A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure, and honour, of joining a wonderful panel, including Carel Pedre, Haiti DJ and activist, and Rory Williams of Carbonsmart.com, at the 5th Digital Citizens Indaba in Grahamstown, South Africa. The brief was to talk about digital communication in the context of natural disasters and climate change. I’ve spent the last three years working on humanitarian policy, so it was a real treat to bring past and current preoccupations together and let them go for a little walk, arm in arm. As ever though, time ran short, so I thought I’d repost the gist of the presentation here.

Thinking through what  to say, I went back to the basics of understanding what happens in a disaster, and what local, national and international organisations, communities and individuals can do to mitigate their effects and help people recover when they happen. I came across this excellent visualisation of the phases of disaster management and response by the University of Wisconsin’s Disaster Management Center, via Özge Yalçiner’s thesis.

What’s striking about this graphic is how little of it is taken up by what we might think of as classic disaster management – maybe a third of it – if you imagine it as a clock face, from about 8 ‘o’ clock to midnight.

Even then, the bit that generates most of the donations and media coverage lasts even less – by the time we get up to ten or eleven ‘o’ clock, when the slow, laborious process of recovery begins, the world’s attention has usually moved on, barring major anniversaries and scandals. I think we’re seeing this with Haiti right now. But fully half of the wheel is taken up with understanding and preparing for disasters before they happen. Another big slice represents the critical prediction and early warning analysis in which governments and local knowledge play an essential part.

Much of this work, all the way around the wheel, requires community participation – and quite right too. Requirements analysis and needs assessment need local knowledge and community input; reconstruction must be community-led and owned to be successful.

Then follow the wheel round to between midnight and 1 ‘o’ clock – there’s a segment devoted to gathering disaster histories and experiences, both to learn and to help plan and prepare for future emergencies. Again, this is a key point of community action. Between 2 and 3 ‘o’ clock, vulnerability analyses bring in community maps, workshops, focus group discussions, and other techniques to make sure that interventions and community support mechanisms reach the right people and places at the right moments.

And last-mile disaster preparedness and early warning systems and mechanisms just won’t work unless they are truly owned by the communities who have to enact them.

This will come as a surprise to none of you, given the focus of this blog, but: I think there’s a significant opportunity here to use SMS to help communities to engage with these processes and get their views heard.

Complaints and response systems, data-gathering, early warning and evacuation alerts all have and should be delivered using SMS, given its ubiquity in areas that are otherwise hard to reach. Two-way communication using an SMS hub running FrontlineSMS would enable you to send alerts, information about distributions, advice and even messages of support and solidarity; and more importantly, receive information about what’s happening on the ground, invaluable local knowledge, and feedback on the success of programmes, and allow people to express what they are feeling.

The Haiti experience has shown that this is possible in an emergency setting, and the important work of evaluating the success of those programmes is ongoing – the next step being to build on this learning to improve our understanding of best practice for SMS in emergencies.

And as I write, agencies now experienced in using SMS in the fraught days after a disaster are thinking about how to maintain those links, and forge new ones, as they move into the ‘recovery phase’. But many organisations are beginning to use SMS in the longer-term, more gradual process of helping people to mitigate and prepare for the risks they’re exposed to – we know many are using FrontlineSMS.

We didn’t get time to talk much about this on the day, but maybe we can carry on the conversation now. What do you think?

I really enjoyed the event and the thought-provoking discussions about digital activism. I’m very grateful to the DCI team for asking us to be part of the day, and to the lovely participants, who very obligingly joined in with a bit of what I like to call FrontlineSMS Pilates.

If your phone has a video camera, you are ready to become a video journalist. It’s really not that difficult. The most important first step, is to decide what to shoot. You need to consider the media audience. On our continent bandwidth is scarce, so think about what readers will really want to see.  Video is about visuals, so provide them with visual evidence such as videos of accidents, official wrongdoing or celebrity spotting. Make full use of the moving pictures and audio by for example confronting a person who parks illegally in a disabled parking bay on camera.

Get ready
Mobile phone video is bad quality video, but what is wonderful about it is that it is always there with you, ready to shoot. So make sure that you are indeed ready to shoot. Keep your battery charged and regularly erase old video clips to make sure there’s enough space. Protect your phones lens from your keys and coins by keeping it in a protective cover – a child’s sock works well. Set your image quality on highest for decent pictures.

Shooting video
When you shoot, make sure that the long side of the image is at the bottom – landscape layout. If not, all your pictures will stand on their heads when you upload them to the internet. Try and keep the phone as still as possible while filming. An always roaming picture is difficult to figure out, and may make your audience seasick. If you need to follow an important action, you should try to move your phone decisively.  Avoid bright lights or backgrounds in your picture or the rest of the image will go in silhouette. Always get as close to the action as possible, and fill the frame with what’s important.

