In 2009, Bektour Iskender and I facilitated a workshop in Istanbul, Turkey to teach digital storytelling to Eurasian journalists and affiliates of Internews. Prior to the workshop, I published a short video interview with Bektour, Kyrgyzstan’s most influential blogger, and another video on Istanbul street food.
In 2008 I was invite to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center to cover the four-week event “Making the eHealth Connection,” which brought together researchers, policy makers, and philanthropists to discuss the potential of technology to make healthcare more affordable, effective, and accessible.
In 2008 I joined eight other American bloggers on a tour of South Africa organized by International Marketing Council, a government agency responsible for “promoting South Africa as a destination for investment and travel and as a source of innovation and high quality goods and services.” The trip was organized by Simon Barber and led by Graeme Addison.
In 2008 and 2009 I visited Liberia for a series of media training workshops with Liberian journalists. I published a post in 2008 reviewing the first blogging workshop and in 2009 I made a video of interviews with Liberian photojournalists. The experience opened my eyes to the difficulties of media development in post-conflict countries with few resources for journalists and media organizations.
Since its founding as a recipient of a 2007 Knight News Challenge grant, I directed Rising Voices, a citizen media training initiative of Global Voices, to train over 25 under-represented communities around the world to take advantage of new media tools to effect social change. I authored the Introduction to Global Citizen Media, which has been translated into six languages, and edited Blogging Positively, a guide to citizen media related to HIV/AIDS.
In 2005 I lived in Monterrey, Mexico and contributed to MTYBlogs, a community of “Regio” bloggers that was founded by Seyd and maintained by Candy Belen, Rolando Garza, Alan Flores, and Moises Kirsch. Though MTYBlogs no longer exists, to this day Alán Flores maintains MTYBlog.
