Today is Francophonia Day. About 50 French-speaking countries and territories, some belonging to the Organisation Mondiale de la Francophonie and others not, will reflect on what it means to have French as a language –often alongside others. (Not to worry we will tell you what the bloggers said as soon as they've said it.)

At Global Voices, this day has special significance as well. One year ago, I was barely getting my feet wet as a novice Francophonia Editor, translating into English blurbs from the blogs of French-speaking countries who don't get much coverage in other media. Today as Global Voices Lingua team leader, I and wonderful francophones like India-based Haitian blogger Pascale Doresca, French journalist and Le Monde contributor Claire Ulrich and Malagasy blogger and GV author Lova Rakotomalala have been translating in the other direction, i.e. from English to French at Global Voices en Français. The goal is to bring more and more Francophones online into the global conversation. By translating Global Voices content into French, we hope to do just that.

See for yourself, the Global Voices en Français site is a work in progress but volunteer translators have been generating French-speaking GV content for Francophones for over a month. If you are a French-English bilingual, please contact us to join the team at francophonia [at] globalvoicesonline [dot] org.

Flashback. Inspired by Global Voices Latin-America Editor David Sasaki's workshop on GV and language at the GV 2006 Summit in Delhi, a group of francophone bloggers approached Global Voices co-founders Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon and Portnoy Zheng about starting a Francophone GV page similar to Portnoy's then year old GVO China site over lunch at Delhi Day 2. Other language communities expressed interest and Project Lingua was born.

Lingua, which is still in its infancy, brings you more than just GV en Français. It comes in:

-Bangla http://bn.globalvoicesonline.org/
-Chinese (simplified) http://zh.globalvoicesonline.org/hans/
-Chinese (traditional) http://zh.globalvoicesonline.org/hant/
-French http://fr.globalvoicesonline.org/
-Portuguese http://pt.globalvoicesonline.org/
-Russian http://ru.globalvoicesonline.org/
-Spanish http://es.globalvoicesonline.org/

Please join me and the whole Lingua team by contributing your language skills to any of the above groups. For Bangla, contact Rezwan Islam at i_rezwan[at]hotmail[dot]com. For Chinese contact Leonard at romleonard[at]gmail[dot]com. For Portuguese contact José Murilo Junior at portuguese[at]globalvoicesonline[dot]org. For Russian contact me at francophonia[at]globalvoicesonline[dot]org as we are looking for an energetic person to run that group. For Spanish, contact David Sasaki at osopecoso[at]gmail[dot]com.

Francophonia Day is truly a multilingual day for us at Global Voices.

Working with Global Voices

The life of a Global Voices author is probably not what you might expect. Yes, we are connected through the internet with the blog and email, but we aren't really connected connected. The majority of us operate in complete seclusion from the rest of the group. It is a lone blogger, a computer, and hopefully a reliable internet connection, writing about the world. Somehow Global Voices has formed this network of rouge bloggers and created something beautiful and special. I had one goal when I came to this conference…I wanted to know about the experiences of the other bloggers: what was their process, how involved were they with the community they cover, what sort of responses were they getting? And thankfully my questions were answered.

(Photo montage by Ange)

A surprising thing to learn is the success of the Global Voices site. Last month alone we had 1.1 million unique visitors. You, dear reader, are a part of this…a part of a global community. Global Voices is not about the Authors or the Editors, or in some respects, even the Bloggers that we cover. Global Voices is about the readers, the ones who broaden their minds and try to take in the world. It is from you that we need to hear from. We want to know what you think about our work, what direction you would like to see Global Voices go, we want to know what it is about this site that matters to you.

The primary focus of the summit was to find more ways to reach our readers. We discussed outreach opportunities, ways of translation to broaden the linguistic scope of the site, and we even discussed ways that, as authors, we can improve ourselves to give you the best posts possible.

