Web breaks down community walls

Community groups from around the world are getting hi-tech production training in Scotland to create a library of online video diaries.

The World Without Walls program links 15 churches with 15 others overseas.

Delegates have traveled to Bo'ness, near Falkirk, to learn how to direct and shoot video footage, edit it on a laptop and produce a video diary file.

The 30 groups will then go on to post a five-minute film about their churches and communities every month.

A total of 11 delegates from South Africa, India, Ghana, the Gambia, Zambia and four from participating Scottish churches have been taking part in training this week.

They will then take cameras and laptops back to their home countries to begin their video diaries.

These will be uploaded or sent via CD-rom or e-mail to be collated and broadcast online.

The Reverend Albert Bogle is minister at St Andrew's parish Church in Bo'ness.

He told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland program: "This unique project brings together 15 communities in the developing world with 15 here in the UK, linking them together through a webpage and connecting with each other through webcams.

Children's groups

"World Without Walls is about local people touching local people, like micro-globalization, subversive globalization, with ordinary people.

"Who would think that a small church in Bo'ness could connect and make such connections throughout the world?"

Technical coordinator Neil MacLennan said: "We're using technology that already exists in the world and just applying it for church use."

The project will cover issues like young people in the Gambia, tsunami victims in southern India and drugs workers in South Africa.

Emmanuel Milton, from Chennai City, India, said: "We are working with tsunami and slum children, we are helping them.

"We have a home and a care centre with altogether about 200 children."

Mr. Bogle added: "Knowledge is power, and communication is power, and isn't it quite an interesting thing to be able to put a laptop into the hands of some of the poorest people in the world to allow them to tell their own story and put it up on the web. That's power."

Flights and computer equipment were all supplied through the funding raised in Scotland, with backing from organizations such as Lloyds TSB and Apple.

Source:  BBC