Youth Ki Awaaz has turned 11 today. And it sure has been a long journey from the time the first ever YKA community developed on Orkut (heh!), till today when YKA continues standing as India’s largest crowdsourced media platform for young people to address key social justice issues. Over the last 11 years, YKA has had more than 72,000 people join its community – and all for a common mission – to speak up on issues that matter, that the traditional media continues to ignore.
As we usher into the new year, I am excited to make a few key announcements about how YKA and its community will continue shaping this year, and over the next decade.
More community ownership
This year, we piloted YKA’s Peer to Peer (P2P) editors model, where a select group of top users from the YKA community will get an opportunity to review and give feedback to posts published by thousands of our new users. For long now, YKA’s regular community members have been leading and shaping dialogues on the platform – interacting with, and helping onboard new users. We launched this initiative to take it a step further, speed up our content review and feedback process, create more community ownership and an even more bottom up approach to how we, as a community, are building YKA. We currently have a group of six P2P editors in English, and two P2P editors in Hindi, and we’re hoping to grow this community drastically in the coming months.
Video storytelling
At the start of 2019, YKA also launched its video storytelling initiative, to add a layer on top of the writing platform, where anyone and everyone can create and publish videos on key socio-political and cultural issues, amplifying it through the YKA network. Several YKA users have already started engaging on key issues, such as a critical review of the 5 years of the Modi Govt, love versus caste, and growing unemployment in India, among others. YKA users can be a part of this movement by simply sending us a video story of yourself, or a citizen journalist report on an issue around them via Whatsapp at +919999181201. We will also be launching simple tutorials and extended video support communities in collaboration with partner organisations, to take video storytelling to hundreds of thousands of young people across the country.
A more accessible and stronger platform
This year, we’re already reaching out to thousands of new YKA community members via Awaaz Bot, our Facebook Messenger community. We’ve also recently launched the Youth Ki Awaaz Prime Ministerial Brief, a weekly email newsletter that brings together powerful stories and narratives by young people that the Prime Minister, our political leaders, and anyone with Prime Ministerial aspirations should be reading. The Prime Ministerial Brief talks real issues, told in an honest, fact-based manner. Sign up now to receive your edition of the YKA Prime Ministerial Brief. And last but not the least, expect multi-lingual expansion by YKA this year. 🙂
Impact Through Data
This year, YKA has also pledged to solve the critical issue of a severe lack of youth perception data around key political issues. We already did the largest ever youth voter survey in India, and several others with think tanks and high-impact organisations around issues such as urban mobility, sexual and reproductive health and rights and road safety, and 2019 will see us creating more data which will be open and publicly accessible for researchers, entrepreneurs, organisations and non-profits, and activists to use and create impact. Not only this, YKA also lets you play a key role in building this data by creating your own polls on the platform, and crowdsourcing public data yourself – turning you into an #ImpactThroughData change maker.
What more?
Tell us! Help turn YKA into a stronger, more impact driven platform by telling us what you think we should focus on this year. Send us an email at info@youthkiawaaz.com.
Onward and upward to the next decade!