Register your blog to add your voice!

This is the Global Voices entry.

Over the next couple of months Global Voices is going to be following environmental and climate change issues extra closely. We're hoping to amplify unheard voices in the debate around the United Nations meetings in Copenhagen in December (COP15).

In November, on Conversations for a Better World, a blog sponsored by the UNFPA, two of our authors, Eduardo and Belen, are going to be cross-posting stories about population dynamics and climate change. I know they'll be looking towards Latin America.

Throughout October, Global Voices bloggers have been mentoring 31 young men and women from Africa and Denmark who are organizing an online campaign under the auspices of MS ActionAid in Copenhagen, Denmark. They've asked us to relay stories about ‘what developing countries need to help correct damage from climate change'. So we'll try to do that too.

Some mentor entries

For Blog Action Day, Jillian encouraged her readers to visit the blog of her mentee Edith, while Ali says his mentee Peter turned the tables on him and inspired him to write a post on climate change.

Another mentor, Gayle, has written a longer post highlighting the situations of farmers in Ghana, Australia (her own countries) and Zimbabwe (her mentee John's country).

Gayle used Twitter to put the call out for farmers in Australia. To her surprise, she was re-tweeted by ABC Radio in Australia, and came directly in touch with several farmers by email. She read interviews with Ghanaian farmers online, and even spoke to one directly.

And among dozens of links and interesting sources, Gayle found information on how local communities use traditional knowledge in rural Ghana to cope with climate change.

Gayle did something that bloggers on Global Voices do all the time. She went looking for voices you rarely hear speaking for themselves in international mainstream media.

In the past week on Global Voices

Bhumika Ghimire wrote a post today about the future of bio-gas in Nepal, including a video by a Japanese university research team that shows how bio-gas is used in rural Nepal.

A landslide caused by Typhoon Ketsana in a village in Pampanga province. Photo by Flickr user susancorpuz90

Earlier this week, Mong Palatino wrote about how Filipino bloggers are drawing connections between climate change and the devastating floods in Manila that killed more than 500 people.

Saffah Farooq wrote about how citizens of the low-lying Indian Ocean island state of the Maldives, feel their fate may be decided by the success of treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

Wildlife blogger Samuel Maina in Kenya, wrote about how Kenyans are so desperate for rain they are awaiting El Niño rains that may displace thousands with mixed feelings.

There is a constant flow of stories on Global Voices' environment topic feed by bloggers all around the world.

Looking ahead

On this Blog Action Day, where we celebrate the collective power of bloggers to push for change, we'd like to encourage everyone not only to write about climate change but also to read what other people are saying.

Over the next many weeks, we're going to be overwhelmed by news stories by journalists quoting politicians, activists, and many others - but when the UN meetings are over and the cameras are off, the people who face the consequences of climate change immediately, will still be telling their stories on the internet in hopes of reaching people who care.

As we say at Global Voices, ‘The world is talking. Are you listening?'

For those far removed from the front lines of climate change, listening and linking is one the few ways we can succeed to make the problem feel real and in need of solutions today.

Related posts

• Blog Action Day 2009: Rising Voices Projects Discuss Climate Change
• Posts in Portuguese on Blog Action Day ‘09
• Greek Posts on Blog Action Day ‘09
• Africa discusses climate change
• Caribbean: Blogging About Climate Change
• Israel: Blog Action Day for the Environment
• Morocco: Blogoma participates in Blog Action Day
• Ghana: Blog Action Day ‘09
• Global Health: Can Condoms Combat Climate Change?

This is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. The aim of this global demonstration is to raise awareness and encourage a global conversation on important subjects that face the world.

In their official blog, Robin Beck announced the topic of the Blog Action Day 2009:

I am so happy to announce the topic for Blog Action Day 2009: climate change.

Thousands of people voted and together we’re going to bring new breadth to the global climate change conversation just as our leaders prepare to meet in Copenhagen this December in an effort to agree on lasting solutions to this crisis.

Blog Action Day was founded by Collis & Cyan Ta'eed in 2007 with the support of their team at Envato. On that first occasion, founders encouraged more than 20.000 bloggers to devote a day to blogging about environmental issues. The next year, in 2008, they highlighted poverty issues with bloggers sharing their personal perspectives and ideas for solutions.

This year, climate change is the subject, which is a great opportunity to build on all the discussions and online campaigns that are being organized in advance of the COP15 United Nations meeting in Denmark in December 2009.

Anyone can participate in Blog Action Day on October 15, be it on blogs, online journals or online magazines. There are no limits to how many posts one can write nor to the content of it, as long as climate change is the subject. Among the supporters of Blog Action Day are organizations such as Oxfam, Avaaz, TckTckTck, Greenpeace and Amnesty International.

