No one is more thankful than we are to everyone who traveled from far and wide to join us and share their stories. We've compiled choice quotes, links, and photos as a thank you to everyone who participated.

The PDF above was created by Paula Góes, Solana Larsen, and Georgia Popplewell. Go ahead, download it!

The Summit is over, but at least we'll always have the memories. And the videos. Thanks to Sami Ben Gharbia, our Video Archive has been updated with edited, high-resolution videos of the entire public event.

We're especially thankful to our Summit Sponsors for supporting the work of Global Voices and so many online activists around the world with this event. We hope to see everyone again next year!

Juhie is a South Asian-Canadian journalist, who is passionate about global health issues. She has worked as a health reporter and editor for almost ten years. She has reported for Reuters Health from India and Thailand, but also a string of other media, including MSNBC.com, Bulletin for the World Health Organization, Women's eNews, and the website EverydayHealth.com, which she helped create (and still works for as an editor). She is currently based in Paris, France.

Juhie has also volunteered for several social justice and health organizations over the years, including women's resource centers, a sexual health NGO in South India, and the Alliance for South Asian AIDS prevention where she led workshops on HIV/AIDS.

We're really pleased to welcome Juhie to Global Voices, and work together with her to expand our coverage of citizen media concerning public health. In her first post on Global Voices today, she looks at Indian bloggers' reactions to proposed legislation in the state of Maharashtra that would make HIV/Aids testing mandatory before marriage. Welcome Juhie!

Ivan Sigal, Georgia Popplewell. Both photographed at the Global Voices 2008 summit in Budapest by Global Voices board member, Joi Ito.

Global Voices has been searching for an Executive Director for the past year, transitioning the management of the project from co-founders Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman. In February, we promoted Georgia Popplewell, formerly our managing editor, to Managing Director, where she manages the day to day operations of our international community. Ivan will be working closely with Georgia, focusing on the long-term strategy of the project, on partnerships, fundraising and sustainability of the organization. We're thrilled to have the chance to work with someone so passionate about the potential of citizen media and knowledgeable about the global media environment.

Ivan is an award-winning photographer, currently working on a book on Central Asia. At our recent summit in Budapest, his workshop for bloggers on photography was one of our more popular events. Ivan has been blogging at Ivonotes, and we're looking forward to reading what he thinks about his new role, which he'll begin in mid-August.

Welcome to Global Voices, Ivan - we're glad to have you here.

During a Summit session about Lingua and the multi-lingual web, Eleonora Pantò represented the Italian team and gave a speech that was quite short due to limits on time. Therefore, I would like to introduce Global Voices in Italian's three co-managers and welcome them on board.

Bernardo Parrella, the initiator of Global Voices in Italian, is a freelance journalist, translator and activist living in the United States, covering digital culture issues (mostly) for several Italian media outlets, and is involved in a variety of grassroots projects. Among his many translations are books by Turkle, Norman, Lessig, Stallman, and Jenkins.

Eleonora Pantò works in Torino as Knowledge Community Manager in a Research Organization called CSP, dealing since 1992 with projects related to ICT and education. She also published books and essays on the overall impact of ICT on education and working environments. Actively involved in promoting Open Education Resources, she also enthusiastically supports the Global Voices initiative in Italy as a tool to revitalize the (often too biased) local media system.

Lucie Marie Dorion Mengozzi is a Canadian freelance translator now living in Tuscany where she teaches English and French. She makes full use of today's e-learning tools with her students, teens and adults, starting with streaming audio and video podcasts to instant messaging and blogs. She also firmly believes in the integration of web-based material in the learning process as it offers access to a variety of content, both academic and general, but often a bit less mainstream and non conventional.

While attending the recent Berkman@10 at Harvard, Bernardo had the chance to talk with several people about the importance of spreading the Global Voices citizen media model and news, even in Italy. At that point Global Voices had Lingua translation groups in 14 different languages, but none in Italian. Bernardo contacted me and proposed himself as coordinator for that project, discovering that Lucie (already involved in French Lingua) was also looking for people to start an Italian Lingua group.

The Italian Lingua team ‘informally' launched about a month ago, attracting media coverage and interest. They now have about 12 translators and publish at least two new posts every day.
The Italian team has great ambition to build upon Global Voices' standing to develop a dynamic, motivated community (also aiming at the many Italians spread throughout the world), and to foster a productive relationship with everybody involved in Lingua and at Global Voices.

Let's welcome Global Voices in Italian and say ‘Ciao' to Italian readers!

