After a successful beta-launch this month, PodTalk.live has now called for people to register as foundation members — it’s free to join the post and podcast social platform.

The foundation membership soft-launch is a great opportunity for founders to help shape a brand new, vibrant, algorithm-free, info discussion and debate social platform.

“PodTalk.live has been put to test by selected individuals and we’re pleased to report that it has performed fabulously,” said the the platform developer Selwyn Manning.

• READ MORE: About PodTalk.live

Manning is founder and managing director of the company that custom-developed PodTalk.live — Multimedia Investments Ltd.

MIL is based in Aotearoa New Zealand, where PodTalk.live was developed and is served from.

And now, PodTalk.live has emerged from its beta stage and is ready for foundation members to shape the next phase of its development.

An alternative platform
PodTalk.live was designed to be an alternative platform to other social media platforms.

PodTalk has all the functions that most social media platforms have but has placed the user-experience at the centre of its backend design and engineering.

PodTalk.live has been custom-designed, created and is served from New Zealand.

“We ourselves became annoyed at how social media giants use algorithms to drive what content their users see and experience,” Manning said.

“And, we also were appalled at how some social media companies trade user data, and were unresponsive to user-concerns.

“So we decided to create a platform that focuses on ‘discussion and debate’ communities, and we have engineered PodTalk to ensure the content that users see is what they choose — rather than some obscure algorithm making that decision for them.

“PodTalk.live is independent from other social media platforms, and at best will become an alternative choice for people who seek a community where they are the centre of a platform’s core purpose.

Sign-up invitation
““And today, we invite people to sign up now and become foundation members of this new and ethically-based social community platform,” Manning said.

What PodTalk.live provides includes:

• user profiles with full interactivities with other users and friends;
• user created groups, posts, video, images, polls, and file sharing;
• private and secure one-on-one (and group) messages;
• availability of all the above for entry users with a free membership;
• premium membership for podcasters and event publishers requiring easy to use podcast publication and syndication services; and next-level community engagement tools that users have all on the one platform.

Manning said PodTalk.live was founded on the belief that for social, political and economical progress to occur people needed to discuss issues in a safe environment and embark on robust debate.

• Go to https://PodTalk.Live for more information and to register

The Pacific Media Centre has a new website and it will be going live over the next week.

A project almost two years in the making, the PMC Online website features a new vibrant design along with an innovative user interface.

Social enterprise website developer Tony Murrow from Little Island Press says that although the layout and design has been updated, the main aim of the project was to modernise the platform for security and user experience.

READ MORE: AUT’s Pacific Media Watch ‘lighthouse’ role featured in freedom doco

“Unlike most websites, it fulfils a number of purposes,” he says.

A unique website for a university environment, it features a blend of news and current affairs content, including the Pacific Media Watch freedom project along with research publication.

“It’s more of a Swiss army knife approach where you’re accommodating a wide range of tools under a single unifying element,” says Murrow.

The most significant change is the new website’s mobile friendly platform, which will allow users to browse easily from their cellphones.

Better showcase
Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie says this will “enormously enhance” the user experience.

“Personally, it has irked me to see a ‘not mobile friendly’ rider on Google for a few years.”

“When PMC Online was first launched in 2010 it was a very innovative and appealing design at the time.”

“And now this new updated design on Drupal takes us into a new digital era and it is a much better showcase for the work of the Pacific Media Centre, its student media outputs and its challenging ‘critical conscience’ social justice content.”

He says the PMC Online website is used by a variety of media as a resource in the Asia-Pacific region.

Several people have contributed to the new PMC website development, including Amy Tansell, Emi Teng, Patrick Murrow and James Bristow.

Little Island Press has collaborated with the PMC on number of projects for almost a decade.

One of the most significant projects was in 2015, when 40 AUT journalism and television students worked with LIP to generate “Eyes of Fire – Thirty Years on”, an archive of contemporary environmental and climate stories to mark the 30th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing on 10 July 1985.

It is believed to be the largest single journalism project carried out a media school in New Zealand.

Little Island also collaborates with the PMC in the printing of the Pacific Journalism Review research journal that is now in its 25th year of publication.

The launch of the new website along with the publication of this year’s Pacific Journalism Review will be celebrated at the Pacific Media Centre’s Midwinter Showcase tomorrow night.

By Mary Jack Kaviamu

My journey started in 2008, when I sought the endorsement of community leaders in my home island of Tanna to contest the Vanuatu provincial elections. I didn’t get their approval. I was told it is against kastom for women to be in Parliament, and that I wasn’t prepared to take up such a challenge.