As an official blog partner, Global Voices will support Blog Action Day by encouraging bloggers around the world to register their support online and join in. On October 15 and beyond, Global Voices bloggers look forward to linking to and translating what bloggers around the world are saying about climate change and the environment where they live.

Global Change, the education program of MS ActionAid Denmak has an ambitious goal teaching social and political change on a global level through education of young people in communication, new media and innovative organising. They are being helped by a team of 31 Global Voices Blogger Mentors that have each been paired with one Danish or African student in order to help them become more familiar with both the technical and human aspects of blogging.

Challenges of mentoring virtually

Since the initial chain of introductory emails between Mentor and Mentees around two weeks ago, numerous positive interactions have taken place and new friendships are forming. Some Mentors have been giving technical advice on Gmail, Twitter, RSS feed, Skype, Facebook, instant messaging, embedding videos, sharing links, Flickr and creative commons, and Mentors have also been commenting on the Mentees' new blogs.

However, in a recent online IRC chat meeting between Mentors to review progress, some were concerned that many Mentees are still only treading carefully into the online world, and have such a tight program, learning new technology, while at the same time learning and planning a campaign for the Copenhagen climate change summit that they have not all been as excited about daily online communication via email and chat as the Mentors.

Resources for new bloggers

Mentors have decided to approach this positively by looking for more ways to inspire Mentees to find meaning in blogging and appreciate how sharing information and building online communities  can contribute to transformation, epecially for a burning issue like Climate Change. With only 3-4 weeks left of the mentorship, Mentors have discussed starting blog memes, and providing topic suggestions for those new bloggers who are still unsure what to write about.

Mentors have been on the go, gathering resources for better mentoring for their Mentees on a wiki page. and in an email group mailing list. Noteworthy resources include: The Common Craft “in plain English” video series, including “Blogs in Plain English” and “Twitter in Plain English“; various articles on climate justice; a list of environmental journalists on Twitter; Sylwia Presley's newly started blog about how to blog; and Diego's suggestion of this inspiring guide.

Catching up with Mentee Blogs

Mentees have written many interesting and resourceful posts with their take on climate change and its challenges. Following are some of the highlights from the 31 mentees.

Annlou has questioned about superficial green revolution. Casper wrote about the obvious limitations of the individual approach – and the problems of the communal alternative. Josephine wrote a thought piece which was triggered by the idea of climate friendly food.

Mentee Arvid and Mentor Renata Avila jointly posted their experience and shared insights gathered while Renata visited Dominican Republic. Rie has blogged on what is happening with the climate issue on the NGO and grassroots level where she featured a number of non-governmental organizations such as Greenpeace and Peoples Climate Action.

Signe reflected on the buzz about climate change and personal responsibility. Simonwr wrote about why changes must come from ordinary people rather than from government leaders.

Mentees also organized this happening in central Copenhagen as part of the Avaaz Global Wake-Up Call on Climate Change.

The course is organized by the development agency MS Action Aid Denmark (more info in Danish) and will bring together university students and professionals from Denmark, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zambia to build their skills in online and offline activism over three months.

Global Voices bloggers will act as virtual mentors to the students in the first six weeks of the course where they will be learning about blogging, citizen media, and online activism.

Organizing for climate justice

The final challenge for the students at the end of the course will be to develop a project related to “climate justice“.

After the first six weeks in Copenhagen, participants will conduct fieldwork in Denmark and Kenya (incidentally coinciding with the African bloggers meeting, Kelele) before returning to Copenhagen once more in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in December.

Through personal online communication, the mentors will introduce their mentees to the wonders of blogging, and help inspire them to see possibilities for creative use of citizen media for activism. Many will also be volunteering advice about micro-blogging and other technologies.

Mentoring from South to North

Among the mentors (from left to right): Tharum, Gayle, Joe, Renata, Ismail, Elia

The 31 Global Voices mentors come from more than 20 different countries, including Venezuela, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Cambodia, Brazil, and Bangladesh. Two-thirds of the students will be from Denmark and the rest from Africa.

Alongside their involvement with Global Voices, several mentors are well-known bloggers in their own countries, and all have either extensive experience or knowledge of online organizing efforts in their own regions. We expect that pairings between - for instance - a blogger in India with a blogger from Denmark; or a blogger in Azerbaijan with a blogger from Uganda; will lead to new friendships and greater understanding of how global community can be fostered via the internet.

Developing a new model for blogger mentoring

The Global Voices mentors are developing the new mentoring program themselves through IRC chat room meetings, a shared wiki for “lesson” ideas, a Google group email list, and a Facebook group.