Electric Discussions

There is an electricity that surrounds a great discussion…and that was present throughout the whole summit. There are many forms of outreach that were discussed. Some wanted to work on projects to help bring the internet and blogging to more marginalized communities, others (ok, this might have been just me) wanted to see more outreach in the form of giving school teachers tools in which to incorporate Global Voices into the classroom.

Another aspect of what I see as outreach was translation. This year Global Voices has increased the number of posts that are being translated into English, but we want to reverse that process too…we want to translate our content into as many different languages as possible to bring in even more people into the discussion. Here is where I want to diverge and tell a little story…

In the midst of a heated discussion about the man hours it would take to translate GV content, GV editor Preetem Rai was handed the microphone and suggested that we offer audio translations of posts. The moment was terrific. It was as if the clouds had suddenly parted and angels had begun to sing…everyone in that room was breathless. A comment offering a simple solution held the entire room in sway. And why not? More people can listen than can read. Why not take Global Voices to the next level? We focus on the written word and we have begun to bring in video and audio…why not more?

In addition to our focus on the written word, we looked at ways to improve our own writing skills. We looked at what made a good post. We looked at the process that each of us goes through to write our posts. More importantly, we developed a bond between us all that carries through what we do on this site.

What the Summit Really Means

If you look through the photos on Flickr that refer to summit, you will see 400+ photos of people eating and talking, and while they might not be that interesting to view, they represent the people that you read every day on this site. When I read an article from David or Amira or John, I don't just read the words…I now read them hearing their voice. The background of each author on this site is as various and diverse as all of the languages and regions of the world that we represent. This last week I discovered a family that I never knew before…and you, dear reader…welcome to our family.

(Photo by Jace)

The session focused on how to mitigate barriers to access, presented examples of current outreach efforts, and brainstormed possible new outreach projects.

Barriers to Access

Blogging without basic needs Several participants wondered how the poor could be convinced blogging could be of value to them. Working in rural India, Dina Mehta found the first question is often “What's in it for me?” Blogging may be a hard sell or perceived as nonessential in communities where many “are struggling with clothing their children, having bathrooms, or money for soap.”

One woman wondered whether blogging might not be an inherently elitist activity since most of those who do blog have the luxury not only of access to the internet, but of time. She commented that for those people are struggling day-to-day to survive, those who are better off might need to be the ones to represent their voices.

Others thought that if blogging could influence mainstream media coverage of poor or underrepresented communities, it would be a powerful way of of convincing them that blogging can bring concrete benefits.

Technological barriers. The cost of owning a laptop - as much as 30,000 rupies in India - was cited as a major obstacle to blogging. Even internet cafes, though prevalent in large cities, can be prohibitively expensive.

Ethan Zuckerman mentioned the One Laptop Per Child project as an example of a project to reduce the financial barrier to entry and to bring computers and the internet to an entire generation of children. “What will happen when a million children have access to this device?”

SMS and mobile phones, which one participant referred to as the personal computer of the developing world, was offered as a powerful, practical and cost-effective means of amplifying citizen voices.

Literacy. Basic literacy is another major obstacle, but many participants were enthusiastic about the potential for photos, audio and voice as a means of expression for those who cannot read or write.

Current Outreach Efforts

Ben Paarman, founder and editor of Neweurasia and a Global Voices Central Asia contributor, discussed Neweurasia's outreach efforts. The group plans to make 25 outreach trips in 2007 to the region to train bridge bloggers in Kazakhstan, Kygystan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikstan using a “train the trainers” model.

Southeast Asia Editor Preetam Rai presented examples from Timor, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Audience participants also offered their own experiences with outreach.

Shivam Vij, and an Indian blogger & journalist, offered by way of example Cybermohalla, a project which gives young people living in the slums of Delhi the tools to used and produce media for self-expression.

One outcome of the project has been Nangla's Delhi, a blog where Cybermohalla participants who live in Nangla Maachi write about their lives their and the fight against evictions and government-ordered demolitions. The power of media “is not to provide people with solutions, it is to provide them with a platform where they can express themselves and provide their own solution.”

