MediaRights

MediaRights uses ICTs to encourage collaboration, promote innovative media about social issues, and find new audiences for social issue documentaries. To that end, one of MediaRights' key strategies involves encouraging dialogue among, and sharing resources geared toward, emerging and established filmmakers through the creation of a nonprofit online community. The Media Rights website links filmmakers, journalists, and advocates working on human rights topics through interactive features. Those who complete a free registration process may list their film, highlight favourite films, and post an announcement or call to action. MediaRights offers a database of over 7,300 films that can be searched by title, filmmaker, distributor, or issue. In an effort to help their community produce and use documentary films for social change, the site offers tools to find existing films, organise events around a specific film, and make more meaningful films about issues in one's community. To that end, interactive online workshops featuring web-tools, articles, and links are designed for these user groups:

1. Filmmakers.
2. Activists: a source of ideas on how to use the media to further a political or social cause. Among the offerings: strategies for using video to provoke discussion and mobilise communities or organisations to take action, and an Advocacy Checklist ("Talk back to your government! Sharpen your political goals and make the best use of even the slimmest resources.")
3. Educators: a meeting place for people who want to use film and video as a teaching tool and as a community resource. One topic, teaching media literacy, features online and offline activities to help young people learn how to evaluate a media message
4. Distributors: a creative centre where documentary film producers and producers of other types of media can learn how to spur audiences to action. Provides resources such as an Independent Producers' Outreach Toolkit, "a how-to guide to building an outreach plan around your documentary film...[that] includes an interactive online guide, printed resource binder and a phone consultation with the outreach experts..."
5. Youth: a resource for young media producers and young activists that features a database of social issue documentaries by youth, an advocacy tutorial, youth radio production tips, and other tools.
6. Enthusiasts.

Young people are also the focus of Youth Media Distribution initiative (YMDi) [no longer online as of December 2009], an e-community designed to empower the next generation of young media makers and activists by sharing resources, ideas, and "digital stories". The mission is "to improve the distribution of independent youth created film, video, radio and new media" by providing information and tools supportive of "increasing the visibility of youth made media." Interactivity is a key feature of this online community.

The organisation also brings attention to the work of artists working in the field of social change in their Media That Matters Film Festival. The Festival is a yearlong celebration of 16 jury-selected short films that stream online alongside Take Action Links. The Festival films, video shorts, digital stories, and new media reach cities around the United States through DVD distribution, community screenings, and via broadcast on cable and satellite television channels. Each year, the Festival enables global audiences to share in these promising media products.

Rights, Youth.

MediaRights was initiated through a collaborative process. In November of 1999, to reflect on Big Mouth Productions' "Innocent Until Proven Guilty," Alan Jenkins of The Ford Foundation brought together a group of media and nonprofit organisations from all over the country to discuss how media makers and activists could work better together. The audio-visual, print, and radio makers present articulated the need for a central place where they could learn about each other's work and find out about new projects. The activists wanted to collaborate with media makers, from whom they felt "cut off".

Big Mouth Productions produces social issue documentaries and provides production services for US and international clients. Arts Engine, Inc. works "to promote media that addresses important contemporary social issues" by producing "independent documentary and educational films addressing issues or populations that are otherwise under-represented in the mainstream media".