Mentors intend to create enough documentation that the experience could easily be repeated by Global Voices or by others in the future. In their own blogs and tweets about the project, they will be using the tag: #gvmentors and we will be sharing developments and conclusions on Global Voices too. Later on, there will also be a student website at: globalchangenow.net

If you know of similar mentoring initiatives we should look at, we'd love to hear about them in the comments.

For Global Voices, this project is a welcome source of alternative revenue. Individual mentors (who usually contribute to Global Voices on an entirely volunteer basis) will be offered modest stipends for their work as mentors, but their collective effort is also generating revenue to support the Global Voices community as a whole.

At least a dozen Global Voices bloggers will be sharing stories from their blogospheres about environment and climate change, youth and sexuality, motherhood, reproductive rights, and more, over the next six months on Conversations for a Better World.

Every month there is a new subject and two new bloggers will take the reins. Ayesha Saldanha (Bahrain) and Rezwan (Bangladesh) co-edited the stories in August, and they will be followed by Ndesanjo Macha (Tanzania) and Njeri Wangari (Kenya) in September.

So far, we've heard from HIV-positive bloggers in Africa and Asia, attitudes to AIDS in the Middle East, and Indian bloggers on farmers facing extreme poverty committing suicide.

This is a great opportunity for us to reach non-governmental organizations and a UN audience, and for Global Voices as whole it is also a very welcome alternative source of income. We are cross-posting the Global Voices entries from Conversations for a Better World on a special coverage page on this website, and sending back links to all the translated versions from Lingua websites.

Conversations for a Better World is still growing and looking for more volunteer contributors. We're encouraging our own community to take part by submitting their stories, and it's easy for anyone else to register and share articles or comments too.

We still have much work to do in chipping away at barriers to development caused by ignorance or lack of awareness. By reading and speaking more openly about many of the things bloggers around the world see in their daily lives we can all help make a small difference.

In 2008, after being administered for three years by the Berkman Center at Harvard University, we became an independent non-profit foundation incorporated in the Netherlands. For an organization with hundreds of members throughout the world, Global Voices manages to keep costs relatively low. We have no physical office, and most of the remarkable people who work so hard to produce the content you see in these pages do so on a voluntary basis. Still, much of our time and energy in the past year and a half has been focused on fundraising and figuring out ways to make the organization more independently sustainable.

We’re pleased to say that, in spite of the current economic crisis, we’re close to covering our budget for 2009, thanks to the support of the philanthropic organizations listed here. To ensure our long-term sustainability, however, we’re looking to strike a balance between philanthropic support, editorial commissions, partnerships, and content syndication, with a bit of advertising in the mix.

Here are some of the ideas we’ve been exploring:

Content Commissions and Underwriting

All our content is published under a Creative Commons license that allows both commercial and non-commercial websites to republish what they like. From time to time, however, an organization will commission us to cover a specific region or topic more in depth. In 2008, Reuters underwrote the cost of hiring editors to curate content on climate change and citizen video. And over the next six months, a new blog from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) will be commissioning our editors to cross-post stories about women's health, young people and sexuality, population, development and climate change. Some donors or organizations with an interest in seeing more of a certain kind of coverage could also specifically support that content, with a clear understanding that they will have no say over the content itself. This kind of underwriting is a feature of many public media models. This type of income is likely to become a significant alternative source.

Advertising

Many websites use automated advertising services, but so far we’ve decided against going that route. Earnings from these ads would be fairly small relative to the amount of space we’d have to devote to them, and we’re concerned about some of the questionable content automated ads can serve. But this doesn’t mean we’re philosophically opposed to advertising. This week, we will be doing our first paid promotion for an online video competition organized by the website Put it On. We feel that promoting a citizen media competition that is open to anyone in the world is in line with our mission. We have also made a commitment that we shall always make it expressly clear when any of our relationships or content partnerships is paid or sponsored, and advertising will be clearly marked as such.

Consulting

There’s an tremendous amount of knowledge and talent in the Global Voices community, and there are opportunities for partnerships with other organizations which can bring financial benefit to both Global Voices and to individual community members. In September, 30 Global Voices bloggers will be paid an honorarium to mentor new bloggers from Europe and Africa participating in an online communication course with ActionAid Denmark. We’re delighted to be able to provide interesting opportunities for Global Voices volunteers and also to share the income across the organization, while using the experience to develop new training guidelines for future mentoring projects.

Online donations

We launched our online donations page at the end of last year with a quiet funding appeal followed by a slideshow featuring photos and artwork from members of our community, and we’re planning another in the near future. In an ideal world, we’d be able to survive only on donations from our readers, and while we know that’s unrealistic, we’re very grateful when friends show their support in that way. So if you like the way we're thinking and growing and care to send us a donation, do know that it will be greatly appreciated!

