Digital inclusion of underrepresented and marginalized communities! 

A lot of groups are excluded from society and also from the Internet in some ways. “Rising Voices” is the digital inclusion arm of “Global Voices”, an international and multilingual community of bloggers, journalists,translators, academics and human rights activists. It promotes the digital inclusion of underrepresented and marginalized communities around the world to leverage the Internet by addressing needs taht they identified. "Rising voices" has a key focus in Latin America. #mediadev spoke to "Rising Voice" director, Eddie Ávila:

#mediadev: How do you define marginalized and underrepresented communities?
It’s hard to put that label on someone - maybe misrepresented in the media, underrepresented in certain fields. Maybe you have barriers that in many other society sectors you don’t have – affordability of the Internet, because they do have lower income. One of our focus-areas is indigenous communities in Latin America and how we can support them. We know the history of indigenous populations that have been colonized or removed from their lands. They want to be part of the global conversation online. They see the Internet as an opportunity to tell their own story, not wait for the media to come in and tell the story for them. We are also working with these communities to help them revitalize their language through visual technologies. We have a network of language activists who are leveraging tools in the Internet who are able to showcase their language and culture online. So their language and culture is very much present and not something from the past - it is something from the present and the future. That’s a way to attract young people to show their language and culture reflected on the Internet. 
#mediadev: Do marginalized communities all live in remote areas?
Not necessarily. We do work with communities which have some access to the Internet, but they are not able to adopt the tools and platforms that they could. They just need some assistance to introduce them to different tools, but also they need training, they need connections to other resources – we are able to do that. But for the most part they have some level of Internet activity. But you know – within big cities there are also marginalized communities, maybe socio-economic, indigenous groups, there are a lot of groups which are excluded from society and also from the Internet in some ways. 
#mediadev: How do you identify the communities?
In the past we had an open call for participation where people said: “I wanna be a part of this. This is me, that is what I am doing”. In that way we really brought together like 20, 25 people who are working in technology for the language. We do a lot of promotion and outreach and people just kind of step forward and say: “I wanna do this and I want to learn how to do this?” Rising voices has different focus areas. One of them is language activism and one is the media information literacy program and then other programs dealing with the overall topic of digital inclusion.

#mediadev: What can the communities do if they and their issues are not represented?
Oh that’s the next step. An analysis about what is missing. It is like a starting point for a conversation. Many of the participants are members of collectives or groups and maybe that can help them change their strategy or adjust their communication strategy and position their community or issues in the media. 
We work with software called media cloud. It’s like a database from different media outlets of these countries. So communities can go in, type in the issue they care about and see how it has been represented in a collection of media over a certain period. What happens is that the platform produces a word cloud where they can see what words are more in use when talking about these issues, and communities can see how issues they care about are represented or may not be represented. 
In April and May we ran a series of workshops in five countries: In Mexico, Ecuador, Columbia, Bolivia and Chile. For example, in Bolivia I was able to go to that workshop. We brought together activists that were working with the issue violence against women. So they were able to see when there was a tragic murder of a woman, how it is framed in the media. They saw that many articles that came out with these issues focused on the crime itself, but you never really saw what happened to the person afterwards. You know the person who committed the crime – were they sentenced? Where are they now? It’s all very much focused on the details and the crimes. Seeing that objectively, seeing it online as a word cloud, it may force them to rethink their own perceptions. A woman from a newspaper was there as well – hopefully it got her thinking how her newspaper approached the subject. It unfortunately happens far too often. It does not get the follow-up the crime deserves.

#mediadev: Let´s talk about media and information literacy which is also a focus of Rising Voices. Is there a growing awareness of the need for media literacy, as in other regions of the world?
We probably see similarities. An increased amount of Internet activity in many countries, many people have smartphones, many people are on WhatsApp, they are able to consume much more information, but maybe there is not something that guides them through what they have seen. Having this discussion about what is media literacy, what is responsible consumption and creation of media?
We are identifying that there is a lot of information out there and it is sometimes hard to navigate. People know that the news is toxic and they are trying to misinform or things like that. So I think people are becoming slowly aware that there is a problem in Latin America. But also seeing what is happening in other parts of the world maybe. In Latin America there are different stages of that. 

#mediadev: You are one of the 13 members of MILEN (Media and Information Literacy Expert Network). How do you get people interested in MIL?
This network is a good opportunity to have those conversations and maybe raise the visibility of media and information literacy. It is a topic and term that is in use very much in Latin America. (…) And to be able to provide resources and show examples of media literacy… from what we have seen it can range over a wide variety of approaches and tools. It is good to reach out to people and they have more media and information literacy in their lives. 
A really powerful way to do that is to show examples. The MILEN network itself, they all are doing something related, but it is very different in the populations they work with and also the tools they use. By giving examples people can see what the purpose is. It is a lot about visibility.