My friend Cristian Cambronero has managed to create one of the most influential blogs in Central America, and most certainly the most important independent blog in Costa Rica. Fusil the Chispas has been live for five years now, and it has consolidated as a true alternative news source. It’s been a fascinating process to witness.
A few months ago, Cristian asked four writers, including me, to create Lechemilk, a guest blogger section on the site. Luis Chaves, María Montero, Carla Pravisani and I have published several literary articles. It has been interesting to see the reactions to different types of text, and how this particular audience responds to the things we’re writing. Most of them are opinion pieces, fictionalized, somewhat based in reality.
My pieces have ranged from the issue of same-sex partnership, to a silly article about the conversations I have about Costa Rica, and the latest was about my tendency to fall in love, frequently and profoundly, with random people. All texts are available in Spanish only.
I was not able to attend the aCCCeso, a seminar on Creativity, Community and Science held on Nov 11-13 in my hometown, San José de Costa Rica, but my friends from Sula Batsu were there and they gave me the scoop. It was quite an innovative proposal in Costa Rica, where we have traditionally had more emphasis in discussing connectivity infrastructure, ICT access projects, and the entrepreneurial side of IT as an opportunity for economic development. The fact that this event included discussions on copyright, learning networks, knowledge sharing and alternative media is definitively a step forward.
Lucky for all of us, my friend Juliana Rincón did an amazing job live-blogging the whole thing. Her notes in Spanish, are in her own blog if you scroll down a bit.
Sulá Batsú has been working on the project “Information and Knowledge Management (IKM)”. The project is reflecting about and improving the knowledge processes, as well as the connection between diverse types of knowledge. It is a global project with 4 different work teams, one of them looking at local knowledge processes, and Sula’s initiative fits into that work area.
Sula’s project is directed towards youth empowerment and intergenerational knowledge sharing supported by ICT tools. The idea is to generate a collectively constructed product based on the experience of key actors and stakeholders, analyzed from the perspective of young members of the community. There is a blog to follow up on the project advance. The group so far has created a variety of methodologies including games, photography, painting, storytelling, interviews and group dynamics, all directed to recover the history of the community and to create capacity to generate and share new knowledge.
There’s more information about the project in Spanish, and there’s a video about some of the project activities (activate the English subtitles by clicking on the CC link of the Youtube video).* There is also a Flickr account for the project, where we have photos taken mostly by the children in the communities.
*A technical detail: I helped with the subtitling of this video. I used Jubler to do the subtitling and then used YouTube feature for including subtitle files. Days later, I learned the folks at Miro are coming up with a cool solution for subtitling in multiple platforms. Remind me of writing a post specifically about that.
Sulá Batsú es una cooperativa de trabajadores de varias disciplinas, dedicados a la investigación social de las Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación, la apropiación social de las TIC y las metodologías y herramientas para el intercambio de conocimiento. Sulá Batsú está ubicada en Costa Rica y trabaja en toda América Latina y el Caribe.
Sulá Batsú is a cooperative owned and directed by workers of different disciplines, dedicated to the social research of Information and Communication Technologies, the social appropriation of ICTs, as well as tools and methodologies for knowledge sharing. Sulá Batsú is located in Costa Rica and works in Latin America and the Caribbean.
