An Attentive Audience at the Meet-up
Introduction:
“I want to play a pivotal role in updating and sharing community generated information with the community and the world at large through citizen journalism. I say so because I witnessed an incident a few months ago during the oil shortage problem, where a CNN journalist came to Kibera slums and paid a woman stage manage some kind or a demonstration saying the price of Paraffin had gone up as he recorded her. I would like to know more about www.voiceofkibera.org so that I can challenge the perceptions and misrepresentations that Kibera goes through.†This was what Ann one of the participants had to say during the introductions session at the meet-up.
Before then, Map Kibera Trusts’ Voice of Kibera had organized a presentation in Soweto East village to engage the youth group leaders more on how they can get engaged with the platform. Having invited 30 representatives, 22 were able to turn up for the event that started at about 2:15pm on Saturday the 1st of December.Â
Preparations for the day:
Adequate arrangements by the V.O.K team were made to ensure that the days program would run smoothly hence achieving its purpose. Below was the program flow.
- Introduction of the entire Map Kibera Trust and Voice of Kibera.
- The relationship between Map Kibera Trust programs.
- The Voice of Kibera platform and how it works, what the participants think can be improved.
- Question and Answer time to enable a brain storming session for better understanding.
- Distribution of Maps on 3 themes; Education, Health and security to the line organizations that attended.
- Refreshment and Networking
- Conclusion
The voice of Kibera Presentation:
This was a step by step presentation done with Fredrick, one of the Map Kibera trust members. I could feel the mood in the hall, one with silence meaning the participants were keenly taking in what was being said. Some of the details that were shared are; How to submit a report, The ways with which you can send the report to the website, the details and importance of categories, editing, proof reading and approving or reports among others.
Fredrick Doing the Presentation in Soweto East
After the session Sande took over to reinforce what had been discussed even as he led the question and answer time.
Some of the questions:
- How do you ensure authenticity of the reports you collect?
- Now that we have new boundaries, what is your organization doing to that effect?
- Do you have anywhere you advertise jobs for the youths in the slums?
 Our Response to the Questions:
That when you have a report and you are not sure about its’ contends, you can get call back the person who send it to get more clarification, if the news has been covered by a 2nd or 3rd parties you can use that as well as using your available networks to get confirmation or more information on the same. Map Kibera is currently remapping the new boundaries by IEBC including information on the location of polling stations so that this information can be available to the locals before the elections in March 2013. We are developing a plartform under the name organizational directory that will see advertisement of opportunities a reality in the sense that those who consume contend do it for free apart from profiling organizations in Kibera on the Platform.
The meet-up that took close to 3 hours came to an end with the p