Name: David Sasaki

Location: Oakland, California, USA

Languages Spoken: English, Spanish

Skype: elosopecoso

Gtalk: osopecoso

Personal Blog: http://el-oso.net/blog

Other Website: http://globalvoicesonline.org

Rising Voices Project Description: I'm the Director of Outreach for Global Voices so I don't have one single project I'm working on, but I look forward to helping coordinate and support the projects of others.

Name: Serina

Location: Borås, Sweden & Nairobi, Kenya

Languages Spoken: Swahili, English, Swedish

Skype: serina360

Personal Blog: Upande Mwingine

Rising Voices Project Description: I'm most involved with bringing the hardships and trials of mentally and physically challenged children in Rural Kenya to light. My project is still in it's baby phase as we are still trying to get these children to be recognized as part of the society by enrolling them in school.

Name: John Powers

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA

Languages Spoken: English

Skype:

Gtalk: powerful1rus

Personal Blog: Bazungu Bucks and Hats For Health

Other Website:

Rising Voices Project Description: EPower Iganga to extend new communications technologies into villages and schools in the Iganga Distric of Uganda

Name: Pepa García

Location: Viña (Chile)

Languages Spoken: Spanish

Skype:

Blog: pepa.tv

Other Website:

Rising Voices Project Description: Videoblogging (Workshops/Microcine) on Playa Ancha, a Chilean poor neighboorhod.

Name: Jay Dedman

Location: SF, California, USA

Languages Spoken: English, Geek

Skype: jay.dedman

Gtalk: jay.dedman

Personal Blog: [http://momentshowing.net|http://momentshowing.net]

Official Videoblog: [http://ryanishungry.com|http://ryanishungry.com]

Rising Voices Project Description: I am a videoblogger with the dream of helping people around the world post short moments about their life. I work with my girlfriend, Ryanne. We helped start Swajana.com, a weekly videoblog out of Pune, India. We also establish node101, a community organization to spread teaching materials for videoblogging and raise money for ambitious projects. Also, Ryanne helped create Freevlog.org , a free video tutorial. Ping me if you ever need help.

Name: Iria Puyosa

Location: Caracas, Venezuela

Languages Spoken: Spanish, English

Personal Blog: [http://www.nosumacero.org/|http://www.nosumacero.org/]

Rising Voices Project Description: FormaComunaAprende is a learning management system to deliver a modular course on tools and applications for administering a micro-local website. The program will provide training on the usage of web resources to people involved on planning and managing local social development projects run by community-based organizations. Participants will acquire and improve skills on using the Web for strengthening community ties, promoting ideas for new social development projects, communicating to constituencies, and keeping information flow with donors and government agencies.

Name: Ljubisa Bojic

Location: Kragujevac, Serbia

Languages Spoken: Serbian, English

Personal Blog: http://ljubisabojic.blogspot.com

Rising Voices Project Description: People from Kosovo will be stimulated to share experiences from the past, about the civil war, in order to contribute reconciliation, healing, and to improve relations between Serbs and Albanians. The main task is to show similarities, and bonds, to create a vision of joint future. Thus, their blogs will contain personal stories, confessions, opinions about political situation, etc. Serbs will introduce their history to Albanians, and vice versa. The other part of the project includes workers who lost their job. They can share facts about corrupt privatization in Serbia, describe the way state treats them and talk about their human rights issues. Masess of people in their fifties are on the street, after long careers in local companies. Think about how they feel, as they have no possibility to get employment again, because only young work force is needed. On the other hand, they don't have enought years of work for pension. Find out more by reading my blog post or taking a look at whole proposal.

