Video Volunteers - India

Everyone agrees that community voices matter. While this is fantastic in theory, what would it look like in practice?

While a few could potentially argue that in today’s digital age everyone is connected, we learnt that that's not fully true. While to some extent urban India does seem to use platforms like twitter to raise their voices, rural communities adoption into such platforms is very low (There are only 23.6 Million Indian Twitter users.

Source. India has over a billion people. So not even 2 percentage of India is on the platform)

Everyone, including the GPSDD is now talking about the importance of community voices in all efforts. What is the opportunity with tech to visualize and scale this?

We would love your help to create a community dashboard of citizen voices (of all kinds) that could be filtered across various categories using community video data of issues and impacts shared below.

Our model over the last 12+ years has been simple. We empower a community member in every district to become a community journalist and social worker and we call them Community Correspondents. They identify a community issue (could be health related, water, gender, etc) and make the first video called the issue video capturing the issue details. Post this, they show this to relevant local officials and work on solving the issue the video is about. As the issue is resolved, they create another video calling it the impact video. This video inspires others to act. Each video is tagged to multiple data relating to the issue and impact. 1 out of every 5 videos today are resolved. And we believe, being able to show our community data in a powerful visualization would help us double our impact rate.

Our target audience

The Community Correspondent, the community and local government officials. We want to create a visualization that a community when looking at feels that their voices are captured effectively on the platform and officials are able to act on insights of the community

Solutions will be hosted on our website, and volunteers will receive a letter of appreciation as a recognition for their contributions.

About Video Volunteers

Video Volunteers empowers marginalized people to tell their stories and create change campaigns, revealing the inequities in the communities that will help them become important threads in India’s development narrative. We believe change begins when the voices of thousands join together to amplify every single cry for justice.

Guiding Questions

We created this very simple visualization. Please help us improve this
How can we use this data and videos to tell a better story and give a better picture of various districts
How can we view this data from a public communications perspective to capture the attention of partners and potential collaborators? How can we present this data in a way that makes it stand out and be impactful?