Audio
Phone audio is not very good, so don’t ever go for long interviews – it puts too much strain on the viewer. However, background audio and short snappy bites can blow life into your video, so take audio seriously.  Never talk while recording , get into the habit of happy nodding and gesturing. Before recording an interview bite make the space as quiet as possible ; this may involve pleading with others to stop mowing the lawn or idling the car outside. Computers, air conditioning, fans are all noisy when on.

Upload your video to the Internet
If you have a mobile phone that can connect to the internet, you can directly upload your video to sites like South Africa’s  Zoopy mobile or go to  YouTube mobile and get a unique code so you can email  or MMS your videos onto the site.

Other African video sharing sites who may in future develop mobile uploading  include zedclips.com , jujunation.com , naijoo.tv , diretube.com and myvideo.co.za. Before you can upload  to any video sharing site you will need to set up a login ID and password. You can also copy your video file over onto your computer, by using a cable or a Bluetooth connection. If your phone has Bluetooth and your computer does not, you can buy a cheap Bluetooth dongle for about R60 ($9). Once you have copied over the file,  upload  to the video sharing site by first signing in, then choosing Upload,  then adding the file, and finally, but most importantly adding a description and tags, so people can search for your video.

Share your video with the world
Once your video has been uploaded, you can distribute it to others. Click on the title of your video and you should navigate to a unique URL. Now you can Facebook or Tweet that URL and others will find your video. If you have a blog, you can embed your video in your blog by clicking on a button that says EMBED CODE underneath your video. Copy this very daunting looking code and simply paste it in the HTML editor for creating a new blog post. Presto! Your video is published on your blog!

Convert your video for editing
To edit your video with a free editing package, you will first have to convert it to a standard format such as AVI . Use a free converter package such as Mpeg Streamclip.

Open your  3GP or MP4 video file and choose Convert to AVI. Then choose the type of AVI that is standard for basic video editing:  Apple JPEG no sound compression and presto – your new AVI is there.

Video Editing
Video editing allows you to do a lot more sophisticated storytelling by putting different  video clips and a narration track together. Try and keep your edited stories to about 1 minute. If you have a windows computer, use the built in video software Windows Movie Maker. The new  Windows 7 video editor is called Windows Live Movie Maker and is very similar. You can also download a really good free video software called Video Spin.

You need to pay if you want to keep Videospin’s converters, but you don’t need them if you already have a free converter. What’s really nice about Videospin is that you can add two audio channels, and that you have a lot more control over the audio editing as you can add keyframes and pull levels up and down within a clip.

Free video editors also like standard audio, so use your converter to change any audio clips into WAV files. Windows Movie Maker allows you to import MP3, but always seems to hangs when it does, so avoid this!  To record voice-over, download the free audio software Audacity and simply click on record to start and stop recording your voice. Now export it as a WAV. It’s probably best to write your narration after you know what video clips you have available.

Open your video editor and import your AVI videoclips and WAV audio tracks. Decide where the story will start and pull that down to the timeline. Use your cursor to make clips longer or shorter. Lay down your audio narration and adjust your clips so that they fit together. Add titles, and adjust the audio volume levels so you get a proper mix. Now you are ready to export your video. Choose a filetype so that your final file size will be less than 20MB, to allow for easy uploading to the web.

So these are the basic tools for starting out as a video editor. Once you start doing stories, and start getting good, you could also explore a range of specific news sites to distribute your video stories, such as Demotix.com who sell your video to news corporations on your behalf. Whatever you do, remember the mantra – If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.

Citizen journalists have become central to exposing the ‘development of underdevelopment’ in many African countries, often giving a voice to communities that would otherwise not be heard and exposing deals that may be against their interests.

We focus on three themes touching on questions of Africa’s underdevelopment - 1) the exploitation of Africa’s rich natural resources, 2) responses to natural disasters and the potential impact of climate change, and 3) debates about the development benefits of mega events such as the 2010 World Cup – to understand the role of digital citizens in disseminating the voice of Africa’s citizens.

The DCI showcases successful projects as ‘best practice’, with the intention of ensuring that DCI participants can integrate these practices into their work. The DCI will also include case studies where online and mobile media have been used to disseminate crucial information about natural resources and disasters. The importance of citizen-based media in addressing climate change and mega events will also be explored.

The DCI aims to build bridges between mainstream media, digital civil society, citizens and successful initiatives. Join the discussion on www.dcindaba.com and follow us on Twitter via @DCIndaba with #DCI2010.

A warm welcome to all sponsors, speakers, delegates and digital citizens – enjoy the DCI experience.

From the DCI team,

Jane, Elvira and Hailey