These are just a few of the ideas we’ve been exploring in order to generate additional revenue for Global Voices alongside our more traditional fundraising. If you’d like to explore any of these further with us, please contact me at georgiap at globalvoicesonline dot org.

We're hugely thankful and proud of all the people who invest their time and energy in this project and who, together, seem to be making it work.

We spent three days working with the OTT09 crowd discussing open translation, together with technologists, translators, and content providers. See Ethan Zuckerman's summary article for details, delve into the OTT09 wiki for notes on the sessions, or read the brand-new FLOSS manual on open translation tools, that was authored during a five-day “book sprint” that took place after the conference. We followed OTT09 with another two days brainstorming - defining the questions and agenda for the translation exchange research.

OTT09 group photo, tired but happy, image courtesy of itzpapalotl

Perhaps the most exciting part of launching a new project is the opportunity to work with new colleagues, and to run the research we've found some very talented people with diverse and complementary skills. We're very happy to welcome Marc Herman into the GV community as the program manager for the project. Marc comes to us with a long history as a freelance writer, author, and editor, speaker of Bahasa Indonesian, Spanish, and student of Catalan. His most recent post is as foreign editor for True/Slant. He will be working to include diverse perspectives into how GV might approach the exchange. His area of research will focus on the demand side questions - who might need the services of a translation exchange? How might users find content they want? How might they contribute content for translation? How do identify audiences who need consistent flows of content from other languages?

Marc will be joined in the research by two people already active in the Global Voices community, Bernardo Parrella and Leonard Chien. Bernardo is currently the Lingua Italian editor, as well as an accomplished translator of numerous books from English to Italian, with a focus on technology, new media, and social change. He has considerable experience with online translation tools and technology as well as with translation communities, and will drive research on appropriate technology platforms, possible technology partners, and imagining a helpful and welcoming online environment for participating translators. Leonard is a co-director of Lingua, GV's translation community, which currently translates GV content into over 15 languages. Leonard will work on community aspects of an exchange, as well as putting his love of statistics and analysis to good use.

Marc, Bernardo, and Leonard will co-author a blog to serve as the hub for ideas, discussions, notes, musings, and article drafts. The blog may lead to a more formal research paper, but the process of how ideas for an exchange become elaborated, and broad participation in its creation are crucial to creating a project that has inclusion and community as core values. The Global Voices wiki is the current home for brainstorming on the exchange. That site won't go away, and we will be pulling the best of content on the wiki into the blog.

If you're interested in the exchange and wondering how to engage, the simplest way is to post a comment on the blog. There you'll also find our research agenda, updates, opportunities to contribute, and preliminary findings, as well as occasional photos of our favorite animals, people and objects, such as Marc's dog Paio, who is in the running to become the exchange mascot. (go to project blog to see image!)

The four other winners were Goods for Good, iSurvive, Wokai, Yoga Bear.

In case you don't know, Global Voices Advocacy is a project of Global Voices to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists. Its director is Sami ben Gharbia, a Tunisian free speech advocate and blogger.

Zemanta is a cool new blogging and social media application you can download as a Firefox extension. It works in Gmail too!

Among some of the lovely things people said in their endorsements of Global Voices Advocacy were…

On Sacred Beginnings a blogger with the pen name Moonstar Silverwolf writes:

I fully support what they do and hope they continue to have success in bringing to light how much censorship is out there and how badly it can get really quick. I also support their resources on how to guides and assistance for anonymous blogging so that freedom of speech is not suppressed in the online world like it might be in the real world. There are many countries and groups that will squash freedom of speech whenever they can, it is our job to help those who need to speak out and provide them the opportunity to do so without fear.

Aparna Ray delivers her vote as a Newsmerick:

Today, I would just like to pause
And blog for my favorite cause
The project “Advox”
Is brilliant, it rocks!
It's work deserves heartfelt applause!

On the Media Re:Public blog, Persephone Miel writes:

Full disclosure: I’m friends with many of the people who make Global Voices what it is and I’m writing this today in response to an interesting challenge that could help bring some more money to Global Voices. But I’m not doing it to help my friends, I’m doing it because I know how hard they work, how many amazing new projects they’d like to do and how important they are to the project of bulding the cross-border connections that we all need to become  global citizens.

Again, heartfelt thanks to everyone for the warm endorsements. If anyone should feel moved to make a donation, we'll gladly accept. But your friendship is the currency we really thrive on. Yeah!

We began discussing the implications of the polyglot internet several years ago, after translators spontaneously began translating the Global Voices site into Mandarin. Translators from other language communities got together to form Lingua after Global Voices' 2006 summit in Delhi. Lingua today translates Global Voices content into 15 languages, with another five languages in testing. For a thorough overview of the project, see Lingua co-Director Leonard Chien's timeline, and Chris Salzberg's excellent slideshow presentation and paper.

