Never before have so many people been threatened or imprisoned for what the words they write on the internet.

As activists and ordinary citizens have increasingly made use of the internet to express their opinions and connect with others, many governments have also increased surveillance, filtering, legal actions and harassment. The harshest consequence for many has been the politically motivated arrest of bloggers and online writers for their online and/or offline activities, in some tragic cases even leading to death. Online journalists and bloggers now represent 45% of all media workers in prison worldwide.

Today, Global Voices Advocacy is launching a new website called Threatened Voices to help track suppression of free speech online. It features a world map and an interactive timeline that help visualize the story of threats and arrests against bloggers worldwide, and it is a central platform to gather information from the most dedicated organisations and activists, including Committee to Protect Bloggers, The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Reporters without Borders, Human Rights Watch, CyberLaw Blog, Amnesty International, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Voices Advocacy.

What blogger, where?

Finding accurate information about arrested and threatened bloggers and online writers is difficult for several reasons.

First, the secrecy surrounding online censorship and repression makes it extra difficult to be accurate. Not a single week passes without stories of arrests of yet another online journalist or activist in countries like Egypt or Iran, but the details and reasons are often shrouded in mystery.

Second, there is still some confusion about the definition of a “blogger”. Professional journalists are increasingly migrating to online media and blogs in pursuit of more freedom, blurring the old lines of definition. And many so-called cyber-dissidents in China, Tunisia, Vietnam, or Iran, do not have personal blogs. Other times, bloggers are arrested for their offline activity, rather than for what they have published online.

This confusion has sometimes made it hard for online free speech advocates to come up with a good strategies and partnerships to defend bloggers and online activists, but it has never been more important to try.

Let's work together

At Global Voices we engage a community of authors, editors, and translators, who help keep us all informed of free speech and human rights abuses. With Threatened Voices we aim to open the process of reporting up even further to any person who has information.

We're calling on those whose friends, relatives, colleagues, or compatriots, have been threatened to help create and update the profiles of those missing or under arrest, so we can seek additional sources, verify, and link to online campaigns dedicated to freeing them.

In the process, we are hoping to learn more about when, where, and to what extent bloggers are being subjected to abuse in different countries, so we can share that information widely with journalists, researchers, and activists, and work towards creating an internet where everyone can exercise their right to speak freely, and where bloggers in prison are not forgotten.

Help spread the word. Tweet, blog and update your facebook status about Threatened Voices!

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.

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.

THE JOB: The Lingua co-director will oversee the running of the Global Voices translation community in collaboration with the existing co-director. Duties will include the following:

- planning strategy for the translation community
- participating in discussions on the community mailing lists and Global Voices general mailing list
- conducting meetings with translation community editors and translators
- keeping track of overall workflow and output of translation sites
- overseeing the creation of new translation sites and orienting new translation site editors
- managing translation community budget
- acting as liaison between the GV translation community and other GV sections, including the the GV core team

As Global Voices is a virtual organization, the co-director will not be expected to relocate. However, he or she needs regular access to high-speed internet connectivity. Start date: as soon as possible.

Our ideal candidate will:

- have a combination of relevant expertise in online media and translation. Some management experience is also desirable
- have the ability to work independently, in an unstructured work environment, and to work with a virtual community
- be computer literate. Programming knowledge not required but strong familiarity with the use of online social media tools (blogging platforms, aggregators) 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 your CV and a Letter of Interest explaining why you'd be a good candidate for the job to: editor AT globalvoicesonline DOT org

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.

Over the period of a year, the project will seek to present comprehensive and deep reporting on and analyses of the Russian-language online community. GV will concentrate on increasing coverage on globalvoicesonline.org of the Russian online world. We will:

• Produce original analysis, research, and reporting based on our coverage of the Russian-language Internet.
• Selectively follow up stories with in-depth research into compelling topics.
• Monitor target civil society initiatives, websites, and movements.

