A pleasure to meet you!

I’m a Canadian freelance journalist (among other things) living in Tbilisi. I get excited about creative strategies for positive social change. I am looking forward to collaborating with you all!

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Hi Heather!

Great to see you here! And looking forward hearing your input at the workshop, but regarding your own life, or stories you heard from/know of in georgia, what do you think is interesting to share with us? What kind of creative ideas have you encountered/initiated in georgia thus far? Thanks!

welcome

Hello Heather , welcome :slight_smile: can u tell us more about how did u settle in Tbilisi from Canda , I guess u had a very interesting journey since u r a freelance journalist.

and another question how do u see street journalism and social media changes the way we get the news , as I am from Egypt and for me I don’t beleive any mass media  channels I always look for twitter feeds of people who are actually inside the events so I have real info but sometimes also I don’t get the big picture

thanks and looking forward to hearing more from u

Hi Inge and Hazem,

I ended up in Tbilisi quite by chance. My partner and I wanted to leave Canada, and when he got a job here in Tbilisi, we decided to go for it . Yes, social media has drastically changed both the ways we access news and the ways journalists collect news. For example, there’s a very interesting company in the US called Storyful that helps news organizations filter our the noise and use social media as a kind of newswire. 

As for creativity in Georgia, I think there’s human ingenuity everywhere you look, especially amongst people doing what they can to get by. It’s the little things like the flower venders who use pop bottles cut in half to hold their flowers, the women selling the use of a scale, or the vendors who use the architecture of that building on Rustaveli to drape their wares.

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u made me more curious

This is the first time i know about this company in the us i will google it now :slight_smile: and i really like the way u described these creative details do u have a,y pics may be there is also a documentation about "tactical urbanism "their u can find small changes as u mentioned that make bigger changes may be u can spot some of these in Tbilisi i will search for the link and send it in a comment

the link

Tactical Urbanism by The Street Plans Collaborative - Issuu

u can find something similar to the half bottles in the Gurilla gardening example :slight_smile:

Anyone doing things on the scale of the DIY ringroad?

@Heather Y hey and welcome to Edgeryders! I don’t know if you saw this post Hazem wrote about how people basically DIYed 4 exits out of a ring road in Cairo. Know of anything comparable happening anywhere in Georgia?

Hey, thank you for today!

Heather hi! Thank you for your downright optimism today…! and for letting us know about your interest in recycling, reusing and decreasing consumption, as well as using technology for social change…  I look forward to tomorrow!

The spots you mention like the one on Rustaveli (by the way the only street I’ve learned the name of so far!) could work if we were to shoot some of the wild things people are doing… maybe not specifically those, but things that have a social impact? Like: are there people who care about recycling and how do they do it? Like the example Sandro had about the glass breaking into the water to make it quicker to decompose :slight_smile: This of course before he realised the impact on fish eating glass! Can we ask some of those people why or how they ended up doing it? Perhaps you can offer a bt of an advice on spots me and @Sam Muirhead shouldn’t miss out on while here… ? thanks, I’ll ask Sandro as well since he also cares about this stuff

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