You can read more about the 15 current Lingua translation projects,here. We're always looking for new volunteers. Join us!

Rising Voices and Open Society Institute's Health Media Initiative are happy to announce the six newest health-focused citizen media outreach projects. We received over 110 proposals from health activists and organizations based in over 50 different countries. The six selected grantees represent the most innovative applications of citizen media tools like blogs, podcasts, and online video to help further the advocacy goals of public health organizations, and to empower the communities they work with.

In Brasov, Romania, the Casa Sperantei hospice center will train its nurses, doctors, and staff how to use audio and video recording equipment to share the direct stories of patients with life-threatening illnesses. The center's staff will also take advantage of their online media training and interactive website to explain the objectives, successes, and challenges in palliative care, which focuses on improving end-of-life care for patients and their families, with a special focus on vulnerable populations including the elderly, children, and patients with cancer or HIV/AIDS.

In the township of Kwa Mashu, on the outskirts of Durban, South Africa, the Kwa Mashu Community Advancement Project (K-CAP) will use its Ekhaya Imagination Lab to train 20 new citizen journalists from within the township how to report on local stories related to local health issues affecting the community. In 1998 Gugu Dlamini was stoned to death in Kwa Mashu after publicly declaring her positive HIV status. The twenty citizen journalists trained at K-CAP will aim to counter such severe stigma to HIV and AIDS while also bringing local health issues to an international audience.

Pavel Kutsev of the Drop-in Center will use blog posts, photos, podcasts, and online video to share his experiences working at a harm reduction facility based in Kyiv, Ukraine. The blog will open a window to the daily reality of drug users and describe how that reality affects public health throughout the country.

The Orizonturi Foundation in Campulung Moldovenesc, Romania will create a blogging club for mental health service users which trains them how to maintain a weblog, upload videos to online sharing sites, and use social networks. The technical skills will enable the participants to share their own stories and forge their own online identities.

In Brazzaville, Congo the AZUR Development organization, as part of its AIDS Network Africa initiative, will “train communication officers of local AIDS organizations in digital story telling, podcasting, and the creation of blogs to document the stigma and discrimination of people infected and affected by HIV and AIDS in Congo in order to use them as a tool for advocacy, education, and the promotion rights of people infected with HIV.” Each communication officer will describe how the AIDS pandemic is currently affecting the local community where he or she works and what daily life is like for people living with HIV and AIDS.

Last, but not least, the FrontAIDS project based in St. Petersburg, Russia will use citizen media to monitor accessibility to treatment for people living with HIV, AIDS, hepatitis, and TB in 20 regions around Russia. The interactive blog-based site will become a an aggregator and go-to resource of citizen media information related to health issues around Russia.

The six projects are diverse in their geography and their strategic approach, but they all share a desire to train health activists to use new media in order spread awareness about their work and the communities they serve.

We're delighted to announce that we've succeeded — registration fees for the Summit have been slashed from €210 (approx US$323) to US$152 for both Summit days (June 27 and 28), including lunch and refreshments, for those registering before June 25. Complete pricing details are available at our registration page, where our online registration system should be up and running shortly.

The Global Voices (virtual) office has been abuzz with growing excitement as the Summit date draws near. As many of you know, our community is scattered across the globe and in spite of working very closely and successfully together on a daily basis, the Summit is the only point in the year where we meet face-to-face as a group.

Nearly 80 members of the Global Voices community will be coming to Budapest from various parts of the world for the Summit, including a number of grantees of our Rising Voices outreach program, plus several guests arriving specially for the Global Voices Advocacy portion of the program. Countries represented at the Summit so far include Burma, Kazakhstan, Sudan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Trinidad and Tobago, USA, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Venezuela, China, India, Tajikstan, Bolivia, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Iran, Kenya, Singapore, Bahrain, Peru, Malawi, Tanzania, UK, Philippines, Colombia, Canada, Japan, Serbia, France, Czech Republic, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Taiwan and Armenia.

If you haven't yet visited the Summit web site and checked out our exciting program, we encourage you to do so. The moderators have been posting entries on the Summit blog previewing the panel topics and presenting the panelists, and we look forward to receiving your comments and input. For those of you who won't be joining us in Budapest, stay tuned for information about how you can participate remotely.

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 is taking place thanks to the support of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Open Society Institute, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the European Journalism Centre and dotSUB.

Our Summit will take place this year in Budapest, Hungary on June 27-28, 2008. Visit the Summit site for background information on the goals of the meeting, our terrific program of events, registration details and information about the charming city of Budapest, including a list of blogs about Hungary.