Brainstorming New Projects

SMS Blogging, Mobile Podcasting. One participant pointed out that media is already “training a society of people to SMS in their thoughts,” for example, in response television show or radio program polls. One project might involve establishing a system for receiving and aggregating SMS messages or photographs captured by mobile phones for publishing online. Another participant suggested creating a system where villagers could use their mobile phones to podcast or submit their voice for transcription.

Oral Histories / Interviewing. GV human rights video editor Sameer Padania discussed the power of voice, of actually going out into communities and taking oral histories. Ishta, a Uganda American student studying in Delhi, suggested interviewing people, getting those who are already blogging to record or write “real human conversations.” Many people want to communicate what they care about, but don't necessarily have the time, means, or inclination to actually sit down and write themselves.

A GV Curriculum. Deborah Ann Dilley suggested using Global Voices as an educational tool for teachers to help them teach students about activism and other places around the world, and suggested developing lesson plans.

Digitizing Culture. Jose Murilo, GV's Portuguese Language Editor, works for Brazil's Ministry of Culture. Jose suggested creating projects to help kids digitize the art they are already creating - theater, dance, music - so that they have the means of reaching wider audiences.

Language / Localization. Many also emphasized the importance of localizing tools and technology, for example, translating blogging platforms into local languages.

Will empowered voices blog for the public interest?

Maria Seidel pointed out that even with the best outreach projects, empowered citizens would not necessarily use blogging for socially useful or activist goals. Others commented that most blogs are used to discuss “trivial” topics like movies and celebrity gossip, and that most blogospheres are dominated by technology and entertainment blogs.

However, Rosario Lizana and others argued outreach efforts need not worry about “the immediate qualitative gain.” Blogging should be fun. The key is to increase general technological literacy, to increase the number of people who can blog, so that “when the real needs arises, you already have these networks.”

(Photo by Jace. Click to enlarge.)

The TIME article praises the individual “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game,” etc. The article concludes: “This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.”

That, in a nutshell, is exactly what Global Voices is all about.

The problem is that the “new kind of international understanding” that TIME describes, a world of true “citizen to citizen” communication, remains a still-distant dream. The reality is that Web2.0 - and the potential for empowerment that it represents - remains largely inaccessible to large numbers of people on the planet, and is not being accessed by many more, for many reasons.

(Photo by Georgia. Click to enlarge.)

How do we help more people become creators of their own media? What kind of outreach can Web 2.0-savvy citizens provide to the still-uninitiated? How do we bridge massive and endless barriers of language and culture? Are the technical tools accessible enough to the next billion Internet users, or are we in need of new solutions better suited to the developing world? And how about people who are being prevented from speaking - or being heard - by governments, corporations, and other powerful entities? These were exactly the questions we tackled during our public meeting on Saturday.

Here were some of my own takeaways from Saturday's discussion:

• Global Voices right now is in English (translating what content it can from blogs in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Spanish, Portugese, French, and Russian) but it needs to be in many other languages. Right now there is a volunteer-driven effort to translate GV into Chinese. Many people in our community feel strongly that much more translation needs to happen, and it appears that at least for some of the languages there is a great deal of enthusiasm. The challenge now is for people to take the lead in building new translation teams to make this happen.

• Outreach can't be one-size-fits all and must meet local needs, through local leadership. we had much to learn from some of the Indian attendees who described a number of very successful citizen media outreach projects in India. One in particular was Cybermohalla, in which slum dwellers reported on the demolition of their own community in order to make way for a public works project. There was some discussion about who ought to be doing outreach to whom - and much agreement that we are not talking about putting Western bloggers on planes to teach people in the Third World how to blog. Rather, in most cases it's about bloggers and media activists in the developing world reaching out to their less privileged countrymen. People agreed that outreach techniques and tactics will vary widely from country to country and community to community - and the more local the teachers, the more likely they will understand the needs of the people being taught. There was also a great deal of discussion about children as the focus of technology and citizen media outreach - the idea being that it is young people who will take most naturally to the idea of using technology for self-expression. (There was of course much interest in the One Laptop prototype that SJ Klein brought to the meeting.)

