CAIRO - When US entrepreneur Seth Godin wrote his book ‘Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us', he wanted to explain that people around the world have more in common, despite their isolation, than they could have ever imagined. When mankind had not yet conquered the Earth and turned it into colonies of megacities, people lived in tribal communities. Tribal members were special to one another, because they had common values and interests. They shared resources, ideas, pain and happiness. Their source of power was their collective united will. Then, man decided to isolate himself from the world around him and pursued happiness independently. No-one can succeed alone and must resort to teamwork to achieve his/her aspirations. Meanwhile, the boom in communications and social networking helps over 6.7 billion people around the world to stay connected. Many of these people have the same interests. Inspired by his idea, a group of 15 people got connected, in order to share their interest in beneficial media production. They adopted a set of values, identified the importance of tribal interaction, named themselves ‘Qabila' (Tribe) and sprang into action. “We started our idea last year. We are a group of 15 people from every walk of life – doctors, media men, engineers, photographers, etc – who have the same common interest in media production and the same message, which is to produce respectable, useful media products,” said Mahmoud el-Shafie, the PR manager for Qabila group. “Since the revolt, our role has become more important than before, because of the freedom we now have,” el-Shafie, an engineer, told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. Qabila is a non-profit media production organisation that aims to produce professional media of all sorts from start to finish. They rely on their 15 members and on people, who have joined Qabila on the social networking site Facebook – all 70,700 of them so far. Qabila collaborates on brainstorming ideas, scriptwriting, directing and production. They have posted a number of three-minute videos, some about raising political awareness and others stressing good values. In their videos which highlight simple awareness about policy, the staff have used cartoons, drawings, graphics and voice effects to make the material easier for everyone to understand. They start their videos by asking ordinary people in the street about a certain topic. For example, there is a video explaining the difference between the parliamentary electoral systems in Egypt – individual, proportional list and mixed systems. People normally say: “I don't know [about this]” or “What does proportional list mean?” They might say something totally unrelated and therefore very funny. “When we ask the people in the street if they have any idea about politics, we are not ridiculing them or letting the viewers have a good laugh. We are sad that most of them simply have no idea,” el-Shafie explained. “The aim is to make these people more aware.” He added that the team has been working in both rich and poor districts in Cairo, as “both suffer from the same lack of political awareness”. On the Qabila page in Facebook, people have been expressing their gratitude to the Qabila team. Sara Sameer has written, “You are a symbol of the ‘gratitude of work'.” Ahmed Shams has commented, “Great that you have told us about politics in a good, simple way, not making it complicated as the politicians do. I'm sure you'll really improve the media.”
