' for people you have never met in a place you have never seen. Perhaps the network public sphere, with its low cost of communication and multidirectional conversations nodes, can help change that. Perhaps it can not. At the very least, it can help connect people who are far away from the places they already care about.