1. Full name
| Anders Vang Nielsen |
2. Global Voices sections to which you contribute
| Lingua |
3. Publication date of your latest post or translation
| Date: – 15/1/2012 |
4. Title of project
| Global Voices Aymarata Taking Over Where the Internet Ends |
5. Project representative (person who will sign award agreement and receive funds)
| Anders Vang Nielsen |
6. Describe the proposed project as clearly as possible in five sentences or less
| Considering the poor outreach of Global Voices Aymarata (roughly 300 visits per month) mainly due to the lack of fast and cheap Internet access throughout the potential followers of that project, the proposal is to distribute the content from Global Voices Aymarata as a newspaper as well as digital/analog audio (as some people only have cassette players), considering the low rates of literacy in the region. The distribution of these materials will take place in the urban and rural areas of the cities of La Paz and El Alto as well as in the Altiplano Region, home to the majority of Bolivia’s Aymara-speakers, many of whom are monolingual. The translator team of Global Voices Aymarata will participate in the elaboration and distribution of the materials together with the Project Coordinator. Ultimately, the initiative should be contemplated as a pilot-project for underrepresented indigenous languages, serving as inspiration for other cases alike in other parts of the world, as well as encouraging the collaborators in their effort to reach out to their target groups. |
7. What aspect or need of Global Voices does your project address?
| The outreach of the indigenous languages editions of GV Lingua (i.e. Global Voices Aymarata) is crucial to the success and justification of those, also in terms of encouragement to the contributors involved to continue their engagement. The proposed project addresses precisely these issues (the lack of outreach to a broader audience) as identified by the translator team of Global Voices Aymarata. Given the nature of the project as a joint collaboration between the Aymara and Danish editions of GV Lingua, it also helps to establish new links in-between the GV community, emphasizing the inclusion of the collaborators to GV Aymarata and so their sense of being part of a greater community. |
8. How would the project further Global Voices’ mission?
| The project is directly linked to the main goal of GV of providing the means to join the global conversation to anyone who wants to speak and listen. Being the representation of the content found on GV in different languages, and specifically indigenous underrepresented languages, a key goal of the Lingua section of GV, the project aims to explore new ways of reaching out to the target audiences of such languages. Considering the mostly negative impact that the Aymara peoples in Bolivia have experienced so far from the effects of Globalization, the project also aims to show another – positive – side of Globalization to these peoples by encouraging them to take part in the global conversation, while maintaining their native language and dignity. As such, the idea is to nurture their sense of recognizing that cultural and political struggles similar to their own are taking place in other parts of the world, that is to say their sense of forming part of a global integrative community. Different means of providing feedback to the project (via text messages, Internet and others) will be integrated with the distribution of materials. |
9. What is innovative about your project?
| Being meant to serve as an experiment that over time should inspire other Lingua groups in comparable situations to implement the same mechanisms of distribution and outreach, the project takes a first step in exploring the idea of linking Internet-based media to traditional media in order to amplify the group of readers. In order to reach as many readers as possible, the means of distribution will be many-faceted and creative (delivering newspapers to schools and universities in both rural and urban areas, handing out cassettes and/or CD’s to taxi and bus drivers, exposing the material at news stands in the cities, renting a minibus for a day to reach places off the common roads of media distribution, transmitting the audio versions on a local radio station, etc.). This entire process could be described as a reversed version of the common model of publishing traditional media (newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts etc.) on the Internet, taking into account the needs of Aymara speakers, including their limited access to the Internet. In that sense, the vein of the project is democratic and including, aiming to even out the inequalities in terms of access to the content of GV, which those differing conditions constitute. |
10. Which section of Global Voices would your project most benefit (if applicable)?
| Rising Voices |
11. How would the wider GV community utilize and/or participate in your project?
| Given the fact that the content of the proposed media is provided by GV contributors in general and the GV Aymarata translator team specifically, the link to the GV community as a whole is already established. In addition to that, through the continuous documentation of the project the idea is to inspire other groups in other countries whose situations share the main characteristics and conditions (underrepresented languages; limited internet access; illiteracy; monolingual native speakers) to implement the same means of distribution and outreach in their reality. It is also meant as an example of activism within a single GV community, and should inspire other contributors to GV around the world to take action on a local level, and in creative ways. |
12. List the other GV community members, if any, who will be actively working on the project. Please specify what role each person will play in the development of the project.
| Victoria Tinta, editor GV Aymarata; Assistant coordinator. Elias Quispe Chura, translator GV A.; Recording of audio versions, distribution. Victor Paco, translator GV A.; Recording of audio versions, distribution. Ruben Helari, translator GV A.; Recording of audio versions, distribution. Emma Quispev, translator GV A.; Recording of audio versions, distribution. Martha Valencia, translator GV A.; Distribution. Celia Saucedo, translator GV A.; Distribution. Irma Laura, translator GV A.; Distribution. Edwin Quispe, translator GV A.; Distribution. Martin Canaviri, translator GV A.; Distribution. Everyone at GV Aymarata: – Contributing to the initial design/planning of the newspaper – Selection of adequate material taking into mind the target audience – Writing or translating introductory articles – Helping out in production and promotion of the material. |
13. What additional resources or expertise, if any, would you need to complete the project?
| For the recording of spoken audio versions of the articles, as well as broadcasting of those on air, a local radio station already known by the GV Aymarata team will be engaged. |
14. Describe the prospects for sustainability/continuation once the innovation grant funding ends
| Given the condition as a pilot-project, an analysis of the outcome of the project will be made once the production and distribution of materials have come to an end. The continuous documentation (blogs, field reports, photos, digital version of materials once produced) together with that analysis should serve as an experimental case for the GV community as a whole, thus – hopefully – revealing indicators of how to develop future strategies of distribution and outreach to native speakers of indigenous languages. The particular experiences made in the Bolivian context might result to be as successful as to justify an application for continuous funding (possibly through advertising), thus securing the on-going of this singular project. |
15. Please specify the timeline for the project, from start to finish
| Mid-February to March (2 weeks): Planning and initial design of material. Selection of articles to be included (Everyone). March (3 weeks): Production and printing of material (Project Coordinator). Recording of audio versions and production of CD’s/cassettes (GV Aymarata Translators as specified). End-March (1 week): Coordination of distribution (Everyone). Mid-April to May (3 weeks): Distribution and promotion of material (Everyone). Broadcasting of audio versions on local radio (GV Aymarata team). May (2-3 weeks): Elaboration of concluding documentation and analysis; follow-up on feedback received (Project Coordinator). |
16. Provide a detailed budget of up to US$5,000 for project costs. (Please try and present as accurate a budget as possible: applicants are encouraged to submit budgets for less than the maximum amount as smaller grants allow us to fund more projects)
| Printed material (1200 copies, 32 pages): $800 CD’s, cassettes (150 CD’s, 50 cassettes): $150 Travel expenses (3x Cochabamba-La Paz by bus; local transport): $60 Distribution (rental of minibus; local transport; catering): $300 Internet and telecommunication (for coordination purposes between team members): $50 Honorarium to radio engineer: $50 TOTAL: $1410 |