Tutorial :: Working with Sri Lankan refugees :: by Shakthi

I spent four days in early 2009 in Chennai, in the South of India – training the staff at OfERR to set up their own, free Wordpress website and develop ongoing digital media content related to their mission. Best of all (this is a first for us), the website is not in English – it’s in Tamil!

OfeRR is the Organisation for Eelam Rehabilitation Refugees. It is a secular, politically neutral NGO that services the 100,000+ Sri Lankan refugees in Tamil Nadu, India. Their activities cover everything from advocacy to engineering, architecture, agriculture, education and – of course – media. This was the first time they were setting up a communications system in their mother tongue – a language spoken by over 80 million people around the world.

On my first day with OfERR I went on a trip to a Sri Lankan refugee camp to get a sense of the places OfeRR works in. You can read about that trip elsewhere on this site.

Returning from the trip, it was clear to me, as I could not speak fluently in Tamil, that I would be of little use to the refugees through direct contact. It was better for me to work with those in the OfERR head office who could speak some English, had interest in the power of new media and could be trained to implement a digital media strategy themselves, with the community and in the language that they knew best. The Director of the organisation, Mr Chandrahasen, identified Anojan as the staff member most suited to this task.

This, step by step, is what I did, over 4 hours each day with Anojan:

Day 1: Discussions about OfERR and it’s mission

Discussions were had about the type of communications system OfERR wanted to set up. They desired a place where they could share:
- success stories about the refugees
- updated, unbiased news about the conflict in Sri Lanka
- the nature, purpose and developments of their activites
- and allow other Tamil people to discuss some of the relevant issues.

It became clear to me that a Wordpress-style blog was well suited to their needs. I knew Wordpress was available in Tamil. Anojan specifically asked for something simple which let the content stand out and this is what a blog does best. Their staff registered www.oferr.in, the ONLY cost incurred in the whole project, aside from our time. We set it up to forward to oferr.wordpress.com and started building the site.I guided Anojan to the Vigilance theme, which was simple and flexible. We looked through OfERR’s various photos and found an iconic photo that represented the aims of the site and the organisation. By cropping and layering the OfERR logo on this photo in Photoshop, we had a simple but powerful web banner in less than an hour (this could just as easily have been done in GIMP). I showed Anojan how easy it was to change to a new theme or upload a new banner in the future.

The next task was to decide on a process for the staff to type in Tamil on the website. We needed something which was free, could work on any computer in the office and was not dependent on certain installed software. Google’s transliteration service became the obvious choice. You simply type a Tamil word with English letters – such as ‘Amma’, or ‘mother’ – and it turns the letters into the equivalent Tamil lettering  – அம்மா. Text was written in the transliteration window and then copied and pasted into the desired field in the Wordpress back end. It worked quickly and intuitively for Anojan and he was posting in Tamil in a few minutes!

I then guided Anojan through more of the back end of Wordpress, going through each icon and tool and its uses. Specific, important concepts had to be explained, such as static pages vs. ongoing, quick release posts; using tags and categories to intelligently architecure your information, etc etc. Anojan had previously done some personal blogging with Blogger so he got a hold of Wordpress very quickly. I left him alone for the rest of the day to continue exploring the back-end of Wordpress on his own terms.

Day 2: Set up a website

In our second session, I felt Anojan was ready to put up his first posts and pages – the basic foundation of the information on his website. So we talked about the different types of content that would be generated. After the talk, I left Anojan alone for a couple of hours to put these posts and pages up himself. When I came back he had published a basic version of OfERR’s about page, programs, contact and staff details as pages. He had organised categories around each of the main topics OfERR would publish content around.

Anojan had also written and published his first post, celebrating that day as the birthday of their Director and all he had achieved for the company. Clearly this post deserved an accompanying photo of their Director! So I taught Anojan how to take or find suitable portrait images, and convert them to a size and quality suitable for the web through Photoshop (again, this can all be done through GIMP or, if you have a Mac, iPhoto). Now that we had started generating assets for the website we set up a simple file structure on his computer that organise all files related to the website in a simple, clear manner, sorting by date and media type so that any point in the future he would easily be able to recall a particular image, audio or video file for other uses.

