Bon Buzz

Socratic dialogue, free writing, drawing each other’s faces, blindly observing what is going on around you in a bustling street in N’Djamena, the participants of the intensive 7 day workshop of the Bon Buzz project did it all. Sometimes you have to challenge your thoughts, break free of established habits, get exposed to new ideas and ways of working when you want to advance in your work. Especially when you are a young journalist, or a publicist, who is born and raised within a highly polarised society and you feel the urge to change the way you are reporting on that society, but you don’t know how.

Enter: the Bon Buzz project. In the beginning of November 2023, 23 young and motivated participants came together in N’Djamena to join Voice4Thought’s 7-day workshop – the first one in a series of two – on writing depolarising stories. Two main themes stood out: what is polarisation, and consequently, how can we depolarise? and how to tell an engaging and convincing story? As we speak, the participants are researching and writing their stories with some online guidance. In February 2024 we will hold the second workshop to discuss the stories and train some more. Bon Buzz is supported by the Dutch Embassy and the European Commission in Chad and executed in partnership with CRASH, a local academic research institute.

Bon Buzz evolved from Tchadoblog.