Hello Clare!
Thank you so much to everyone who helped and supported the Rwanda week, I'm back in London now after an amazing time over there. Live reporting was much harder than I expected so the whole thing would not have been possible if it hadn't been for all the efforts others put into writing Rwanda stories and I know it was hugely appreciated by people there, who are much more used to being ignored by the international community.
Now if only we could establish a permanent presence there .. One thing that might work is using cell phones to record reports, which are at least somewhat widespread in Africa. There's a project underway to make Wikipedia content available to Africans via cell phones (using text-to-speech and free callbacks), perhaps a similar approach could be used for Wikinews, both for recording and reading (listening to) news. Anyone interested in working on this - drop me a mail, and I'll put you in touch with the right people.
I'm planning to write a report on what can be learnt from the experience in terms of access to technology, other problems, the usefulness of Wikinews in getting alternative voices heard and potential future ideas so will do that soon, hope it will be useful. Erik, if you could let me know when you're working on State of the Wiki I can try and get it to you before then?
Will be written and published in early July probably. I'm planning to do a little user survey again, and I'll contact you when I do that.
Also, someone from the Boston Globe called me out there to talk about the conference & Wikinews (hopefully he also spoke to someone with rather more experience...) I think he was comparing WN with Ohmynews (?) so we'll see what he comes up with.
OhMyNews is probably the largest citizen journalism project (unless you count Indymedia as citizen journalism). I'm invited to a conference in Seoul this week to speak about Wikinews at the OhMyNews forum. I'll try to give you all an idea what these people are working on when I get back.
I've been completely convinced of the value of WN over the past week and look forward to continued involvement!
Wonderful. It's great to have you on board.
Best,
Erik