Global Voices Online

Stories

July 17th, 2008

Global Voices introduces Executive Director, Ivan Sigal

Ethan Zuckerman · 17:54 ·

lingua → pt · zht · zhs · mk · de · it · bn · fr · es · fa

We're thrilled to announce that Ivan Sigal has joined Global Voices as Executive Director. Ivan comes to us from the US Institute of Peace, where he's been researching citizen media in conflict-prone parts of the globe. Prior to his time at USIP, Ivan spent several years with Internews, an international media development organization. With Internews, Ivan worked on projects in the former Soviet Union, was Regional Director for Central Asia and Afghanistan, Regional Director for Asia, and worked on development for Latin America and the Caribbean.

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.

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November 16th, 2007

Hiring: Global Voices seeks an Executive Director

Ethan Zuckerman · 22:44 ·

lingua → pt · zht · zhs · de · es · jp

The new board of directors of Global Voices met this week and decided it was time for an exciting step: hiring an executive director for Global Voices. Believe it or not, Global Voices has operated for almost three years with no one formally at the helm of the organization, and with no full-time employees. As our work and scale expands, we've reached a point where we need someone to coordinate and head up our fundraising, management and public relations efforts.

This is likely to be an extraordinarily challenging task, but for the right person, it's a terrific opportunity to help our community reach new heights. The job description follows below - please feel free to share it with anyone you think might be helpful to us.

Global Voices is seeking an Executive Director to oversee the Global Voices Online, Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy projects and the community that supports these endeavors. Global Voices is a multinational virtual organization, supported by the paid and volunteer efforts of over 100 people on every continent. Our executive director must possess a wide range of professional and personal skills to help our project reach its potential as the leading international citizen media community online.

The Executive Director will be responsible for the following:

- Management oversight of Global Voices major programs, including direct management of team leaders for the website, language translation, advocacy and outreach projects
- Draft and manage operating budgets for the organization
- Fundraising responsibility, which includes grant writing and creating networks to increase funds
- Maintaining relationships with past, current and future foundations and corporations in order to maintain and increase funding base
- Financial management of the organization
- Maintaining relationships between a governing board, advisory board, paid staff and volunteer staff
- Overseeing PR/media relations for the Global Voices network of projects
- Extensive travel in the course of representing Global Voices

Specifically, we are seeking a director with

- Strong leadership skills
- Experience managing a multilingual, multicultural team
- Experience supporting nonprofit or commercial projects through corporate and foundation fundraising
- Experience working with mainstream news outlets and journalists
- Experience with or strong understanding of citizen media, including blogging, podcasting, and videocasting
- Experience managing substantial ($1m+) budgets
- Strategic planning experience, preferably in a nonprofit or media context
- The ability to work independently and be able to produce results

To work effectively with our community, we would prefer that candidates:
- Have experience living and working internationally, or have traveled extensively in the developing world
- Are active bloggers or creators of online media
- Are multilingual, with fluency in English and at least one other language
- Have experience working in diverse, multicultural environments.

The ideal candidate must have a passionate commitment to the values and goals of Global Voices, they will be joining a well established team of editors and authors who are dedicated to amplifying the voices of world. There is no geographic requirement associated with this position - Global Voices has no office, headquarters, etc. - but substantial travel is expected. Candidates must have access to broadband internet connectivity and comfort working in a wholly virtual environment. We strongly welcome candidates from outside North America and Europe and encourage people currently working on the Global Voices project to apply.

To express your interest, please send a cover letter and CV to “edjob AT globalvoicesonline DOT org” by December 7th.

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March 6th, 2007

Global Voices is seeking an Outreach Director

Ethan Zuckerman · 10:10 ·

Global Voices is seeking a full-time Outreach Director. The outreach director will coordinate Global Voices's efforts in promoting blogging, podcasting, videocasting, photoblogging and other forms of citizen media throughout the world. This will include responsibility for managing a grants program that will support innovative outreach efforts with microgrants, compilation of curiculum for blogging outreach and coordination of speaking and teaching engagements for Global Voices bloggers around the world. (For more on how Global Voices views outreach, see these notes from our December meeting in Delhi.)

Suitable candidates will have a strong understanding of the international blogosphere, journalism or technical writing experience, excellent management and leadership skills, and strong experience as a public speaker or technical trainer. Strong spoken and written English is a must - skill in other languages is a strong plus. We are very unlikely to consider candidates who are not active bloggers - links to the blogs you participate in are a key portion of a cover letter or resume for this position. Active involvement in the Global Voices community is a strong plus.

Global Voices expects that the Outreach Director will focus 40-50 hours per week on the position, with a great deal of schedule flexibility. Some international travel is required as part of the position, including attendance at the Global Voices annual meeting (travel funding will be provided.) The Outreach director reports to the acting managing director of Global Voices, and later to the executive director - she or he will be an active part of the Global Voices senior management team.

This position does not require relocation. All Global Voices jobs are virtual - people work from their home countries and connect with other Global Voices staff via the Internet. This job is open to residents of any nation. Salary will be based on experience.

To apply, please send a letter of interest along with CV or resume to ethan@globalvoicesonline.org

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January 14th, 2007

Global Voices is hiring an advocacy director

Ethan Zuckerman · 22:35 ·

Global Voices (globalvoicesonline.org) is seeking a part-time Advocacy Director. The advocacy director will coordinate Global Voices's efforts in supporting online freedom of expression. This will include responsibility for building online relationships between national anti-censorship and anti-net filtering movements, interacting with international press freedom organizations, producing educational guides to anti-censorship tools and reporting on the movement for the Global Voices website.