The primary focus of our coverage and analysis will be Russian-language online writing from and about the Russian Federation. Secondary content may also include Russian-language content from the former Soviet Union, as it relates to the Russian Federation. GV will seek to ensure that the content receives broad recognition and publicity, both on our sites, and in other contexts and languages. As with all our projects we seek publicity, interviews, and re-publication in other media to further amplify the content.

Global Voices is seeking to staff two part-time positions,  a Project Editor and a Contributing Editor.

The Project Editor will direct the project, manage project content on Global Voices sites, and coordinate staff and volunteer contributions. The individual will produce and/or edit several in-depth stories per week, as well as shorter posts linking and pointing to important topics, events, and writing as it occurs. The work will involve extensive translation, analysis, and further original research and reporting when appropriate, in order to elucidate and identify trends, ideas, and social and political currents within RuNet. Analysis will also examine how content in the Russian language space relates to other online communities, languages, and cultures, and offline Russian conversation, journalism, and social and political movements.

The Project Editor will also:

• Edit an ongoing Special Coverage section to consolidate and organize content from the RuNet project.
• Manage the content of project sub-editors and contributing authors.
• Work closely with Global Voices' existing Russian-focused editorial editors and authors.
• Work with other researchers and analysts of the Russian online world, in order to gain broader perspectives and diverse content
• Cultivate relationships with Russian bloggers and writers, toward the same end.
• Present at conferences and events pertaining to the Russian online world.

The Contributing Editor will work with the Project Editor. The individual will assist in producing and editing content for the project, including regular output of stories, translation, and networking. The work will involve extensive translation, analysis, and further original research and reporting when appropriate

Successful applicants will have the following qualifications:

• Fluency in English and Russian. Articles will be published in English, with minimal editing. Writing samples will be required as part of the application.
• Familiarity with the Russian blogosphere, Russian social networks, and Russian political, social, economic, and cultural trends.
• Ability to report on, analyze, and explain the Russian online world, in English.
• 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.

We will be seeking the right mix of skills and experience for these two positions. We will also have opportunities for more occasional research and analysis by other contributors The final make-up of the editorial team will depend on the interests and availability of applicants.

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

Interpreting RuNet is funded by a grant from the Open Society Institute.

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.

What exactly is Kelele ‘09?:

Kelele is an annual African bloggers’ conference held in a different African city each year and run by an organising committee in that city. Kelele will be held for the first time October 29th - November 1st 2009 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Explanation for changing conference dates:

Greetings African Bloggers.

As the organizing committee of the KELELE Bloggers Conference, we would like to apologise for the postponement of the African Bloggers Conference—KELELE—which was due to take place from 13th to 16th August, 2009 in Nairobi, Kenya.

The African Bloggers Conference is an initiative of Kenyan bloggers and as the organizers we required significant financial support to underwrite the event. Although many sponsors had initially expressed interest in being a part of this great undertaking, due to the prevailing global economic climate they did not come through as we had anticipated.

We also encountered a setback while working out the logistics of partnerships with a sister event, namely the African Blog Awards. The African Blog Awards were to take place prior to the conference. The awards were designed to give Africans a chance to vote for the best blogs across the region with the winners from each country being awarded an all expenses paid trip to the conference.

We are now pleased to announce that the inaugural Kelele, Bloggers Conference will take place in Nairobi from 29th October– 1st November, 2009.

Mark your calendars, book your tickets and pack your bags because this is a conference you cannot afford to miss!

Subscribe to our newsletter here for more information on how to register for the conference.

Beat your Drum!

The theme of this year's conference is Beat Your Drum:

The theme of the conference is ‘Beat your drum’, a befitting theme that not only defines the influence that Africa has had in the world’s history mainly through its musical sounds but the sounds that have now entered the digital age into the blogosphere as the voice of its people.

With so many voices marginalised or simply ignored in the African society today mostly due to a lack of a free space, we believe that the internet in general and grassroots media tools such as blogs in particular represent the most powerful way in which Africans can take back their voice.