Name: Daudi Were

Location: Nairobi, Kenya

Languages Spoken: Kiswahili, English

Skype: d.were

Gtalk: daudi.were

Yahoo Messenger: mental_acrobatics

Personal Blog: Mentalacrobatics

Other Website: KenyaUnlimited

Rising Voices Project Description: Our project targets youth groups within Kenya. According to the Kenya National AIDS Strategic Plan some parts of the AIDS prevention message are getting through, others are not. For example while most young people in Kenya have heard of AIDS only 53% of young women and 60% of young men aged 15-24 know that condoms reduce the risk of contracting HIV. Our project aims to set up a separate blog for 5 youth groups across Nairobi. Through these blogs we will encourage the youth to engage in this critical conversation through a medium they are comfortable with and find exciting, the internet.

Name: Aparna Ray

Location: Kolkata, India

Languages Spoken: Bengali, English

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Personal Blog: http://newsinlimerick.blogspot.com/

Other Website:

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Bishan Samaddar

Location: Kolkata, India

Languages Spoken: Bengali, English

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Personal Blog: http://monochromemoments.blogspot.com/

Other Website:

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Eduardo Ávila

Location: Cochibamba, Bolivia

Languages Spoken: Spanish, English

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Personal Blog: http://barrioflores.net/blog

Other Website:

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Juliana Rincón

Location: Medellín, Colombia

Languages Spoken: Spanish, English

Skype: jules.rincon

Gtalk: jules.rincon

Yahoo Messenger:

Personal Blog: http://medeamaterial.blogspot.com/

Other Website: http://blogs.medallo.info/ and http://blogotematico.info/ podcast

Rising Voices Project Description:

Medellín is a city which for the past years has been inmersed in a power struggle between police and military forces and the guerrilla, where the victims were the civilians who lived in the city, particularly in certain areas on the mountainous slopes surrounding the urban area. It is to these areas, popularly called Comunas, where we have begun to work: areas where poverty, violence and abuse have been the daily bread for several during many, many years. Medellín is evolving: arts, culture and education have become a main focus of the government, and with the creation of Library Parks in the middle of these previously conflicted communities we had our work set out for us. What we are attempting to do is empower the communities surrounding these brand new libraries and give them a sense of ownership for them and their communities by writing, recording, photographing and taping their lives, their barrio and their stories.

Name: Kathryn Ward

Location: Illinois, USA

Languages Spoken: English, some Bangla & Spanish

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Personal Blog: http://pagolnari.blogspot.com

Other Website: http://www.siu.edu/~narijibon

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Mario Duran

Location: El Alto, Bolivia

Languages Spoken: Spanish

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Personal Blog: http://www.analiza.tk/

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Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Rafiq Islam

Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh

Languages Spoken: Bengali, English

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Other Website: http://www.narijibon.com/

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Vickie Remoe-Doherty

Location: Freetown, Sierra Leone

Languages Spoken: English, Krio

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Personal Blog: http://www.switsalone.blogspot.com/

Other Website: http://www.sierravisions.org/portal/index.php

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Alvaro Ramirez

Location: Norway

Languages Spoken: Spanish, English, Norwegian

Skype:otexto

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Personal Blog: http://otexto.net/

Other Website:http://equinoxio.org

http://carnivalesque.blogspot.com

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Animesh Bain

Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh

Languages Spoken: Bengali, English

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Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Hugo Miranda

Location: Bolivia

Languages Spoken: Spanish, English

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Personal Blog: http://angelcaido666x.blogspot.com/

Other Website:

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Jorge Montoya

Location: Medellin, Colombia

Languages Spoken: Spanish, English

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Personal Blog: http://fabricadecosas.com/blog

Other Website:

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Sahar Romani

Location: Kolkata, India

Languages Spoken: Urdu, Bengali, English

Skype: sahar.romani

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Personal Blog: http://marginswrite.wordpress.com/

Other Website: www.kalammarginswrite.org

Rising Voices Project Description: Neighbourhood Diaries is a grassroots journalism program mobilizing youth residents of Calcutta's urban slums to research, document, and write about their neighbourhoods as critical citizens. As insiders, the youth authors have an acute perception to neighborhood nuances, subtleties, and sensitivities offering a radical perspective to mainstream news and journalism on urban slums. ND will promote stories from slums as ‘neighborhood stories’ through the gaze, consciousness, and articulations of the local youth residents. Their authorship will add authenticity to popular conversations and journalism on ‘the poor’ and ‘the disadvantaged’ by empowering sources/subjects to be creators/distributors of local knowledge themselves. The contents above will be documented through various mediums including, writing, photography, audio/videography, and other visual art. 

