After a two-day workshop the EkoRural team in the Central Highlands of Ecuador edited their own video about seed banks in the province Cotopaxi. Quite an impressive achievement, as none of them were familiar with any of the programs before the workshop. Moreover, most of the participants do not work often with computers at all!

The first day of the workshop, we introduced some of the programs that are used to edit videos and discussed the importance of EkoRural documenting work from a personal perspective  to share with the rest of the interested world.  This workshop aimed to develop the capabilities and skills of the EkoRural team and  community participants to document processes and results on their own.  The primary objective  was to be able to show possible investors more about EkoRural and its activities and to earn their trust by showing how initiatives are progressing. Other objectives mentioned by the participants were increasing awareness amongst program beneficiaries and using video media as a reflection tool.  The workshop was very participatory and included a number of interactive activities, such as the “mood and lessons learned meter” (Jules Pretty et al., 2005), which was used as a reflection tool at the end of the first part of workshop to better prepare leaders and participants for the following session.

Since the reflection meter showed that most participants learned best during the practical part of the first session, we decided to spend the entire second session of the workshop a week later practicing video-editing. Below, you can watch the result of that second session.

It is evident that the primary objective of the workshop was met; the participants now know how to edit a short video.  We hope that many videos will follow this first success!