Josue Guzman was one of the Guatemalan archaeologists I was accompanying into this ancient Mayan city and he, like the other two archaeologists that climbed up for exactly the same reason, wanted to send a text message to their girlfriends. I asked him if he had reception and he nodded, lifting up the four fingers of his left hand to tell me he had four bars-worth of reception while texting with this right hand thumb. 

"In Guatemala we're very connected," he told me and all I could hear while sitting 55 metres (180 ft) off the ground was the sound of many thumbs clicking on keys. That's when I started to believe that cellphones and the developed telecommunications industry in Guatemala was one of the reasons for this inter-connectedness. 

At that moment I imagined what news would look like if everyone who had a cellphone or at least access to one, could send, share, distribute and report events they witnessed via a cellphone to a website and also receive that information. What are the ways the use of this ubiquitous technology would impact Guatemala's nascent democracy and move towards freedom of expression, democratization of media spaces and growing online blogger conversations and citizen participation? 

When I returned to the United States in September 2009, I wrote up this idea as a Fulbright proposal of a cellphone-driven community website that provided anyone in Guatemala with a cellphone with the ability to deliver their message to the world. In May 2010, I was awarded the fellowship and in September I drove back to my native Guatemala to implement the project as a cell-phone based website, community organizing tool and way to provide Guatemalans, especially youth, with computer and Internet literacy skills.

Guatemala's Telecom sector is among the top four in Latin America. The cellphone infrastructure, with 99 percent saturation, is extremely well developed, in contrast to Internet access (only 7.7 percent, with high-speed access concentrated in large urban areas). Cell phones are ubiquitous and becoming more widely adopted each day in a country where there more cellphones than citizens. 

In December 2009 PrensaLibre reported that Claro, one of the largest cellphone service providers in Guatemala, reported almost 6 million users, equivalent to 40 percent of the Guatemalan market in 2008. The second largest company, Tigo, reported 5 million users or 34 per cent; and the third provider, Movistar, provided service to almost 4 million customers, with a turnout of 26 percent of the telecommunications market. There was a 65 percent annual growth from 500,000 cellphones in 1995 to 13.3 million in 2007, according to a Telefónica 2007 study.

In May 2009 the prominent Guatemalan lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg, was murdered and based on the community response we knew we couldn't wait until I arrived in Guatemala to launch.  My husband, the designer for HablaCentro, and my friend, the developer, launched HablaGuate in May 2009. But the main structure grew from HablaHonduras - created on June 28, 2009 on the eve of President Manuel Zelaya's ousting - in order to provide an alternative news outlet during the seizure of state. 

It was a request by the Honduran community during a Skype chat of a dozen journalists, technologists and nonprofits workers who were committed to making it a community-driven website. Within a month the traffic reached 30,000 visits without any marketing efforts. Now almost a year later, the site already has 3,776 posts, close to 3,393 comments and almost 200 contributors. One month later, HablaVenezuela was launched after a request from a core group of Venezuelans. Two months later, HablaCostaRica and HablaElSalvador. Other requests have come in for hubs to be set up in Mexico, Panama, Belize and others. Each of the hubs reflects the national and regional interests of each country, with cross-national discussions and cross-pollination of content.

HablaCentro acts as “regional pulse meter” and provides an online space for discussion. It  was formed as a collection of citizen news hubs in Central America, where the local communities can share their news, opinions and discuss in Spanish and with the means available to them - computer, email and text messaging. A team consisting of community organizers, editors, designers and technologists, support these hubs with tools and develop tutorials in Spanish to create participation and ownership of the hubs by the local community.  

HablaCentro utilizes two Android applications, the HablaCentro gateway which makes it possible for anyone to create their own SMS gateway from their Android-powered cellphone, and HablaRadio, developed specifically for community radio stations and citizen reporters to submit their voice-recorded reports and stories via cellphone. 

The hubs use a Web application framework called Rails, and volunteer editors provide technical support and video tutorials to help contributors. Leveraging partnerships with in-country nonprofits, news organizations and bloggers creates long-term support for the hubs and sustainable content distribution and verification of information processes.  Each hub includes simple aggregation of content from Twitter, blogs, and major news outlets, as well as contributed commentary, analysis, opinion pieces. In the future, portions of the contributions will go through a more rigorous news editing process to maintain journalistic value and also incorporate a micro-donation based platform, similar to Spot.us, to fund more investigative reporting that originates from the SMS contributions submitted by citizens.

A central component of the network of HablaCentro is the cellphone which accounts for about 35 million cell phone users in Central America. A 1999 report by Pyramid Research states the number of mobile phones in the region grew more than 180 percent, going from 443 thousand units to 1.2 million. Yet very few tools have been developed with the Central American community in mind, even though it is so geographically close to the United States and with a shared political history. 

The local communities in Central America have a need to share current regional events around them, to connect with one another and to their governmental institutions around issues such as crime, health, education, human rights violations, environmental changes which have effects far wider than the local communities. While there are local blogs, there are no platforms that combine the power of blogger participation, the use of mobile devices, the action-oriented information from community groups and the editorial and reporting process of professional journalists.

HablaCentro is unique approach to get local reporting and ownership in the hands of under-served Spanish-speaking communities in Central America. Each country's communities can shape their own news and teach others in a directly democratic and participatory process. In Central America the need for news is profound and provides a lifeline to much needed information for governance, financial opportunities, community connectedness and so much more. 

The history of Central America is mired in violence, dictatorships, political and economical corruptness, impunity and multiple outside political and economical forces involving themselves without the approval of the communities. The overabundance of blogs (in Guatemala I have compiled a directory of some 1,500 blogs), Facebook groups, the use of Twitter by municipalities, nonprofits, SMS delivery of breaking news by major news sites, all show there is a need and passion that people have to  participate and to forge their own democratic paths using cellphone and Internet technology as a tool for development. They are creating their own media and information networks they trust – a trust that is not often there for established media companies.

This is the core of the HablaCentro network: to provide a space for anyone to share their views, to educate, and inform community groups and citizens about how to tell any story or opinion that has impact, relevance, timeliness, can be verified, has geographic significance and to make the process community-driven. Journalism is an act of building community around information. Journalism is also just one type of information. HablaCentro consists of the community-owned hubs where the community are the editors, the producers, the creators and the consumers and the more people participate in that process the more they will believe in it. 

Each hub was created with the support of a core team of committed citizens in different parts of the world, together with a need from each country. HablaCentro is a case study in collaboration and communication in every step of the process - creation, maintenance and vision.