I just uploaded the log [1] of the IRC session for the Global Voice manifesto session. It definitely needs to be edited. I'll try to do it soon, but if someone else wants to take a shot, be my guest. If you're going to work on it please comment here so we don't double our efforts. If I don't see any volunteers, I will give it a try soon. I think the first pass is to filter out the noise and try to pick up any interesting thoughts and maybe organize them into groups.
I'm hoping Alex and Ethan have an interesting conversation on their long drive and write up some of the points for the vision and focus. I received this in email from Alex which I think is a good start:
1) we believe in free speech — and act to defend it and extend it
2) we believe in direct connection between people in ways which allow us to consider ourselves part of a bigger here and wider us — and we act to bring flows of tools, money and attention to bear on creating channels for those connections to develop
3) we believe in planetary citizenship along international norms — and we act to empower campaigns to make the world fairer, freer, more prosperous and more sustainable.
I think we discussed the name and the focus a bit. I personally think that not focusing on blogs, but on providing voice/voices generally is important. I think we need to bridge not only languages and regions, but medium types/vectors. I think that the diversity of the group geographically as well as in terms of medium types was very important and maybe this group can bridge bridge groups? We talked about names a bit. The name that I liked best was “Global Voices”.
SJ suggested that his experience with Wikipedia translations could help put translation as a focus for one of the efforts. There was another issues of more simple tools, and I think Rebecca pointed out that we need to understand the user's needs before we design the tools. What other tasks can we focus on? Who are the champions of these tasks? Ethan, am I getting ahead of myself?
UPDATE: I've just uploaded a cleaned up and html version of the IRC log [2]. I tried to convert as many of the nicknames to full names and links as possible. If you know the identity/URL for any of the participants who are not converted, can you please provide it?