The ISABEL project (Interactive Social Media for Integration Skills Bartering Empowerment Informal Learning) Final Meeting and Final Conference took place in Budapest, Hungary, between the 17TH and 19TH of September.
This project seeks to employ innovative practices like citizen journalism in order to strengthen groups and communities both at social and territorial level. In doing so, social and intercultural links are strengthened, promoting communication among communities, making possible personal and collective growth and letting people know that their voices will be heard through a “Network of community reporters”.
On 17th and 19th of September, the partners: Consorzio ABN (Italy), Semplicittà S.p.a. (Italy), The Mrs. Consultancy (UK), University of Salamanca (Spain), Documenta (Spain), INTRAS Foundation (Spain), PERSPEKTIVwechel (Germany), People Voice Media (UK) and Artemisszió Foundation (Hungary) did a balance about the work done in the two years of the project, and what is need to do until the end of the project in December.
On 18th took place the Final Conference “Social Link Conference” with the participation of speakers from different countries who give us their vision of community reporting.
Michael Sinclair Stewart from the University College of London introduces us how mass media has evolved during the XX century. Now the social networks and web 2.0 are mass phenomenon where everybody can be a community reporting. He shows us his project MyStreet where the news are located in an interactive map just where it happened.
Zoltán Gayer from the Budapest College of Communication Business and Arts spoke about how the social media and web 2.0 are changing the way to obtain information, economics, marketing and education.
Ángel García Del Dujo from the University of Salamanca introduces us the methodology developed by the ISABEL project: Virtual Learning Buses (VLB) http://virtuallearningbuses.wordpress.com/ a tool to train community reporters.
Corina Bartoletti from Consorzio ABN, coordinator of the project, spoke about the sustainability of the project in the European network of Community Reporters.
The Roma Film School presented us the documentary “Ten years from now” with the participation of youngster gypsies, who film themselves asking where they would like to be in ten years from now. The concept was to focus on helping them to gather confidence and self-esteem, giving them a way to show their daily life and how they feel their future will be.
The afternoon session of the conference we did workshops, where we could participate in the different task that a community reporter has to learn: create blogs, edit videos and photos, learn to do an interview, etc.
The last part of the conference was to shows us videos from community reporters that have been created during this two year project.