• Teaching people how to blog or create media isn't enough if they can't get around barriers to speech. People need to be able to speak and be heard without fear of reprisal if their thoughts aren't in line with their government's. They need tools to get around censorship - both in terms of expressing themselves and in accessing the works of others. There is also the issue that many people in many countries aren't aware of what their governments are actually doing to limit speech or access to information on the Internet, and thus even in many democracies, there isn't enough public pressure on governments to be as open as possible. Global Voices is about to launch an advocacy arm, thanks to some funding from the Dutch development organization, Hivos, which will enable members of our community to work directly on these issues.

Be sure to read Nathan Hamm's summary of our introductory Session 1, Ethan Zuckerman's account of Session 3 on translation, and Sameer Padania's summary of Session 4 on tools and technology. A summary of Session 2, focusing on outreach, should be coming soon. There is also a conference blog put together by Ange, one of our community members participating remotely from Dubai.

Sunday's meeting was a closed-door session for Global Voices editors and authors only. We rolled up our sleeves and discussed how Global Voices authors and editors can do an even better job at amplifying citizen voices from around the world. Our tech team is working on a major re-design of the site to make it more user-friendly (and less overwhelming). We are also developing a new public aggregator of all the blogs that our editors and authors watch in order to compile their daily links and features, and this aggregator will include a mechanism by which anybody can suggest blogs that we ought to be following and linking to. As we realized last year, GV is not just a media site but a conversation community. Many of our authors and editors discussed strategies for community building: specifically, how to support communities in their own countries, regions, and language groupings comprised of people who want to communicate with a broader global community of conversation.

People are taking initiative to carry out ideas that we could never have imagined just a year ago. We've always known that the individuals who work on GV are talented, passionate, creative, and articulate, but spending two days with this diverse collection of characters was humbling. As co-founders, Ethan and I are excited that the project has grown to the point that others are taking the lead when it comes to leading Global Voices and representing it to the public. We are very happily receding into backstage supporting roles: fundraising and doing the legal groundwork to transform Global Voices from a project under Harvard's Berkman Center to an independent non-profit organization.

This weekend's meeting also drove home the importance of face-to-face meetings even for a virtual organization like Global Voices. The Web has helped us find one another and has enabled us to work together in ways that would otherwise be completely impossible. But for the people who are devoting many hours every week to curating the global conversation on Global Voices, there is nothing like sitting down over curry and beers for building trust, camaraderie, commitment, and a feeling of shared ownership of the project.

People who are not very familiar with what we do often make snyde remarks about how strange it is that bloggers find it necessary to meet in physical space - as if the need for face-to-face meeting somehow proves the limitations or inadequacies of what we do. These remarks completely miss the point, of course. Global Voices may be a virtual organization with no physical headquarters (and no plans to create one), but what we do is ultimately about building understanding - and ideally dialogue - between real flesh-and-blood human beings and physical human communities.

We are not just generating chatter amongst avatars and usernames and online personas. We are not creating an alternative universe or online cyber-utopia into which our members escape from the realities of our daily lives and the problems within and between our countries. We are using the Internet's virtual space - and the creation of online citizens' media - as a means to a very physical end. The Web connects the physical human beings at the ends of it who are using it as a channel to express themselves and reach out to one another. When we as individuals can all create our own media, not only do we find each other and organize more easily around common causes. By taking control of our own narratives, our own stories, we gain greater control over how others perceive and define us. This in turn will make it more difficult (we believe) for outsiders to impose unwelcome, unsuitable, unjust or violent policies upon us - all of which are made much easier when mass media is used to stereotype, pigeonhole, and dehumanize us.