I tried again in 2012, this time paying my candidate fee without the approval of the community chief. When the community leaders learnt of this, they organised a meeting to stop me from contesting. They asked that I give up my candidate fee to a male candidate of their choice, promising in return that they would support me in the 2016 national general election.

I respected their decision and gave my ticket away. Their male candidate failed to win.

In 2015, cyclone Pam devastated Vanuatu, with Tanna being one of the worst-hit islands. Women bore the brunt of the devastation, forcing them to seek out new ways to survive. A realisation began to dawn that it was time for them to stand up and speak for themselves.

After numerous meetings with women groups, the first ever Tanna Women’s Forum was held in October 2015. More than 1200 attended the meeting where women demanded change to a political system that held them down, tied them in poverty, and gave them no opportunity to speak out.

It was a breakthrough moment as many of these women have lived under threat all of their lives.

The women put their heads together and agreed it was time someone took the lead. I was nominated. The women agreed that I would contest the next general election scheduled for late 2016.

Just days later the government announced a snap election, effectively wiping out our time to put together an election campaign. We moved ahead, anyway, with membership numbers now standing at 3700. We had much confidence that we would secure one of the seven seats in the Tanna open constituency.

With very little time to prepare, I took on the challenge with much confidence. That as a solid membership of women we could succeed, and that even if we failed to win a seat, we would learn valuable lessons from the snap election experience that would better prepare us for the next general elections in 2020.

I had so much confidence. I wasn’t thinking of losing; our hopes based on the registration figures signed by women across the island.

Crossing controversial territory
The first obstacle was informing community leaders of our decision to field our own candidate – a woman. Working with a chief that I have close ties to, a community meeting was arranged whereby I would declare and launch my candidacy.

No one uttered a word, except a female friend who stood up, and much to my surprise, said: “I am not in support of women being electoral representatives in Parliament, and I am also against the policy of reserving seats for women.” I took this understandably as coming from someone speaking from her heart, but it also confirmed that the notion that women “do not belong in Parliament” was not held by men alone.

With no financial backing (other than two small personal contributions totalling 15,000 vatu) I had to dig into my own pockets to fund the campaign. I must say the election process is very expensive, with transportation in Tanna costing 20,000 vatu per day. We hired six public transport vehicles for the campaign.

We managed to visit (and revisit in some cases) 19 communities, speaking with roughly 700 men and women. Our slogan was Hemi Taem! (It is time!).

Taking centre stage during the campaigns was the most challenging. The questions and comments raised by communities were not difficult to answer, but there were also tricky ones coming from those who perceived us to be defying kastom.

‘You have not killed a fly or an ant, how can you prove that you can work like men in parliament. You are nothing but a woman.’

‘Our custom and culture perfectly points out your place – which is to look after the children, and mine (male speaking) is to do the talking. Where is your respect for this kastom? Are you from Australia that you don’t know our kastom? Who has given you this right to contest?’

‘Maybe we can vote for you in the provincial council election, but not to parliament.’

‘Our fear right now is the domestic violence law; we do not want our women to take those laws into their own hands.’

‘We don’t want to vote for women, because we don’t want women to have the right over us men.’

‘We don’t want our women to vote for women. If they do, we will divorce them.’

In a lot of places, prior to our campaign meetings, there would be community meetings, most held in the nakamal where “consensus” was often reached for all community members to vote for a particular candidate.

In some cases, I wasn’t allowed to go and campaign – even to speak to just the women. In one case, some women called me and said: “Mary, please don’t come to our community as you will not be allowed to speak here.”

Discrimination and the threat of violence
The campaign revealed that culture is a main contributor to the limitation of woman’s influence in politics. I’ve seen how a lot of people are reluctant to vote for a woman.

We did not receive discrimination from men alone, but women also. The discrimination we received was more on emotional violence. Discrimination against women in the society was very obvious at the time of campaigning and we observed how discrimination was somewhat based on a woman’s age, her marital status, her level of education and economic status.

And as such, a woman may not be considered to be valuable or worthwhile if she does not fit the collective representation of both men and women.

Personally, I was able to endure a male-dominated political campaign period, but stories of threats of violence experienced by some women have just been unbearable. There are many of such accounts, ones that I share with a sad heart.

This is one woman’s account of the threat she received from her partner the night before the poll:

I was already in bed pretending I had fallen asleep for some hours, but my husband came up and woke me up. He held a knife to my throat and demanded that I tell him who I was going to vote for. I was so afraid, I did not speak. He told me to speak or else he would beat me. I started crying. I was short of breath and was shaking. I cried out, “please help me … someone listening outside, please help me!”

But nobody came to my rescue because they were afraid of my husband. He pushed me down, punched me again on my stomach and head, and said he was giving me a chance to speak or else he would beat me up. He knew of my intention to support women in this election.