View Lingua translators around the world in a larger map

The Lingua initiative, driven almost entirely by the enthusiasm, creativity, and the efforts of volunteer translators, demonstrates the capacity for a community of like-minded translators and writers to bridge language barriers to share stories and information, based on a simple, nontechnical platform. Lingua points to the value of human effort and the importance of culture and community in choosing what to translate. It has also demonstrated the value of distributed human translation as a means of quickly translating a large quantity of current and topical information.

The idea for a translation exchange as a parallel and complimentary project to Lingua began in response to the larger challenge of the polyglot internet: that, with over 1.3 billion Internet users, any one of us is only seeing a small slice of existing content, based on our language capacities. The issue was addressed during our 2008 Summit in Budapest, both in presentations by members of the Lingua team (see http://globalvoices.blip.tv/file/1070249)  and in numerous conversations on the side. Ethan Zuckerman captures the phenomenon in this post - and in its English translation.

We have at present notional ideas about how a translation exchange might work and how it would fit with the existing, loose and innovative community that is Lingua. Our first challenge is to ask a lot of knotty, interesting questions about translation communities and culture, the economics of distributed production, and the nature of demand for translated news and information for a variety of media sources, and then, to see if we can make something interesting out of the answers. Our hunch is that we'll be working mostly on building communities, rather than making tools.

We want to work on simple, participatory, web-based “translation memory” systems, that would allow us to do things such as store past translations of complex phrases and maintain a common translated vocabulary. There are some good tools out there  to facilitate translation, such as World Wide Lexicon and dotSub, so we'll be asking how to integrate tools into communities of practice.

We also want to see whether an exchange platform can provide easier connections between the best of citizen media stories and media who might be interested in commissioning translations of specific subjects. For instance, whether the good folks at New America Media would find an exchange helpful in providing content for their 2000 ethnic media partner publications, to get them content from around the world in appropriate languages.

What's clear is that there is space for projects that work in the gap between existing information content providers in many languages, and the possibility of a translation exchange that could help open up a lot of content that was previously not accessible because of language barriers, and a lack of access to efficient and inexpensive translation. This includes information providers looking for new ways to get news from other language communities, development organizations seeking to ensure information about their issues are available in multiple languages, and probably lots of other uses we haven't considered because there's no platform like this at present.

We're at early stages with this initiative. Here's a link to an announcement for a project manager - some of you might be interested in applying! Our intention is to build a community of interest around the project - as with all GV projects, we recognize that the best ideas often come from practice and collaboration. Some of us will be gathering at Open Translation Tools 2009 in Amsterdam to kick off the discussion (registration open). We're also gathering initial ideas and inviting conversation on the Global Voices wiki - feel free to join in!

Global Voices is launching a new project! We're seeking a half-time project manager.

The project: Global Voices is launching a project to research, design, and build a translation exchange to facilitate the flow of information globally, with an emphasis on developing world, citizen media, and ethnic media content. The project seeks to match translation resources to the needs of media partners, for the purpose of facilitating the flow of news across multiple languages, and from local to global news contexts.

The goal of the project is to facilitate flows of news and information across multiple languages to support the polyglot Internet - read this post by Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman for background. The specific objectives are to research and develop a translation exchange mechanism to match supply and demand of translated news and information, and to pioneer a new mechanism for distributed translation of content and repurposing across a network of sites.

The Lingua translation exchange project will initially be a one-year initiative to identify opportunities and challenges, convene partners and interested parties, and determine feasibility. A second stage, to design a model for the exchange, and oversee its creation, may also occur in year one.

The job: The program manager for the Lingua Exchange initiative will manage the project, from inception to completion, including the following:
-oversee research on translation memory tools and work with the GV translation community to explore how to integrate these tools into GV projects.
-oversee research on technical, editorial, legal, and marketplace challenges of setting up a translation exchange for Global Voices and partners, as well as for a broader community.
-work closely with technical staff to identify technical solutions and challenges to integrate or link a translation exchange into existing Global Voices initiatives.
-manage collaboration with interested partners and the online translation community; represent this project and Global Voices at relevant forums.
-set up and work with an advisory board, members of which will include interested organizations and experts in translation communities.
-manage the workflow and communications with GV staff and community, and organize and run any meetings and work outputs that further the goals of this project.
-track the work flow against the stated goals of the project.

As Global Voices is a virtual organization, the project manager will not be expected to relocate. However, he or she needs regular access to high-speed internet connectivity and will be expected to travel. Salary and other compensation will depend on the candidate’s experience. Start date: as soon as possible.

