by Emily Clark
As part of our Asia Network program, EngageMedia is delivering a number of ‘Skills Building Partnerships’ to activist and community groups in Asia-Pacific to assist them in distributing their videos. Last month Andrew and Nova spent three days with the folks from Forum Lenteng in Jakarta; a non-profit organisation working to develop social and cultural studies as a vehicle to examine issues of culture in society in Indonesia.
Day one kicked off with introductions and a discussion around expectations of the 3-day workshop EngageMedia planned to deliver. It was clear that the group from Forum Lenteng was incredibly switched on and had a clear picture of what they wanted to achieve. Forum Lenteng are really creative and have established their own methods for distributing videos. They have also built their own audiences and a huge community around their work.
It was evident from the beginning that one of the key challenges Forum Lenteng experiences with online video distribution is the slow internet speed and lack of access in Indonesia, thus they need a wider strategy to most effectively distribute their work. We discussed ideas around mapping for each video they plan to make the Aim, Audiences, Resources and Limitations. This will help to establish if it can be a shorter video more suitable for online distribution or if it requires a longer video and needed more methods of capturing an audience.
Other topics covered throughout the 3-day workshop included Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), video compression, publishing videos via online sharing websites, RSS and RSS2, hybrid distribution strategies, BitTorrent files, FTP uploading and Creative Commons licensing. Following three tiring days of productive discussions and outcomes, both the EngageMedia facilitators and the Forum Lenteng team were really pleased with the success of the workshop. Throughout the course of the workshop and since it took place Forum Lenteng has uploaded a lot of great videos to the EngageMedia.org website which can be viewed here.
