Monitoring Paraty with the Nucleus for New Media

This weekend we traveled to the city of Paraty on the coast of Rio de Janeiro to run a workshop with the Nucleus for Media, Art & Technology and professors from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). Officially launched in January 2015, the Nucleus was created to provide training in communications and technology for residents of Paraty and recover the community-managed communication platform run for 15 years by Eco TV.
We teamed up for the day with founders of the collective and members of Paraty’s Agenda 21, a local forum working to advance the sustainable development goals established during the UN Rio+20 Conference in 2012. Participants included local film and media makers, architects, staff of the City Hall, and community organizers. Our goal was to train an initial team in Paraty on the use of Promise Tracker explore how the tool might be combined with the Nucleus’ WebTV channel to source local infrastructure issues and engage residents of the city in monitoring.
The group discussed a broad range of issues related to flooding, sidewalks and public parks and created test campaigns to monitor city initiatives to plant trees and implement a network for sustainable disposal of cooking oil.
Participants had excellent feedback on how to improve the Promise Tracker platform and facilitate sharing of information about monitoring campaigns both online and off, many of which have already been integrated into the tool. We look forward to an ongoing partnership with the Nucleus to run Promise Tracker workshops with new groups in the city and pilot a model for disseminating campaigns through the Nucleus’ YouTube channel.