Our ideal candidate will:
-have a combination of relevant expertise in online media, translation, and project management.
-have the ability to work independently, in an unstructured work environment, and to work with a virtual community.
-be computer literate, comfortable working with programmers and technical language. Programming/HTML knowledge not required but strong familiarity with the use of online social media tools (blogging platforms, aggregators, use of RSS feeds, and tagging) is important.
-speak and write English fluently, and be highly proficient in at least one other language; polyglot speakers highly desirable!

Interested candidates please send CV and Letter of Interest explaining why you'd be a good candidate for the job to: editor AT globalvoicesonline DOT org.

Update (June 18, 2009): Applications for this position are now closed.

In August I had the pleasure of joining this wonderfully energetic and talented group of writers, translators, activists, and bloggers. As the new Executive Director I've been learning every day, and I am proud to be a part of this community as we expand our networks and look for new ways to sustain our work.

In 2008, we've had a number of big changes. First, after being supported since 2005 by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Global Voices took a big step towards its future by registering as an independent nonprofit organization. We are now officially “Stichting Global Voices,” a Netherlands-based foundation dedicated to supporting and facilitating citizen media and blogging.

Our mission remains the same: to call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens' media around the world; to support the emergence of new citizens' voices; and to advocate for online freedom of expression around the world.

While we continue to have strong informal ties to Berkman, we now have a constituted board, a growing staff, and independent administration. While our registration is Dutch, we remain resolutely global in character and virtual in our operation.

We have no office; instead the world is our workspace. Our board members hail from Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Utah, and Massachusetts; our staff are in Trinidad & Tobago, Taipei, the Hague, Washington D.C., Toronto, moving between Copenhagen, Puerto Rico, and New York, or simply homeless, caught on the jetways between Antananarivo, Dhaka, Durban, El Alto and Kolkata. Our editors hail from places such as Brasilia, Cochabamba, Almaty, Kiev, Paris, and Beijing, and our authors are simply everywhere.

From the start, Global Voices has been a project powered equally by a volunteer, community effort and by the support of donors. In 2008 that community has continued to grow; we now have some 120 authors and some 130 translators contributing their time and effort to make GV a success.

Financially, GV has also continued to grow. Our donors have included the MacArthur Foundation, Reuters, the Knight Foundation, Hivos, the McCormick Tribune Foundation, Google, and the Open Society Institute. In 2009 we're also lucky to be supported by the Media Development Loan Fund on strategic planning, as a fiscal sponsor, and on funding support. We also have the support of the New World Foundation and the Arca Foundation. And while the financial collapse in 2008 has been hard on everyone, we're hopeful that we'll be able to maintain and grow Global Voices through a combination of volunteer effort, donor support, partnerships with other media, syndication, and possibly select advertising.

With that in mind, we've recently set up a donations mechanism, to help us cover the costs of running our newsroom, paying our server expenses, and supporting our small, dedicated staff.  Even a small contribution will help us to keep bringing you the best of online stories and news from many languages and around the world.

On programs, we've had an excellent year, and are tremendously excited by all the work and projects that await us in 2009.

A group of Global Voices authors at the GV Summit in Budapest in June 2008 (photo by Joi Ito)

Our newsroom is garnering international recognition for its work finding and amplifying unheard stories; we're finding that we are particularly useful in times of crisis and natural disaster. These stories are gathered on our Special Coverage pages, which in 2008 focused on events such as the Kenyan elections violence, the Myanmar cyclone, the Sichuan earthquake, the South Ossetia conflict, and the Mumbai, India attacks. We also ran popular special projects together with Reuters around the Beijing Olympics, and Voices without Votes, about the U.S. presidential elections. For 2009 we're looking forward to continuing our coverage of underexposed and underrepresented stories, especially in light of the continued decline in international media coverage around the world.

Our outreach initiative, Rising Voices, now supports 17 projects to bring blogging and online media to underrepresented communities. Rising Voices is developing from a micro-grants and training program into a network of online community media projects that support and help each other by sharing best practices, training, and knowledge. We're sponsoring another round of micro-grants in January, and planning to expand the network beyond grantees to support other projects in the burgeoning citizen media community.

Our translation community, Lingua, is now translating Global Voices content to 16 languages. Lingua has grown incredibly, from only Chinese and Spanish in early 2007, to “one of the largest volunteer-based online translation communities in the world.” The Lingua community is likely to keep growing in 2009, with another five languages in line to set up sites.

