YETAM on YouTube now!

I'm so excited because now YouTube has captions now. And I have a GREAT intern named Ayla who is doing all the subtitling for the Rwanda videos. She's posted several of them on dotsub.com and done the subtitles from Kinyarwandan and from English (using the documents that Joseph and Baptiste did). Chrystel from Plan Rwanda will send us the French versions soon, and so all 3 planned languages will be done.

We were getting some comments that the videos were not loading quickly so we are testing with YouTube and now will be posting in both places. Basically it's really simple. We take the videos and compress them into flash (.flv) files, and upload them to dotsub.com to do the subtitling. Then we upload them also to YouTube and we download the subtitle files from YouTube and re-upload/attach them to the YouTube file. And it's working super well. I started a PlanYETAM channel so as the videos get loaded they will be available there.

http://www.youtube.com/user/PlanYETAM

Once Ayla finishes uploading Rwanda films, we should have the Mali and the Senegal ones in hand to start uploading. I'm hoping that the web company can the just embed the videos from YouTube and they will come complete with the captions. You can also use geo-location from YouTube, which is cool since I've been wanting to do a google earth overlay for quite awhile, and now with the videos on YouTube it will be a snap. Ayla is already figuring it out -- she's great!

I am dying to see the Senegal and Mali films since I wasn't at the training. Mali sent a really cool attachment with their quarterly report. They used an evaluation methodology called Most Significant Change where you use storytelling to identify the most significant change from the training. So there are some amazing stories and quotes from the kids in there. I hope that we can use this for the upcoming YETAM projects in the next countries.

I had to do a presentation today at our office because it's already been 6 months that I've been on this 'secondment' or special assignment with the West Africa office. I can't believe it's gone by so fast. I think I've enjoyed almost every minute of it.