How to organise a Read Fest - Part 1

Read Fests are lovely events that help everyone contribute to content creation for the blind, and also help us enrich the online library at one go.

This post is about conducting a Read Fest at a place near you - a school, college, office, residential community.. anywhere at all. No matter where the content is created, it can be uploaded and shared with everyone very quickly.

How to Conduct a Read Fest – Organiser’s Guide
Introduction

This document is for all Friends of Esha who want to organise a Read Fest at a school, college, residential colony or office near them. This is the complete organiser’s guide, and we hope this will help make the Read Fest a complete event possible anywhere in India, or indeed, anywhere at all.

Requirement Gathering

People Required
At least 2.

Time Required

 2 weeks.

When should this be done

If you want to do a Read Fest to support a specific school, or a set of people who can be represented by the school. Or when you want to contribute to clabil but have no idea what kind of content should be picked up.

Steps

1.      Contact a blind school near you. Explain the concept to the principal / administrator.

2.      Request the principal to identify some intelligent and sincere students from the school – which grade they are from is not important.

3.      On a designated day, go to the school and meet these students. For breaking the ice, the following conversation starters are good:
                  a.       Have u read Braille books? In which all languages?

b.      Have u heard audio books? Through daisy or through mp3?

c.       How did you hear the audio books? In school library cd players? On ur cell phones? How?

d.      What do u want to be when you grow up?

e.       What is your favourite subject? Why?

f.       What do you like to do in your free time?

4.      After ice breaking, ask the students, one by one, what they would like more of in audio content. Make sure that as one person is asking, the other is taking down notes. If only one volunteer is going, pls carry a Dictaphone or use the voice recorder of ur smartphone, so that notes are not lost.

5.      Come back and chk the catalog to ensure that the content you want is not already there. If it is there, download and keep. (the catalog is online at www.braillecards.org/audio.htm and you can contact eshabraille@gmail.com for the offline catalog which is usually bigger.

6.      After checking the catalog, start looking for content.

7.      Where you are taking content from an online blog, or other private sources, please write to them and take permission.
.. post to be continued..