Our Advocacy project has had a busy year, in the face of increasing pressure and attacks on bloggers around the world. In 2008, Internet journalists became the most targeted of all media producers in repressive environments. In response, GV Advocacy has reported on online media persecutions in 40 countries, conducts training and advocacy at conferences and workshops, and provides resources and guides for blogging anonymously and using web 2.0 tools for advocacy. We've translated our guides into seven languages and seen more than 12,000 downloads in the past 14 months. In 2009, we'll be continuing with these projects, and also expanding our news coverage of attacks against bloggers, including podcasts and video reporting.

One of the best things about the Global Voices community is the constant brainstorming about new ideas, projects, and ways of working. GV started as an experiment in the power of networks, and some of our most successful projects have grown out of ideas generated and driven by individuals in our network. For 2009, I'm certain we'll see ideas come together that are only possible when many work on a common goal, but with each contributing their own specific skills, knowledge, and enthusiasm.

With that in mind, we encourage you to join us! Subscribe to our daily digest email and RSS feeds, and don't hesitate to contact us if you would like to become a Global Voices author, translator (or donor!).

Thanks to all, and Happy New Year.

In December 2006, bloggers attending the Global Voices Summit in Delhi decided to create a project that would enable volunteer translators to make selected Global Voices posts available in different languages. In just two years, we now have websites in Bangla, French, Arabic, Albanian, Chinese, and many other languages.

Leonard Chien in Taiwan, is co-manager of Lingua with Portnoy Zheng. He has created an interactive timeline mapping the growth of the project, including the first translation in each language, key partnerships with other organizations, media coverage of the project, and interviews with participants.

Slide the green dot to the right to read entries on the timeline. Click on entries to read more details about each item.

New volunteers have appeared from all corners of the world to help collaborate on this project. An email to Lingua from an interested translator is the simple first step to getting involved. Each language group works autonomously to get translations done, and everyone works together in email groups to decide on the joint direction of the project. Many translators wind up authoring posts on Global Voices and vice versa.

Claire Ulrich, who manages Global Voices in French, created this map of the Lingua translators community.

View Larger Map

Please join Lingua if you have the skills and times to make a contribution. Everyone is welcome and the community is full of wonderful people. Email us! (at the bottom of this page)

We have welcomed more than 70 volunteer translators from at least 21 countries to the Global Voices community in the past year and a half.

It's not an easy task to keep up with the 150+ authors, editors, and translators who regularly contribute their energies to Global Voices.

We have no physical office, no geographical headquarters, and only rarely have a chance to meet face to face. You can read more about how Global Voices works on our About page.

Claire Ulrich who heads Global Voices in French has plotted the approximate locations of all Lingua translators on this Google map.

Please help spread knowledge of the many different Lingua translation sites by linking to them in your blog.

Agrandir le plan

The day began with an introduction by Georgia Poppelwell (GV Managing Director) and Solana Larsen (GV Managing Editor), in which our wonderful wonderful sponsors were thanked. David Sasaki (Rising Voices Outreach) spoke briefly about the latest ongoings of the Rising Voices project, and showed a short film that featured the current independent projects being funded by Outreach.

Session 1: Web 2.0 Goes Worldwide was moderated by Lova Rakotomalala, with Catalina Restrepo (HiperBarrio, Colombia), Collins Dennis Oduor (REPACTED, Kenya), Cristina Quisbert (Voces Bolivianas, Bolivia), Mialy Andriamananjara (FOKO, Madagascar) speaking. It was live blogged by Rebecca Wanjiku. This panel gathered leaders of cutting-edge Web 2.0 initiatives from Colombia, Kenya, Bolivia, and Madagascar who seek to make the global conversation more representative of the global population. Issues pertaining to their specific projects and the challenges that they have overcome.

Session 2: The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies focused on how the rise of blogging, social networking and micro-blogging services like Facebook and Twitter, video- and photo-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, and the spread of mobile technology have given ordinary citizens the means to participate more fully in the democratic process. Looking at the impact these tools have had on recent elections were Daudi Were (Kenya), Onnik Krikorian (Armenia), Hamid Tehrani (Iran), Luis Carlos Díaz (Venezuela). Solana Larsen moderated the session, while Jillian York livedblogged the proceedings.

When Biases Meet Biases was the topic for Session 3. Focusing on recent Tibetan protests against China with the Olympic Torch Relay Ceremonies, international sentiment towards the Chinese has been quite negative. What can be done to encourage dialogue in times of such heated disagreement? Panelists Isaac Mao (Entrepreneur and Researcher, China), Rebecca MacKinnon (University of Hong Kong and Global Voies), John Kennedy (Chinese Language Editor, Global Voices), aided by moderator Xiao Qiang, endeavor to answer this question. Thanks to Jillian York for liveblogging the session.

