Knight International Journalism Fellow Stephen Franklin completed four months in Egypt in 2007.

The Online Video for Citizen Journalists in Malaysia program is a three month-intensive training for citizen journalists. Throughout the course, journalists produced and disseminated online news videos about Malaysia’s several religious and ethnic communities through the prism of human rights, religious and ethnic tolerance issues.

The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) will present a training program for working professional journalists as well as “citizen journalists” or bloggers in Russia. Working in three cities in diverse regions of Russia – Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok – ICFJ will undertake this work in cooperation with its Russian partner, the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF) of Moscow.

This 11-month training program has been extended to early 2013. it promotes the concept of citizen journalism, where members of the public play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information through traditional and non-traditional media outlets.

Jorge Luis Sierra developed a successful digital mapping platform called Mi Panama Transparente that uses crowd sourcing to pinpoint instances of crime and corruption in Panama. Now, Sierra is launching the digital map in Mexico and working closely with a Knight Fellow in Colombia to do the same.

As in Panama, Sierra has put together a strong coalition of partners in Mexico.

In a country where the government restricts traditional media, Ross Settles helped Malaysiakini, the leading independent news site, to expand its offerings and improve profitability. He has developed more than 30 hyper-local sites that for the first time cover communities outside Kuala Lumpur.

Now, 144 citizen journalists provide a regular stream of news reports to the Komunitikini website. To boost traffic, Settles helped to develop a system of tagging Komunitikini stories by location, category and theme.

Bruno Garcez is helping Brazil’s top media outlets to include multimedia reports from citizen journalists on important issues such as land reform and pollution prior to presidential and general elections in October.

Garcez is partnering with ABRAJI, the leading investigative journalism association, and the daily Folha de Sao Paulo to incorporate reports produced by trained citizen journalists. Already, 20 citizen reporters in Sao Paolo are producing stories and posting them on a common blog, Mural Brasil.