Fascinating sounding project unveiled yesterday by the folks at the Committee to Protect Bloggers.  The project is called Blogswana and the idea is that they will train 20 university students from Botswana in journalism and blogging, then those students will go into the field once a month and interview some one who does not have access to the web or blogging. 

The interview will be turned into a blog post for the interviewee's blog, the interviewer will have a blog of their own as well, and the most recent posts from the blogs written by the 20 students will be aggregated onto a central site.  Comments left by users will be delivered to the interviewee next month and their answers will be posted back on the blog.

The AIDS angle is that all the parties involved will be people who have been impacted by AIDS in one way or the other, though that won't be the central topic of the interviews. 

The instigators of this project hope that it will be a pilot for many others based on the principal of overcoming the digital divide and doing citizen journalism by actually visiting and talking to people who are not online.  This particular area was chosen because one of the US instigators lived in Botswana for some time.  I think this sounds like a great project.  If you're interested, you should read their write up on it.  The project is currently looking for a variety of forms of support, so stop on by if you'd like to be of assistance, too.