We can’t keep up. It seems like every time we open our inbox, another digital media training is taking place in the Arab world, in Jordan or Egypt (update May 19: we learned about another training in Egypt from ifikra)—or, of course, at the end of this month in Lebanon, as we initiate our own training-of-trainers program.
At the moment one of our cofounders, Mohamad, is in Amman participating in an online creativity workshop given by Joichi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons, the nonprofit corporation whose copyright licenses aim to make it easier for the new wave of content producers “to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.”
The new Arabic–English site Meedan.net is liveblogging it, and you can see pictures of all the participants, including Moh, in a Picasa web album. They’re working on rapid prototypes of web projects, including one that deals with women’s empowerment in Jordan, a comic strip with a cat, and a marketing and publicity plan for the workshop itself. Follow the progress over the course of the next three days on the workshop blog. We certainly will.
SMEX also took a step today toward launching our summer workshops, which will take place online and offline. We began to connect the more than 50 participants from all over Lebanon who will meet on May 30 in Beirut with a private Google Group, an easy and flexible way to set up an email list.
Participants began to introduce themselves and upload pictures in preparation for the course, which will take place in two five-week sessions. The first session will cover the basics of social media for social good, and the second will encourage participants to apply what they’ve learned while diversifying their talents. This diversity will be invaluable to what we hope, in the spirit of Tactical Technology Collective’s recent InfoActivism Camp in India, will become a network of trainers, who look to each other for guidance long after the training is done.
Image: Photo collage of Amman workshop participants created with Picasa 3. The album was public, so we assumed it was okay to remix the photos. We’re looking forward to publishing ours!