And while you're at it, please help spread the word about the Global Voices Summit by flying one of our sweet-looking Summit badges or banners on your blog or web site.

Over the next few days and weeks we'll be adding speaker bios, a list of attendees and more — and do keep checking in at the site for blog posts and commentary from Summit participants and others and to join in the conversation.

See you in Budapest in June!

THE JOB: The Public Health Editor will be responsible for writing weekly articles which cover the latest discussions and topics related to public health and human rights in the developing world from citizen media like blogs, podcasts, and video-blogs. S/he will work closely with the rest of the Global Voices editorial staff (managing, regional and language editors), and will also be expected to attend regular online editorial meetings.

As GV is a virtual organization, the Public Health Editor will not be expected to relocate. Regular access to high-speed internet connectivity will, however, be a key factor in being able to carry out this job.

The position involves:

• Surveying the current citizen media space to find blogs, podcasts, and vlogs focused on public health issues in the developing world.
• Introducing Global Voices readers to how health activists are using citizen media to spread awareness about public health issues.
• Interviewing and introducing the grantees of Rising Voices' latest health-focused grant competition.
• Liaising between public health bloggers and journalists looking for stories to report on.

This is a part-time position with modest compensation, for somebody who is passionate about helping to amplify the voices of health activists concerned with human rights from the developing world. It is also a great opportunity to become involved with a global community of bloggers who are working on the cutting edge of citizens' media.

THE REQUIREMENTS: Our ideal candidate has an international outlook and solid experience both in citizen media and public health. Solid English-language writing editing skills are a must, and a strong familiarity with the current tools, web sites and trends in citizen media worldwide is important. Familiarity with the regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia is particularly desirable. S/he has the ability to work independently and responsibly with only remote supervision.

Ideally, s/he will have the ability to read and write well in at least one language other than English and have a working knowledge of other languages. Preference will be given to candidates from outside the United States and Western Europe.

To apply, please send your CV and a letter of interest to outreach@globalvoicesonline.org. The application deadline is Saturday May 24, 2008.

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, in collaboration with the Open Society Institute Public Health Program’s Health Media Initiative, is now accepting project proposals for the third round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects focused especially on public health issues involving marginalized populations.

Ideal applicants are dynamic NGOs or individuals who:

• Represent the vital voices of communities affected by stigmatized health issues whose stories, viewpoints, and experiences are often marginalized, unheard, or misrepresented in mainstream media. These communities include people living with HIV and AIDS and/or tuberculosis, people with mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities, injecting drug users, sex workers, LGBTI individuals, people in need of palliative care services, and Roma facing discrimination in healthcare settings.
• Are enthusiastic about using new, interactive modes of communication to build relationships and establish dialogue on the important advocacy issues of their community.
• Envision and highly prioritize media and communication strategies to achieve the advocacy goals of their organization.

Pre-requisite for the competition:

• Organizations must have their own website or participate in a network website.

Rising Voices and OSI aim to bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities. Examples of potential projects include:

• Working with a tuberculosis or HIV clinic or local drop-in center with the offer of training health workers, local harm reduction or sex worker outreach workers, patients, and their families to blog and upload video, in order to document their work, their experiences, and their community.
• Use blogs, podcasts, and online video to help give voice and representation to LGBTI communities and advocate for their rights.
• Distribute mp3 recorders to a local NGO working on palliative care issues, and help them produce monthly audio testimonials and/or interviews featuring stories and experiences of participants, for uploading to the NGO's website.
• Organizing a regular workshop on blogging and photography at a legal aid center representing the rights of people living with mental disabilities. Part of the budget could be used to purchase affordable digital video cameras and internet café costs, so that participants can describe their challenges and life experiences to a global audience.
• Purchasing an affordable digital video camera and teaching a group of local Roma community outreach workers how to produce an ongoing video-blog documentary about their work, which could then be posted to the organization's website and linked to other networks' websites.

Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $1,000 to $5,000. Special consideration will be given to proposals from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucusus. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets.

Successful projects will be prominently featured on Global Voices.

Completed applications will be accepted no later than Sunday, June 1st in either English or Russian. Please submit your application on the Rising Voices apply page. Russian-language proposals should be submitted here. All applicants will receive a confirmation email by June 3. Grantees will be announced on June 28 at the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest, Hungary.

