HiperBarrio Project – Colombia

Started with a small group of people at a library. A simple meeting where we were told how to manage social web tools, how to work with photo's, video's, etc.

La Loma is a location in Medellín in Colombia where there is a lot of multiculturalism. Some musicians, writers, poets, etc. so this is an area where there is a lot of activity. La Loma is known as District 13 on the border with San Cristobal. Google “District 13″ and you will see some violence where there is ethnic cleansing going on.

HiperBarrio – Hyper Neighbourhood – is an initiative funded by Rising Voices. It is a series of ideas, a meeting point for young people who wander around from home to school and to the library. Helps them identify problems and re-think their public spaces.

Some difficulties we've seen are that of young kids sitting and surveying militarily some sector of Colombia on a border within a certain sector, hence La Loma has become a place without any borders to overcome this. The other issue is that of access to equipment and understanding of how to use social media and the internet.

One of the things this is being used for is to capture the history of the area from all of the current knowledge that they have of this area. Also, to make people start using English and to play with other languages. We started 3 libraries to start training the trainers so that they can in turn teach others to interact with a global community and to spread the information through forums like this one (Global Voices Summit).

Things are changing and with Social Media we have the ability to share this change with others. This is a meeting point.

“As long as you express, we are free human beings.”

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