I begged him to let go of my throat or I was going to die, and I promised him that I was going to vote for the candidate of his choosing.

Another woman also had a similar story.

I saw you talking with those women, but I have stated clearly my rules and you have to follow them. We are going to vote for a male candidate and not for any woman. If you fail my words and I find out the numbers at our polling station, I will make you pay for it.

Other women were reportedly threatened by their partners to show candidate photos after they had cast their votes to prove they voted for a particular candidate. In some polling station, men threatened to divorce or physically torture their wives if results showed a significant number of women’s votes from that particular polling station.

A way forward
Political parties, as we know, are the most important institutions affecting women’s political participation. Even though our group knew we could have more support (moral and financial) from political parties if we ran under one of them, we still made the hard choice of running as an independent candidate.

We had a few reasons for this, with the main one being that bigger political parties filed their candidates in advance, leaving no space for women to contest under their ticket. Secondly, women still have a long way to learn about the processes and lobbying involved in politics.

In spite of the challenges women continue to face, I see a new generation of powerful women flourishing in Tanna. Women with a strong sense of identity and power.

Through our journey, many have come to understand that participation in the electoral processes involves much more than just voting. It is time to exercise the democratic rights that have either been ignored or violated over the last 36 years.

Through our journey in politics, many have come to appreciate that through political participation women can have the freedom to speak out for the first time in the island’s history, which they’ve done through campaigning, assembling, associating and participating.

I have seen the power of ordinary women who have stood up against injustices to say they are tired. I have seen the faces of those who shed tears because of so much ill-dealing and threatening within their homes and communities.

We have started a journey where we will continue to celebrate the united power of women who have taken the first steps to uncovering the multiple forms of discrimination and injustices. We shall continue to seek the empowerment of women to a level where they can think and speak for themselves.

Mary Jack Kaviamu has more than 10 years experience working with provincial government, which included a period as acting secretary-general of the Tafea Provincial Government Council. She worked at the Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP) from 2010 to 2015 to implement a programme of political stakeholder engagement in Vanuatu. She is currently a manager for ActionAid. This article was first published on both Vanuatu Daily Digest and the PiPP blog and is republished by arrangement with PiPP.

By Eva Cox

There was a 1970s badge that declared:

Women who want equality with men lack ambition.

This statement neatly sums up the broad intentions of second-wave feminists to create radical shifts of gender power. On International Women’s Day 2016, looking back, I suggest we failed to pursue that agenda and settled for much less. We achieved formal legal equality over the subsequent decade, but moving past that into wider social equity changes seems definitely to have stalled.

What went wrong?
We knew then that legal equality was only the starting point. We understood that real gender equity would require radical changes to macho cultural power structures. So we planned and discussed the ways we could revalue what matters and eliminate gender-biased, macho-designed cultural dominance.

Despite fixing most of the legal barriers, the cultural changes failed to follow. There were other changes happening. By the 1980s the arrival of neoliberalism as the dominant political paradigm slowed most social progress, as market models took over. These changed the political focus from progressive social change to market choices and individualised material success.

This approach also emphasised machismo and reinforced gender inequities, because market competition rewards materialist views of what matters. The more collectivist social roles that are part of our social infrastructure – and often heavily feminised – are devalued and considered private concerns.

Our early support for increasing the proportion of women in positions of power was not driven by wanting more women sharing male privilege, but a belief that feminists could infiltrate and make the social and cultural changes we wanted. Now, the increasing numbers of women allowed to join men in positions of power and influence are mostly prepared to support the status quo, not to seriously increase gender equity.

So 41 years after International Women’s Year, Australian (and New Zealand) women are still the very much the second sex, insofar as we are permitted limited share of power and resources in the public sphere, but on macho market terms.

What is the second sex? It was neatly defined in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex analysis of how gender roles were socially designed:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

and

She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.

Still the second sex
In Australia, women are still clearly the “other”. Our once radical social movement has been diverted into good works such as women’s refuges, counting female victims of violence and calling out sexism. While all these are necessary, there is little focus on offering serious alternatives.

Too many women’s groups are plaintively asking for better access to the options open to men, on men’s terms. The current groups seem to have lost the necessary optimism to identify and lead serious changes to the nasty, inequitable and fading market model which not only excludes the social but is showing serious flaws.

The damage to social well-being that results from the reliance on unfettered markets is much wider than just the continued poor status of women. There are clear indications of social distress in many developed countries whose austerity cuts have created serious inequality.

A review of current public policy priorities at the local level shows few social goals and policies that indicate any serious efforts to make Australia fairer and create better social well-being. The long-term over-emphasis on GDP and financial growth is exacerbating inequalities, with changes focused mainly on punishing the unemployed.