***

The OSI Public Health Program’s Health Media Initiative aims to increase public awareness of health issues, especially stigmatized health issues involving marginalized populations. The initiative focuses on supporting health NGOs to develop their relationships with journalists across all media platforms so they may communicate health and human rights issues effectively with the public. Where the media environment is especially hostile, OSI also supports “community journalism” initiatives to encourage NGOs to use digital technology to communicate their stories and issues to each other and to the world at large. The initiative also seeks to build the capacity of media professionals to report responsibly on public health issues.

Rising Voices aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities.

This partnership allows more people to have access to both websites and the chance to be informed about subjects related to activism and the international blogosphere.

Canal Solidario-One World is a media project that has offered access to news and resources about solidarity, cooperation, peace, human rights and social dialogue through the internet since 1999. It is promoted by the Fundación Chandra, with the support of Fundación Un Sol Món de Catalunya.

The Canal Solidario-One World project is developed by a team of journalists committed to the idea of media as the engine of change towards a more inclusive and free society. Canal Solidario-One World belongs to the OneWorld international network, with 11 local branches all over the world and more than 1,700 subsidiary organizations.

It is worth mentioning that Canal Solidario has very interesting sections such as the Entrevistas (Interviews) with people who play an active part in social movements and other areas of similar interest, La Lupa de los Conflictos (The magnifying glass of conflicts) that analyses controversial subjects, and the Blogosfera (Blogosphere), where posts from the international blogosphere are outlined on a weekly basis.

We are certain this partnership between websites will benefit readers who will see their information and reading options increased in this way.

Our Lingua translation sites, which translate Global Voices' English-language content into over thirteen languages (and counting) are now more prominently linked from a box at the top right-hand side of the home page.

The main page for our Special Coverage sections, which attempt to aggregate the massive volume of citizen media commentary on topics like the 2007 Burmese Protests, Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Kenya's post-election crisis and, most recently, the protests in Tibet, is now linked from the navigation bar just below the Global Voices logo, and links to individual Special Coverage pages are highlighted just below the featured posts.

And last but not least, prominent links to our outreach section, Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy and our special US elections project Voices without Votes, are now displayed just before the short links on the right-hand side of the home page.

We are pleased to announce the translation into French of Blog for a Cause!, the Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy thanks to Claire Ulrich from Global Voices en Français. Blog for a Cause! has already been translated into Spanish; the translation into Arabic, Chinese and Bengali is on the way.

The guide outlines easy-to-follow tips on how to use blogs as part of campaigns against injustice and features successful examples of advocacy blogs from around the world. It is divided into five sections:

1. Frequently asked questions about what blog advocacy is
2. The 5 key elements of any successful advocacy blog
3. The 4 steps to creating an advocacy blog
4. How to make your blog a vibrant community of active volunteers
5. Tips to help blog activists stay safe online.

Please download Bloguer pour une cause ! (PDF file) and help us translating it into your language.

Global Voices Lingua is honored to announce today that German, Albanian and Macedonian have launched officially. A new chapter is turned.

Since the initiation of Lingua, we have gathered an enormous group of enthusiastic editors and volunteers to translate their passion into words. Because of their precious efforts, Global Voices is heard by more people in more languages around the world. Lingua has also reflected the variety and diversity of multilingual World Wide Web.

These translators (not machine translation!) has contributed their time and intelligence to fulfill the mission of Global Voices – to “shine light on places and people other media often ignore.” Their greate translations have also helped Global Voices reach new audience.

Now, Lingua has a dozen translation versions. Of course it is not enough! There are many other languages not covered by Lingua yet, and this is the way we are progressing. More languages are coming. Welcome to join us! If you are interested in getting involved, please visit Lingua page for further information and contacts.

The event will bring together the members of the Global Voices citizen media project and its wider community with a diverse group of bloggers, activists, technologists, journalists and others persons from around the world, for two days of public discussions and workshops around the theme “Citizen Media & Citizenhood”.

The Global Voices Summit provides an opportunity for us to share the knowledge in our dynamic global community with bloggers, activists, students and media professionals. The meeting will explore important developments in citizen media spearheaded by people outside North America and Western Europe and investigate how the growing number of people distributing information globally can help affect lasting social change.

The first day of the Summit, hosted by Global Voices' Advocacy section, will be devoted to discussions about censorship and the challenges facing free expression online. The second day will highlight cutting-edge applications of Web 2.0 on electoral campaigns in emerging democracies; tackle issues of translation and the idea of the world wide web as a multi-lingual space; and showcase citizen media solutions in emergency situations. The day two program will also include a hands-on workshop in building activism tools using free, web-based services such as Google maps, Twitter and online video-sharing sites.

