Source Fabric in Prague, which provides free, open-source content management systems for news organizations around the world, invited me to speak at their conference in the Czech Republic in October 2011.
They made a video of my presentation (below), which was about digital news entrepreneurs in South Africa, Malaysia, Guatemala, Costa Rica and other countries. (The first 30 seconds are pretty cool. I just saw the video for the first time last week after doing a search in YouTube.)
The conference, called Mediafabric 2011, had over 250 guests from five continents to explore the intersection of journalism and open technology.
Among the speakers was Peter Kahler, station director at West Africa Democracy Radio, who told of the 500% increase in site visits since they switched to open source newsroom tools like Newscoop and Airtime.
Other speakers were Sarah Hartley of the Guardian, Mariano Blejman of Página/12, Luis Manuel Botello of ICFJ, and David Brewer of Media Helping Media.
Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times, told the group, “Online media and citizen journalism are wake-up calls for the traditional press to re-invent itself, for journalists to relearn what their profession is all about. We need a paradigm shift in the way we do journalism.”
At the time, I did a blog post in Spanish on the event.
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