Anojan then went on to write his next post: explaining to future contributors of the site – both his own colleagues and interested people from the wider Tamil diaspora – how to type in Tamil on the website.

Day 3: Content on Website, Training other staff, Photos and Videos
One of the key components of the CuriousWorks approach is ease of use and accessibility. Your website should not be the domain of just one person in your company. Set up correctly, people involved in each of your different programs should be able to contribute to the site, growing the site as a whole and giving it greater authenticity.With this in mind, Anojan presented the site to key members of the OfERR staff who would be publishing to it in the future. He took them through the basic steps of publishing posts and inserting images. After the presentation (in Tamil, of course), we registered each of these staff members and guided them in publishing their first posts, about their respective programs at OfERR – women’s empowerment, medical unit, nutrition, computer unit, advocacy, etc. These people had never done this kind of work before and were posting, in Tamil, within the hour!

Find more photos like this on All Around You

I finished off the day teaching Anojan how to shoot video with the resources available at OfERR. They had one stills camera with a video function built in as well. So I taught him a simple process involving shooting with the stills camera and editing and exporting in Windows Movie Maker. By the end of the session he had made his first video, on equipment he had ongoing access to.

Day 4: VodPod—>All Around You.net—>Wordpress; Anojan does everything by himself

I began our last day by teaching Anojan how to embed slideshows and videos into a free Wordpress account. If you don’t pay to host your own Wordpress site, embedding some types of multimedia content can be tricky. I showed Anojan a simple work around process for this. Firstly, all single, web-sized images and text-only documents were to be uploaded directly to Wordpress. The space included in their free account is enough for thousands of these assets.

All collections of photos, audio and videos were to be uploaded for free using our own service, All Around You. Anojan signed up and uploaded both a collection of photos and his first video. Anojan then used All Around You to organise his photos into a photo album. He was now ready for the final step.

I asked him to open a new window and go to Vodpod. It took Anojan about 30 seconds to sign up this free service and log in to the home page for users.

Then, back in All Around You, he simply click the ‘get embed code’ link for his photo slideshow and copied and pasted that code into the ‘paste embed code’ in Vodpod’s home user page. You can see this tab just under the ‘add videos’ tab near the top of the page.

Once pasted, you click ‘preview’ and the ‘post to site’ tab. At this point, Anojan could just publish his content directly to the OfERR website, with accompanying text, by clicking the ‘Wordpress’ button and entering his website’s details. Or, after clicking the ‘Wordpress’ button you can click ‘options’ and get the embed code yourself to paste directly into a post, in the back end of Wordpress.

Videos can be added to Wordpress in exactly the same way.

As we were nearing the end of our last session, I wanted to make sure Anojan could go through everything he learnt on his own. I left him alone to do this, and on his own initiative he write a how-to for his colleagues on the proper processes for writing content for the website. Then, he took his own photos, made his own video, and uploaded them to All Around You. He used our process to publish them to the Wordpress site with accompanying text in Tamil – all on his own.

To finish, I discussed with Anojan the current operational systems of OfERR and how digital media could be integrated into these. This is literally about writing up who works where and how they can pass information about what they’re doing to Anojan in the head office; how often different people to report on their work and how that can be translated into posts for the website; etc. We wrote up a full document on this – essentially a digital media strategy for OfERR that just fit snugly into their already ongoing activities.

I created a private group on All Around You for OfERR where this strategy was published and through which Anojan, myself and other staff at OfERR could continue to talk about their site. Here Anojan and other staff could also access our knowledge base of ideas, looking through our ever-growing collection of techniques and how-to’s for using digital media effectively with their community. This is a service that anyone can use to publish content about their community.

I was quite certain now that OfERR no longer needed me in their offices and could run the website and develop effective content for it on their own. I had achieved my goal: redundancy.

Not bad for 4 days!

If you’re interested in going through this training yourself, or for staff in your organisation, find out more here and contact our General Manager Naomi, via naomi@curiousworks.com.au. We’d love to hear from you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Country, Sri Lanka, Technology and tagged with All Around You, chennai, oferr, refugee, sri lanka, tamil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.