We use the Web not to escape our humanity, but to assert it.

The world is listening. Is GV talking?

Salam puts it in terms of getting the tools and technology out there, and getting a broader range of people to understand and use them. The next step for GV in particular might be, he suggests, encouraging more local people to blog, which could broaden the range of content on the site. As steps towards this, he pulls out four key areas: learning to blog, for the young and old; getting your blog noticed - or, as he puts it, “How I became famous”; getting blog content into other media, such as print; and staying safe, secure and anonymous as a blogger.

A blow-by-blow account after the jump…

Learning to blog

Salam and Preetam offer examples of teaching people to blog from opposite ends of the age spectrum. Salam approached his children's primary school, and offered to teach an after-school class for 9- and 10-year-olds to teach them HTML, to use Blogger, and then to update the school blog by FTP. One Cambodian organisation builds on the interests of young students - finding scholarships to study, developing the skills to create a website - by helping them use blogs initially as a productivity and project management tool, and then to share their own content.

But it's not just about encouraging younger bloggers. When you look at your family, says Preetam, it's usually your grandparents who talk the most - they generally have more time on their hands… Friends of Yesterday of Singapore ran a blogging workshop for senior citizens in Singapore, as a way of capturing and sharing their memories. There aren't that many contributing at the moment, but they expect this to increase.

Bloggers of all ages need guidance and training on, for example, how to avoid legal and copyright pitfalls when blogging, and Preetam suggests mini BlogCamps as one way of offering bloggers this kind of assistance.

Blogging101.com?

As well as conducting face-to-face training on how to blog, Salam asks whether it makes sense to build a central repository for blogging resources, with tutorials, and technical and other resources - but who will build it, and who will use it? It could be hosted at GV, as it sees traffic from areas that might find such a resource useful.

Simple web searches can lead to a bewildering amount of information, but building a repository would help direct potential bloggers to resources on more advanced topics like making multimedia content. There Salam could share resources on vlogging, with step-by-step tutorials on how to capture, encode and upload video and to CC Publisher, which helps users assign different levels of Creative Commons Licenses to the videos they upload. Preetam mentions that platforms like YouTube are now beginning to incorporate tools that allow users to record direct into the site from a webcam, making the process even simpler.

Jose Murilo Junior offers an alternative view from Brazil's Cultural Hotspots program, in which he says that, rather than making the kids participating in the project follow a set of resources on blogging, the project leaders encouraged the kids to customise the tools they wanted to use. Whether this might lead some of that content to be left out of global conversations because the platform it's produced on doesn't integrate with global content aggregators, as Jen Brea observes about some West African Francophone blogs, might be addressed by Ben Paarmann's call for services like popular global tools like Wordpress to roll out in more local languages, such as Russian.

Ethan Zuckerman mentions the excellent In A Box series from the Tactical Technology Collaborative, which offers a set of ready-to-go tools, starting with NGO In A Box, and now including Security In A Box and Audio/Video In A Box. All packages use open source software and are already or can be localised into various languages.

Getting your blog noticed – or how Salam became famous

Once you have a blog, how do you get it noticed? In Salam’s case, he started blogging because his friends already had blogs, but his site was pretty much personal until he sparred with other bloggers, got trackbacks, and got picked up by Iraq Blog Count. His readership went through the roof, and the rest is history… After a particularly heated exchange between some Iraqi bloggers, Salam also created a space where Iraqi bloggers could share news, discussions and debate – a GoogleGroup called the Iraqi Blogodrome. This, and other groups like it, could prove a useful model for other ‘spheres.

A print edition?

Throughout the GV community, bloggers are trying to reach out not only to those who aren’t already blogging and want to, but to those who might want to read blogs and can’t, for technical or other reasons. Could a print edition be the answer?

Some of the very countries where local networks of bloggers or GV might want to publish print editions of blog content, are the same countries where it might be most difficult to do so. Preetam suggests that samizdat publishing (print, photocopy and pass on) might be a way to stay under any Ministry of Information’s radar.

