The Qwasha! Portal for community digital content is an online public archive of counter narratives, community media productions, interviews, stories and activities. This initiative is addressing the need to increase the use of Information Communication Technologies and related social media platforms to facilitate and amplify citizen voices and grassroots exchange, dialogue, and collaboration at local, regional, continental and global scale in all spheres of public life. The hope is that by putting effort into a more organized public action archiving practice in community based development initiatives within the eThekwini metro area the online platform can be seen as another tool in the hands of citizens, a means through which they can voice their view and move citizens closer to the realization of fundamental human rights to free expression, thought, association, access to information and the right to dissent.
Niall McNulty helped develop the digital components of the project, using the open-source collections management software Omeka and a number of social media applications. The archive can be accessed at https://qwasha.org.za/archive