An overview of the Summit program is posted at the end of this message. A Summit web site with registration information and a updated program will be available within the next couple of weeks, but feel free to contact me at georgiap@globalvoicesonline.org if you have further questions or for information about sponsorship.

Please add the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit to your calendars. We hope you'll join us in Budapest!

Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008
Budapest, Hungary - June 27-28, 2008

DRAFT PROGRAM

June 27, 2008

Session 1: “Toward a Global anti-censorship network”
Why do we need a global anti-censorship network? How can we facilitate the sharing of techniques, best practices and experiences around the protection of online free speech?

Session 2: “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech”
Citizen Media confronts the threat of censorship and oppression. Some case studies from Kenya, Burma, Egypt and Hong Kong.

Session 3: “Living with censorship”
Participants share their experience of living in countries where government censorship is a
reality and of being part of organized efforts to combat it.

Session 4: “Frontline Activists meet the Academy: Tools and Knowledge”
The tools to circumvent web filtering and other methods of online censorship exist, but they don’t always reach the people who need them as easily as they could. How can we facilitate better coordination between the developers of these tools and the anti-censorship movements that need them? And how do we facilitate the flow of information and from the activists back to the developers so the latter can design more appropriate tools?

Session 5: “NGO's and on-the ground activists: Defending the Voices”
How can NGOs most effectively work with on-the-ground free speech activists to combat censorship?

June 28, 2008

Session 1: “Web 2.0 Goes Worldwide”
The second incarnation of the internet means much more than social tagging, RSS, and trackbacks. Thanks to the steady proliferation of broadband connectivity throughout the developing world and the innovations of international web entrepreneurs, some of the most exciting online developments today are taking place in locations where, merely a decade ago, internet access was rare, if available at all. This panel will gather leaders of cutting-edge Web 2.0 initiatives from Bolivia, Botswana, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Session 2: “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”
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, at least potentially, to participate more fully in the democratic process. This session looks at the impact these tools have had on recent elections in Kenya, Armenia and Iran and poses the question: is citizen media having an actual impact on democracies in transition?

Session 3: “Digital Activism Workshop”
Are you prepared for the next emergency in your blogosphere? In this session we break into group workshops for some hands-on training from activists who have used these tools to create mashups like the Access Denied map, which highlights censorship of Web 2.0 sites, Ushahidi.com, a presentation designed to visualize and document the post-election violence in Kenya, as well as report on crises using tools such as SMS and Twitter.
Group A) Google Maps mashups
Group B) SMS groups and flashmobbing
Group C) Campaigns for arrested bloggers
Group D) Video distribution
Group E) Reporting with micro-blogging tools

Session 4: “Translation and the Multilingual Web”
In the short history of global communication via distributed computer networks, numerous thinkers, specialists, media critics, social activists and writers have fashioned a vision of the Internet as a barrier-free forum for the inter-national and inter-cultural transmission of knowledge, ideas, and information. In practice, however, online communities are still divided by the differing languages they speak. Is online linguistic segregation a technical or cultural dilemma? Will machine translation tools such as Google Translate fulfill the promise of a multilingual web or is it up to human volunteer translators to construct bridges between language-oriented online spheres?

Session 5: “Citizen Media to the Rescue”
In moments of political upheaval, governments often silence the mainstream media either legally or with threats of violence. The only ones left to tell the story are citizens who witness it and share pictures and reports online. In this session we investigate the impact citizen media has had on emergency situations in Myanmar (Burma), Pakistan, and China, both internationally and locally.

Blog for a Cause!, the Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy, is now available in Spanish thanks to this translation by María Florencia Puente from Global voices en Español.

The guide outlines easy-to-follow tips on how to use blogs as part of campaigns against injustice and features successful examples of advocacy blogs from around the world. It is divided into five sections:

1. Frequently asked questions about what blog advocacy is
2. The 5 key elements of any successful advocacy blog
3. The 4 steps to creating an advocacy blog
4. How to make your blog a vibrant community of active volunteers
5. Tips to help blog activists stay safe online.

Blog Por Una Causa! is availble for download as a PDF file. You may need to install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view it.

Please download Blog Por Una Causa! and help us translating the guide in your language.

For further information please contact Mary at MaryCJoyce [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com or Global Voices Advocacy Coordinator Sami Ben Gharbia at advocacy [ at ] globalvoicesonline [ dot ] org