In countries where publishing openly is less problematic, magazine-style print editions of local blog content might be able to attract income from local advertisers to cover production and distribution costs. People in the room also seem to feel that books of GV and other blog content could reach a very different and valuable audience. Could GV publish a book like the recent WorldChanging effort? But GV is a very different beast to WorldChanging, and Ethan feels that any GV book would need to define its audience pretty clearly before committing to such a potentially costly exercise.

But with a growing willingness among publishers to bring together content from around the world, as with the Sage Keywords Series from India, might there now be an audience to cater to? Tactical Tech's Open Publishing In A Box offers a comprehensive open-source solution for publishers. And could POD or print-on-demand technology play a role, allowing users to create their own books of GV content?

Ndesanjo Macha and Ethan remind us that mass media, particularly radio, are still by far how the majority of people consume their media worldwide, and that helping local newspapers and radio stations around the world connect with and cover their local blogosphere might generate more local interest and traffic – and eventually lead more people to blog themselves.

And if none of that works? Broadcast your podcast yourself…

Staying safe, secure and anonymous

Many bloggers in the GV network do not blog under their real name, whether because they are blogging about sensitive matters, or it might compromise their professional position. But writing under a pseudonym is rarely enough. Quinn Norton, at the Summit for Wired Magazine, says that, rather than not having the tools to protect their identity online, the biggest problem for most users is not knowing that you should do so at all. Sites like ShowMyIP.com can give you a pretty good idea of what people can see about you (in fact, click the link to find out what you're leaking as you read this). If bloggers genuinely want to stay anonymous, at the very least, says Salam, they need to avoid posting personal pictures that might lead back to them, comments that might identify their workplace, and writing in a way that invites charges of libel.

There are plenty of examples of bloggers suffering from leaking privacy. One Iraqi blogger didn’t get into trouble for what he had written on his blog, but was picked up by the police after they read the comments under his posts… Another blogger writing about a political scandal in the face of a press blackout, was gagged by his Ministry of Information. After international pressure, he was allowed to write again, but only after he agreed to delete the offending posts. In the process, a whole group of his fellow bloggers were taught how to bypass censors.

Free and simple tools to help more bloggers do this are readily available. Salam suggests using TOR and proxies to conceal your work and home IP address. This helps bloggers to conceal their identity not just for what they post, but where they comment too. TOR is a relatively painless install, just download the installer, double-click the file, and it’s added to your browser, from where you can turn it on and off. Here’s an explanation of how it works. Privoxy works well as an additional layer of protection to TOR. It stops sites extracting information about you, and allows users to choose what to show and what to hide. Priyanka, a local blogger, suggests HTTP Tunnel, although this might be one for the more advanced user.

Ethan rounds up by reiterating that GV will soon have someone employed to do the advocacy on this exact issue, and part of their remit will be to develop guides on how to get around censorship.

And that meaty session took us through to the end of the day…

Portnoy Zheng leads a project to translate articles from Global Voices into Chinese. His reason for launching the project was a sense that it was very hard to get relavent international news in the Taiwanese mainstream media. He began translating with a story from Indonesia on Global Voices, talking about a plane crash caused by overloading a plane with durian which killed a number of Indonesian politicians (Durian is an inherently funny fruit, which may explain why Portnoy felt compelled to provide a pan-Asian translation.) After translating about 100 posts, he met Rebecca in Taiwan and decided to formalize the project. There's now a site - maintained by about 10 translators - which translates a subset of Global Voices articles. There's no clear guidelines to which ones are included - usually posts that talk about China or north Asia, and often articles about controversy in the Middle East, which Portnoy feels don't get covered closely enough in Chinese media.