“We are gathering to make a powerful, positive, inspirational noise that will be heard across the continent and beyond; KELELE!” says Daudi Were the Kelele Project Coordinator and one of the KenyaUnlimited administrators.

African bloggers have defied all odds to tackle fundamental issues that are facing their communities as well as highlighting developments in technology, sport, music and art.

The conference is aimed at gathering Africa’s top grass root activists for a discourse and to create a synergy on the Internet. This will be the start of other similar conferences under the Kelele banner that will be held annually in different African Cities and will be run by an organizing committee in that city.

Kelele ‘09 needs your help:

Become a volunteer for Kelele ‘09:

Do you have graphic design skills that can help take Kelele’s branding and image to the next level? Please email us at main@kelele.org – we would love to work with you!

Are you proficient in either Kiswahili, French or Arabic? We need help with translating the key information on this website in order to reach as many African bloggers as possible! If you can help please email us at main@kelele.org – we would love to work with you!

Sponsor Kelele:

We invite organizations and companies to seize the opportunity to be associated with a positive movement rising across Africa by sponsoring the conference designed to bring a lot of that positive energy into one room. KELELE sponsorship demonstrates your organization’s support for Africa, the voices of Africans, citizen media and the benefits it can bring to people in the developing world. For corporations, KELELE sponsorship also offers the opportunity for brand positioning.

Sponsor a speaker or session
KELELE speakers will be traveling from across the globe. Help us cover all or part of the costs associated with a particular speaker or session. Sponsors’ names will be mentioned in all publicity material and KELELE announcements and be included in the session description. Sponsor logos will appear on the KELELE web site. Other entitlements may apply depending on the level of sponsorship.

Sponsor speakers or participants from a particular country
If your organization has an interest in a specific country, please consider helping us underwrite the cost of bringing people from that part of the continent to the Summit. Sponsors’ names will be mentioned in all publicity material and KELELE announcements and will be included in the session description (if participant is a speaker). Sponsor logos will appear on the KELELE web site. Other entitlements may apply depending on the level of sponsorship.

You can follow Kelele on Twitter and Facebook.

Here is the summary of proposed program and list of board of advisors and organizing committee.

Buy the shirt on RedBubble.com (this week: 15% off!)

We're not making any money on these sales, so there's no pressure to buy them. Of course, if you would like to make a donation to support the work we do at Global Voices, we'll happily accept.

Global Voices is a community of bloggers and translators, who work mostly on a volunteer basis to report on citizen media conversations around the world. We rely on your support to get by.

Shirts are available in a variety of different shapes, sizes, and five colors. Every blogger in the world should have one.

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!

“I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because… (put your own words here).

And… very importantly, you must also copy and paste this text into your post.

This blog post is part of Zemanta's “Blogging For a Cause” (http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

Zemanta is a cool new add-on blogging tool. They have issued this competition in order to encourage blogging for charitable causes. The five blogs to get the most votes will each win a prize of $1200.

The deadline is JUNE 6, 2009.

There are so many blogs and causes online, but at Global Voices we feel it's important for bloggers to stick together and support each other when bloggers in many countries still risk harassment, prison or even torture for the work they do - not to mention having their blogs filtered or censored by authorities who object to their opinions.

Freedom of speech on the web affects everyone, not just bloggers. It is a human right to both say and read what we wish. Global Voices Advocacy keeps track of online censorship worldwide in daily posts, and maintains a map of web 2.0 censorship. There are also guides like Anoymous Blogging with Wordpress & Tor or Blogging for a Cause that many bloggers appreciate.

And finally…

….if Global Voices Advocacy is to have any chance of winning, we need your help asking others to help support freedom of expression. It would be great if you could treat this as a meme and pass it on/appoint 3-5 of your fellow bloggers to join.

Tweet, link, and love?

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!