Petya Raykovska
Saturday 21st March
3:15pm
Track 3: The Henry Thomas Room
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/petya/the-fight-for-independent-media
The story of Open Media Foundation – a Bulgarian non-profit, founded by volunteers to help improve the media scene in a country where a handful of people have controlled the market for years and have completely changed people’s perception of what journalism actually is.
Open Media was founded in the beginning of 2012 by one developer, one media expert and one system administrator and is currently focusing on three open source projects that deal with a different aspect of the media problem in the country:
– New Bulgarian media timeline – an interactive timeline shedding light on the important facts in the new Bulgarian media history after 1989.
– A cross publisher micro donations platform allowing users to donate small amounts per month to articles they have enjoyed – an alternative to the subscription model
– A free high school media platform built on WordPress that brings together practising professionals and school kids in order to provide an early “learning by doing” education on quality journalism.
The main purpose of the talk will be to show how open source tools can help socially active people move change even in very difficult fields whether by just voicing out various problems or providing solutions to different aspects of the problem.