David points out that Global Voices currently translates only a small subset of the languages of the blogosphere - we translate content from Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, French, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, Russian and occasionally Serbian and Ukrainian. In other countries, we neccesarily misrepresent the local conversation, showing off only a few people in the country who happen to be bilingual. He points us to a recent blog post titled “Africa, Global Voices y el anglocentrismo cool”, which argues that if you don't speak English, you don't show up on global voices. David's looking for ways to turn critique like this into involvement - what would be involved with getting the author of this post to help translate GV into Spanish and translate Spanish posts on GV?

David starts outlining some of the questions we're facing in dealing with translation on GV:
- How do we encourage blogger translation? How do we get more people doing this?
- Do we need permission from bloggers before we start translating their work?
- Should we translate non-English comments into English to encourage conversation?
- Should we let people translate all our posts, using the Indymedia model which allows people to click a tab, choose a language and offer their own translation?

This last question raises the issue “Why isn't everything put onto the site also put into MediaWiki, letting people translate on the fly?” The simple answer: maybe it should be - we've not spent enough time thinking through how to making the site translatable. One of our community editors points out that we have to make very careful decisions about what we translate - it's an editorial choice as much as the stories we select for the site.

Two suggestions that got widespread applause and enthusiasm:
- finding a way to reward volunteer translators, perhaps with Amazon Rewards dollars or other currency
- making it possible for people to offer their reading of GV posts in translation from a link on the site.

Where We've Been

Global Voices Online was born out of a meeting of a small group of bloggers from around the world at Harvard Law School two years ago in December of 2004. With the growth of the blogosphere, it was evident that professional journalists no longer controlled the discourse between citizens in different parts of the world. Bloggers had already started dialoguing in ways that created bridges between their own communities and those in the wider world. At the conference, attendees tackled the problem of how to amplify the voices around the world trying to be heard. From the conference came the Global Voices Manifesto.

A group blog that came out of the conference. Over the course of 2005, regional editors were brought on board to offer a snapshot of the discussions going on in regional blogospheres through daily roundup links. As the site grew throughout the year, more regional and language editors came on board and more importantly, the group of about 100 volunteer authors who write the longer, more in-depth posts that are the heart and soul of Global Voices.

The response to what we do — providing the resources for people to find voices and different perspectives around the world easily — has been tremendous. Over one million people visit Global Voices Online every month, a tremendous level of growth since last year. Our high Technorati ranking shows that we have become influential in the blogosphere, and winning the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism shows that we are being taken seriously.

Where We're Going

“Stichting Global Voices?” We are in the process of becoming a foundation under Dutch law with a sister NGO under US law. Why? Global Voices started in the United States, but we are a global project and we want to incorporate outside of the US to better reflect our global character. Choosing the Netherlands involved making compromises between finding a venue that potential funders were comfortable with, one in which the legal process works quickly and smoothly, and one with which the Global Voices community was comfortable. Dutch law allows Global Voices to form a board of directors made up of members from around the world, including Global Voices authors and editors.

Site changes are in the works at Global Voices Online. A new design is in the works that will make Global Voices look less like a blog and more like a magazine. Additionally, other changes that will make our work more transparent and make the global web that we watch accessible in an unfiltered form. We already have implemented the ability for readers to search the blogs that our editors monitor — “the Global Voices web” — through the search field between the country tag cloud at the top of the page and the content. We are also working on going live with an aggregator that will show all the blogs that we watch with the most recent content displayed. Both of these steps will allow users to see what we see and make sure that we are doing our job of amplifying global conversations accurately and fairly.

Fulfilling our whole mission: The Global Voices community has done a phenomenal job of realizing parts of our mission over the past year, and in the next, we want to do a phenomenal job of realizing all of it. Our planned site changes will give people the tools to explore the global blogosphere. Hiring a part-time advocacy coordinator will give us the means to advocate for free speech and access to online speech tools. And we are exploring ways to bring voices from new communities into the global conversation.

The Global Voices community has steered us to great success in the past year, and we are committed to continuing to create innovative and engaging solutions to the questions of how we bring new voices to the global conversation.