The up-and-coming powerhouse branch of GV, Lingua, provided Session 4: Translation and the Multilingual Web. Lingua Head Portnoy introduced and moderated a panel with speakers Chris Salzberg (Canada/Japan), Paula Góes (Brazil), Rezwan (Bangladesh), Claire Ulrich (France). They briefly addressed issues concerning how Lingua content posts are chosen for translation, the importance of how offering different language content greatly expands GV's audience, and covered some of the new translation tools that are being utilized by this team. Lingua currently translates into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Malagasy, Portuguese, Albanian, Macedonian, Arabic, Farsi, Bangla, Hindi, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese.

Our last session today was When the World Listens. Moderated by Preetam Rai and with Neha Viswanathan (India), Juliana Rotich (Kenya), Lova Rakotomala (Madagascar) as speakers. They provided the summit with a look at the importance of the “other” blogger- the ones who don't blog about politics but who blog about everyday life. Other issues discussed were how blogs can fill in the gap in new and inventive ways when traditional media outlets cannot report, such as in the cases of natural catastrophes and political crises. Rebekah Heacock provided the liveblogging coverage for this session.

It must be said that such a conference takes a huge amount of effort to put together, not only should the conference organizers (Georgia and Solana) be commended but our sponsors and partners. In addition, the team of volunteer bloggers who offered their time to take session notes, twitter, flickr, and to live blog (incrediably labor intensive!) deserve a great vote of thanks. It takes a community to cover our community!

I came from journalism, Ethan from non-profits; we both shared concern about the media and global attention flows. I saw the international English-language media focusing a lot of attention on certain people and places, and less attention on other voices and places. Ethan was doing a lot of research on media attention patterns. We were studying the blogosphere and wanted to talk about all the people around the world who were starting to blog.

Following the introductions, Session 1: “Toward a Global Anti-censorship Network,” started up, with Helmi Noman moderating. Jillian York and Renata Avila liveblogged the session using CoveritLive. Internet filtering, self-censorship, and related issues in Egypt, Morocco, Belarus, Japan, and Pakistan were discussed during this session, which featured Sami Ben Gharbia, Chris Salzberg, Andrei Abozau, Ethan Zuckerman, Awab Alvi, and Alaa Abdel Fatah.

Session 2 was liveblogged by Juliana Rotich. Mary Joyce moderated; Ory Okolloh of Kenya, Wael Abbas of Egypt, Amine of Morocco, Oiwan Lam of hong Kong, Au Wai “Alex” Pang of Singapore, and Hamid Tehrani of Iran spoke on the subject “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech.” Issues broached during the discussion were the use of twitter, proxies and SMS to get around internet filtering and censorship. Each panelist shared stories of recent events from their countries.

Jillian York liveblogged Session 3, entitled “Living with Censorship.” Awab Alvi of Don't Block the Blog moderated, whilst Helmi Noman, CJ Hinke, Andrew Heavens, Rezwan, Yazan Badran, and John Kennedy were panelists. Each panelist discussed what it's like to live with censorship, and each had a different perspective on the issue.

Session 4, liveblogged by Juliana Rotich, brought special guests, whom moderator Ethan Zuckerman said we are very lucky to have at the Summit, as they are in high demand as speakers! Roger Dingledine of Tor, Nart Villeneuve (Citizen Lab), Isaac Mao (Digital Nomads Project), Robert Guerra (Privaterra), and Danny O'Brien (Electronic Frontier Foundation) spoke. Danny O'Brien discussed selecting a circumvention tool:

What criteria should you look for when choosing circumvention & anonymizing tools? This is important because some tools that you can use now may not be safe to use in future. Google may be good now, but as it continues to grow, will it remain so?

The features you want…
-You want a tool that is well funded.

Juliana notes that O'Brien recommends against commercial products.

The day wrapped up with Session 5, liveblogged by Rebecca Wanjiku and moderated by Xiao Qiang. Panelists were Clothilde Le Coz (RSF), Elijah Zarwan (HRW), Nasser Weddady (HAMSA), Stephanie Hankey (Tactical Tech), and Antony Loewenstein (Amnesty International Australia's campaign Uncensor).

Rebecca MacKinnon spoke at the very end of the panel, discussing censorship as a legal, political and social program:

Without the social layer on top of the technical and legal solutions, a lot of these problems are going to be difficult to solve. I was really struck by stories about social demoralization and isolation that some bloggers feel.

She added that we as citizens need to work together to get past censorship and focus on what we can do, rather than what we can’t. To conclude, she also mentioned how censorship can have a landslide effect, for example: Japan’s freedom of speech/anti-pornography censorship stance could be used as an example by China to subdue its activists and dissenters.

Day 2 promises to be just as incredible, with Rising Voices, GV Lingua, and other topics.