Medellín, Colombia: The Recipe · Global Voices
David Sasaki

In the last podcast introducing the HiperBarrio project in Medellín, Colombia, Jorge Montoya [ES] described the workshop he gave to young people in the working class neighborhood of La Loma San Javier as part of Medellín's 16th annual Seminario de Comunicación Juvenil [ES], or “Youth Communication Seminar.” The goal of the week-long seminar, according to its website, is to “continue reflection of diversity and its manifestation as a form of inclusion of the persons that make up the city.” Jorge led the workshop on new media and at the end of the week each young participant had his or her own weblog. They also collaborated on a group weblog [ES]. And, most impressive, they produced the incredibly creative video clip above about their experience in the workshop.
The clip of the young participants – produced using Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker – shows them explaining the ‘recipe’ of how to improve city-wide communication using participatory tools like blogs. At the end of the clip we are shown screenshots of the participants’ weblogs (linked to at the right-hand side of the workshop website).
I asked Jorge to describe the process of making the video clip.
Cuando estuvo planeado el asunto, ellos se dieron a la tarea de hacer una ambientación mínimamente de acuerdo con un programa de cocina, grabamos en cuestión de una hora y luego nos dimos a la tarea de editar entre todos con Movie maker, agregándole algunas de las fotos y cerrando con la invitación a que leyeran cada uno de los blogs nuevos.
Todos disfrutamos mucho la experiencia, nos reímos bastante y creo que lo fundamental fue la reflexión sobre la importancia de informar e informarnos, lo que era nuestro objetivo antes que pretender mostrar detalles técnicos sobre la apertura de blogs pues sobre eso ya hay bastante info.  Se quiso realizar algo más fresco, más del lenguaje de todos, con cierto sentido de invitación y para generar inquietudes.
We all enjoyed the experience. We laughed a lot and I believe that the fundamental thing was the reflection of the importance of informing and of being informed, which was our main objective before trying to teach the technical details of how to open a blog. There is already plenty of info about how to do that. We wanted to make something more fresh, in a language more easily understood by everyone, with a certain sense of welcome, and to generate interest.
Although all the posts are written in Spanish, many of the HiperBarrio participants included photographs of their city. Some examples include:
Like all of us, I am sure that these new bloggers would appreciate comments of encouragement and even just simple greetings from around the world.
Using dotSUB, you can also help make their video clip available in more languages by translating the brief transcript. Simply register for an account and choose the language you wish to translate the clip to on the far right of the video page. I have made a brief screencast describing how to translate and subtitle video on dotSUB.