In November 28-29, Kyrgyzstan team of neweurasia, Tolkun Umaraliev and Mirsulzhan Namazaliev, held two-day trainings on new media and citizen journalism in the remotest regional center of Kyrgyzstan – in Batken region, which is famous for hosting enclaves of and sharing border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Neweurasia’s trainings were the first new media and citizen journalism trainings ever held in Batken region.

As Batken region is one of the technically underdeveloped regions of Kyrgyzstan, it would have been difficult to organize new media and citizen journalism trainings from Bishkek, where the Kyrgyzstan team of neweurasia is based. Therefore, it was decided to collaborate with Batken Media Resource Center (BMRC) that closely works with local government, local NGOs and journalists. As people in Batken do not have regular internet access, BMRC used its networks in disseminating information about the trainings among local NGOs, journalists and government officials. As a result, there were many applications. We have selected 15 best applications, and except one, all of them attended the trainings.

The trainings were held in November 28-29 in two training venues in Batken city. The first day of the trainings took place at conference hall of Public Foundation “Zhetigen”, where Tolkun and Mirsulzhan made various Power Point presentations. Topics included: internet and how it is used in daily life, internet in Kyrgyzstan, new media and citizen journalism, blogging and micro-blogging, podcasting in videocasting, bloggers ethics and security in internet. It must be noted that among all the topics trainees showed their great interest in blogging, as they liked the idea of publishing their thoughts directly on webpage without having IT backgrounds. Tolkun Umaraliev’s presentations “New media and blogging” and “Blogosphere of Kyrgyzstan” raised many questions from the audience, and started a discussion on how people in Batken can benefit from new media and blogging despite the factor of poor internet penetration. Mirsulzhan Namazaliev surprised trainees in his presentation “Internet in Kyrgyzstan” by the fact that Batken region has just 3% share from overall internet usage in Kyrgyzstan, which again resulted in a discussion about the reasons for such a low indicator. During the whole day, trainees were involved in the process very much. There were organized two coffee-breaks and a lunch for participants.

The second day was held in BMRC’s office, which is not far from the first day’s venue. The reason for having two venues is that BMRC’s office does not have a conference hall for 15 people and enough room for a digital projector. Whereas the conference hall of the Public Foundation “Zhetigen” does not have computers connected to internet, which BMRC has. As the first day mainly covered theoretical aspects of new media and citizen journalism, the second day was more practical, where trainees were trained on how to open and edit blogs, write posts and generate ideas for posts, use multimedia and other new media tools. From all available blogging platforms, we chose Kloop.kg, for its easy registration process and already active blogs in Kyrgyz blogophere. Therefore, Kloop is the best place for Batken blogger to easily integrate into the Kyrgyz blogosphere. Due to the lack of computers, we could not work individually with each participant. Therefore, trainees were divided into three working groups according to their interests – 1st group “Tourism in Batken, 2nd group “Social issues of Batken”, and 3rd groups “Welcome to Batken”. Each group was given an assignment to create a blog on their interests, change its design and install different widgets. After each group created their own blogs, each member of all three groups was asked to write by one post on their group blog. Despite very slow internet connection and lack of computers, at the end of the day, there were three ready blogs with 3-4 posts in each. Trainees were very much involved in the process of creating blogs and writing posts that some of them did not even attended coffee-breaks, but spent their time in front of computers and worked on the assignments. Just like the first day, there were two coffee-breaks and a lunch in the second day as well. The trainings finished by presenting certificates for participants and having their feedback.

Even though trainers faced several problems like low quality technology and poor internet access, the new media and citizen journalism trainings in Batken were a great success. Organizers could gather the audience that became interested in new media and citizen journalism and created a network among each other for further collaboration.