The market model stresses paid work only, completely ignoring feminised unpaid, underpaid, often uncounted roles and tasks, most notably the raising of children. These are not included in GDP, but are essential to good social functioning.

This shift is clearly illustrated by proposed changes to the funding of children’s services, whose role will move from complementing community/family to servicing GDP growth. In the process, “progress for women” has been reduced to increasing their participation in paid work.

This pattern appears in parenting payments and other areas where unpaid contributions are ignored. Similar issues arise in Closing the Gap failures, which emphasise white male models and ignore the value of good social relationships that were once also more important in Western societies.

Time for a radical rethink
In the lead-up to the 2016 election, voters increasingly distrust the major parties, whose economic emphasis turns them off. Rather than leave solutions to the current holders of power, or some populist alternatives, we need feminist-led setting of social equity goals.

Can some good feminist ideas reignite the light on the hill to find ways out of current political dilemmas? Let’s commemorate International Women’s Day this year by offering some bold initiatives that show our concerns are universal, albeit from feminist standpoint. Here are some starting points:

• devise and discuss good social policy goals, which prioritise gender and other equity outcomes, and make them central to the coming election;
• revalue the rewarding the skills and time put into care, relationships, feelings and other social needs that require attention and commitment;
• broaden the agenda and revise our assumptions about what matters to make sure that gender biases are removed from roles such as caring;
• ensure that men recognise their need to be liberated from the limited assumptions about masculinity that also limit their choices and lives;
• abolish the term “women’s issues”: these are social issues that affect everyone, and the label stereotypes women as the second sex who have special interests; and
• acknowledge that women cannot “have it all” because men can’t either, but ensure that both can take on fairly shared responsibilities for essential paid and unpaid roles.

These are starting points for addressing deficits in mainstream politics and putting social well-being high on political agendas. We require feminist perspectives to set social goals that are sustainable, and create social resilience.

These necessary strengths are undermined by the macho tendencies in current political directions. We need to recognise the importance of social connections, cultural needs and care of others that economics doesn’t cover; to balance material and social stability.

And, as de Beauvoir said, women need to decline to be the “other”, to refuse to be a party to the deal. This would mean for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. That’s feminism.

Feminist and author Eva Cox is a professorial fellow at Jumbunna IHL, University of Technology Sydney. This article was first published in The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives licence.

Pasifika Renaissance, an NGO dedicated to Pacific oral histories, has appealed to groups documenting traditional knowledge to upload stories to their YouTube channel.

Among recent collaborators are Papua New Guinean journalist and community worker Milton Tyotam Kwaipo, from Rabaul, who runs a multimedia studio in Madang Province.

After earning a BA majoring music, journalism and public relations at the University of Papua New Guinea in 2006, he later worked for NGO World Vision International in PNG, Timor Leste and Vanuatu from 2009 to 2015.

He also earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Community Development in 2014.

In 2015, he started Milate Multimedia Produxion that focuses on using multimedia (music, audio, radio programs, video and photography) for social empowerment through sharing of ‘positive stories’, focusing on local communities developing themselves rather than waiting for outside sources to aid them.

He is also a musician, playing a flute, saxophone and other instruments.

Pasifika Renaissance’s appeal said:

Since many interested and motivated people have asked us about possible participation in our NGO’s activities, we decided to invite you to document oral traditions from knowledgeable elders in your village or island by a video/digital camera, tablet or cellphone to upload your videos on our YouTube page.

The topics of your elders’ narrations include legends, folktales, colonial histories, experiences of WWII and dying cultural practices.

Narrators can speak in their languages or English in your videos, since the target of your videos is younger people on your island.

This project will primarily enable you to record disappearing oral traditions of your home island and share them with your people.

Furthermore, through this project, we seek your active involvement in revitalising your island’s traditional culture and creating a larger “renaissance” movement in a wider Pacific region.

In addition, if you have an opportunity to take videos of cultural practices (e.g. fishing, festivals, rituals, dances) on your island, please share them with us to upload them on our YouTube page.

If you are interested in this project, please send us a message on FB or at pasifika.renaissance@gmail.com, so we’ll send you more detailed info. We are very looking forward to your participation in our endeavor!

We are very keen to collaborate with a researcher, government official, and interested community member of the Pacific islands to pursue our common goals. Please contact us to discuss possible collaboration. Thank you!

The latest upload to the channel has been a “Western-style” dance “Kahlek Dil” from Pohnpei.

In addition to earlier Western influence in island music in the 19th century, Pohnpeian people learned several forms of foreign dances during the German administration (1899-1914).

One of them is marching dances, which were created through interactions with foreigners in the Marshall Islands and spread throughout Micronesia in the early 1900s.