News from the ground up
GroundSource receives grant to pilot in South Africa.
GroundSource has been awarded a $15,000 grant from UK-based foundation Indigo Trust to pilot its community messaging platform in South Africa. The grant will support a pilot with GroundUp News, which publishes news about life in South African townships.
Journalism too often treats communities as places to go only when disaster or unrest strikes. It’s easier to seek perspectives from powerful and connected people than it is to ask average citizens what’s really happening, on the ground.
We think it’s time for that to change.
We believe that the ever-increasing ubiquity of mobile technology is creating a space for new, more “grounded,” more engaged, citizen-centric forms of journalism to emerge.
And we’re not alone.
The UK-based foundation Indigo Trust has awarded GroundSource and our partner in South Africa, veteran journalist Raymond Joseph, $15,000 to pilot GroundSource with GroundUp — an independent news agency focused on South African townships and other underreported areas.
This pilot will establish a new outpost in our efforts to establish and spread the GroundSource platform — and along with it, new models for community-centered journalism and research.
The pilot will later be expanded to include a South African civil society organisation (CSO), as GroundSource can help non-profits reach out to tech-poor and isolated communities.
GroundSource has established a short code in South Africa (44984) which will serve as an open channel into the GroundUp newsroom, allowing people to text news tips, observations and stories. It will also allow GroundUp journalists to engage directly with ordinary people who are often ignored by the mainstream media.
Joseph and journalist Kim Harrisberg will work with GroundUp to develop a community of “sources” using GroundSource. As they build the base, they will target questions or messages to sources using the platform, establishing an ongoing, two-way conversation that we expect to yield new stories, new audiences and new relationships with people throughout the townships.
“As a developmental news agency that focuses much of its coverage of communities, voices and issues that are largely absent from mainstream media,” Joseph says, “GroundUp is an ideal organisation to partner with in this testing of GroundSource in an African news environment.”
GroundUp filled a void in news coverage when it started in 2010. “Township life in South Africa is underreported in the news,” its website reads. “We want to change that.”
We believe, as GroundUp does, that it’s crucial to listen to the communities we serve not just when disaster strikes, but every day. That means being present, giving the community a chance to speak, and making it easy to listen and respond.
In other words, having a conversation.
GroundUp will use new channels to the community to shine a light on problems of government accountability and service delivery that plague South African townships.
The tricky part is making the connection in the first place. For a host of reasons, hard-to-reach voices are often ignored — unless and until bad news like service delivery protests turn violent or disaster strikes.
They often lack the technology (read: smart phones with data plans); but more profoundly, they often believe that because they are poor and isolated, they don’t have value to newsrooms as a “source” or to advertisers as an audience.
GroundSource is an ideal way to overcome these issues and to make these forgotten communities more accessible using inexpensive and available “tech” — SMS — to reach them and help amplify their voices.
The ability to use GroundSource to build communities of trust means that people usually off the media’s radar are now able to easily and cheaply raise the alert when problems or issues arise, so that journalists can be dispatched to investigate further.
In Africa, where millions of people live in isolated areas, this ability to reach and build contacts allows media to open up ongoing communication with sources in communities without it being expensive or requiring excessive resources.
***
About GroundSource: GroundSource is a mobile, community messaging platform design for organizations to cultivate two-way conversations with their community using even the simplest mobile phones.
About GroundUp News: GroundUp is a community journalism project that reports stories about health — especially HIV, TB and sanitation — education, women’s rights and immigrant’s rights from South Africa’s townships.
About Indigo Trust: The Indigo Trust is a UK based grant making foundation that funds technology-driven projects to bring about social change, largely in African countries. The Trust focuses mainly on innovation, transparency and citizen empowerment.