Name: Taslima Akter

Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh

Languages Spoken: Bengali, English

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Personal Blog: http://narijibon.blogspot.com/

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Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Sanjana Hattotuwa

Location: Colombo, Sri Lanka

Languages Spoken: English, Sinhala

Personal Blog: http://sanjanah.wordpress.com

Other Website: http://ict4peace.wordpress.com | http://www.ict4peace.org | http://www.info-share.org

Rising Voices Project Description: Fostering people’s participation through ICT frameworks to support peacebuilding and conflict resolution is one central to the mandate of the Media Unit at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in particular and complements my work on ICT4Peace (http://ict4peace.wordpress.com/what-is-ict4peace). Regrettably, I live, as do many others in Sri Lanka, enmeshed in violent conflict. This project aims to create, through the innovative use of ICT, citizen journalism and grassroots dialogues amplifying vital dialogues necessary to foment peace, reconciliation and democratic governance in Sri Lanka.

Visit Groundviews, Voices of Reconciliation Radio or Vikalpa for more information.

Name: Preetam Rai    

Location: South East Asia

Languages Spoken: English, Hindi, Some Mandarin, Bahasa, Vietnamese.

Skype:preetamrai    

Gtalk:preetamrai    

Yahoo Messenger:preetamrai  

Personal Blog:http://www.preetamrai.com

Other Website: http://www.globalvoicesonline.org

Rising Voices Project Description: I don't have a project but I am often traveling in South East Asia/China region. I will be happy to help out in terms of training or evaluating technology platfroms for your project.  

Name: Md. Arafatul Islam

Location: South Asia 

Languages Spoken: Bengali, English, Hindi

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Gtalk: arafatul

Yahoo Messenger: writearafat

Personal Blog:

Other Website: http://voiceofsouth.org/

Rising Voices Project Description:

Name: Luis Ramirez

Location: Santiago, Chile

Languages Spoken: Spanish and English (sometimes...)

Skype:

Gtalk: luisramirezuchile

Yahoo Messenger:

Personal Blog:http://luisramirez.cl/blog/

Other Website:http://ucpn.cl/

Rising Voices Project Description: 

Our citizen-led campaign called "one computer per child" in Chile (ucpn.cl) is an attempt to raise national awareness regarding underprivileged kids’ access to new technology. Our goal is that our country can achieve free and permanent access to computers for at least 1 million Chilean children living in poverty before our bicentennial (2010).

To achieve that goal we are leading a consensus-building process targeting politicians, opinion leaders, the media, and other relevant national leaders.  

For instance, our strategy includes approaching future presidential candidates for the elections to be hold in 2009. Here the aim is straightforward: we want the idea of 'one computer per child' included in the candidates programs. 

With Rising Voices’ support we can give a huge step forward reaching directly the students of the poorest schools in the nation.  This would be their opportunity to express, using their own words, why they consider important to have more access to ICT. So we can call this project as 'Rising Children Voices'.

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Name:Gabriel Jaime Vanegas

Location: Medellin

Languages Spoken: Spanish

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Personal Blog:http://esasvocesquenos llegan.wordpress.com/blog/

Other Website:

Rising Voices Project Description:

Hiperbarrio Project in Medelín, Colombia

Gabriel Jaime is the Library Coordinator and on site Director of VideoBarrio and ConVerGentes, two community groups from La Loma San Javier who are part of the Hiperbarrio project from Medellin.

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