Suitable candidates will have a strong understanding of the international blogosphere, technical understanding of the mechanisms of internet filtering and circumvention (proxies, Tor, anonymizing techniques), and journalism or technical writing experience. Active involvement in developing world anticensorship efforts is a strong plus, as is active involvement in the Global Voices community.

Global Voices expects that the Advocacy Director will focus 20-25 hours per week on the position, with a great deal of schedule flexibility. Some international travel is required as part of the position, including attendance at the Global Voices annual meeting (travel funding will be provided.) The Advocacy director reports to the acting managing director of Global Voices, and later to the managing director - the advocacy director will be expected to participate in the Global Voices editorial process, serving alongside regional editors, translation editors and our human rights video editor, and to contribute advocacy-related posts to the Global Voices website.

Update Several people have asked if this job requires relocation. It does not. All Global Voices jobs are virtual - people work from their home countries and connect with other Global Voices staff via the Internet. This job is open to residents of any nation.

We are able to offer an annual salary of $25-30,000 USD for this position, based on experience. To apply, please send a letter of interest along with CV or resume to ethan@globalvoicesonline.org

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December 17th, 2006

GV Summit Delhi ‘06 Session Three: Language and Translation

Ethan Zuckerman · 06:37 · South Asia

David Sasaki has put together a remarkable session on translation at the Global Voices conference. It begins with a conversation led by John “Feng 37″ Kennedy in Chinese between the half dozen Chinese speakers in the room, then a five-person conversation in Swahili, led by Ndesanjo Macha, then a lively conversation in Hindi involving about a quarter of the room. David observes that, during each conversation, he saw about half a dozen people smiling, engaged in the conversation, and everyone else ignoring the larger conversation. This is obviously a useful metaphor for some of the challenges we're seeing at Global Voices - how do we amplify, contextualize and translate conversations from all the languages represented online?

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.

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November 6th, 2006

24-hour demonstration against Internet censorship

Ethan Zuckerman · 18:32 ·

Our friends at Reporters without Borders (often called “RSF” - Reporters sans Frontières) are organizing an online demonstration against Internet censorship, beginning tomorrow at 11am (Paris time) and continuing until 11am on Wednesday, November 8th.

The goal of the demonstration is to draw attention to online censorship in the thirteen nations RSF terms “Internet black holes” - by clicking on a map of these nations, users register their protest against Internet censorship and for the release of over 60 cyber-dissidents currently under arrest for writings on their blogs.

The protest takes specific aim at Yahoo!, inviting users to record messages for the company's founders. Yahoo! is a special target for RSF because the company's has cooperated with Chinese authorities in investigations of journalists, supplying information that helped lead to the arrest of Shi Tao, a journalist serving a ten year sentence for “divulging state secrets abroad.”

RSF is also inviting visitors to the site to start blogs hosted by the organization - RSF will feature opinions from these blogs on in a weekly section titled “The Blog View of the World”. Finally, RSF will be launching a version of their site in Arabic, complementing the current versions in French, Spanish and English.

We're very grateful for the hard work that RSF does to promote online freedom and openness. Please visit their site today and show your support for their efforts.

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April 14th, 2006

Petition Hu Jintao for Global Voices editor Hao Wu's release

Ethan Zuckerman · 17:17 ·

Many Global Voices readers have asked what they can do to hasten our friend and colleage Hao Wu's release from detention in Beijing. Hundreds of you have put badges on your blogs and webpages to call attention to Hao Wu's detention, and this support has helped generate media interest in the situation.

We'd hoped that media pressure would lead to Hu Jintao to release Hao prior to his upcoming meeting with President Bush. Unfortunately, this looks increasingly unlikely. So today we're launching a letter-writing campaign and a petition to ask for Hao's immediate release.

Rebecca launched the letter writing campaign earlier today, and we're encouraging readers to write to their national governments, to the Chinese ambassadors in their nation, to their local newspapers, and to Chinese President Hu Jintao. Her post offers key pieces of information to include in letters or op-eds as well some useful addresses.

We've also launched an online petition, demanding that President Hu Jintao release Hao immediately.
(more…)

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Announcing Our Alliance with Reuters

Ethan Zuckerman · 14:30 ·

We're thrilled to announce an alliance between Global Voices and global media company, Reuters. Reuters has been supporting Global Voices efforts since late last year, when they hosted our annual conference at their global headquarters at Canary Wharf in London.

Yesterday Reuters announced a major contribution to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where Global Voices is based. This contribution has allowed us to hire our managing editor, Rachel Rawlins, to continue supporting our outstanding team of regional editors and to bring on translators, to provide better coverage of content in languages like Arabic and Russian. Support from Reuters will also allow us to do more outreach and training in parts of the world where there are currently few bloggers. Reuters' generosity allows us to expand the range and quality of information we make freely available to anyone who cares to use it.

We're especially excited about the relationship because we see a great opportunity to help Reuters - and the global media community as a whole - to understand blogging better and the impact of Citizen's Media on the world of journalism. We believe that the information, opinions and perspective that bloggers share complement conventional journalism and that bloggers and journalists can work together to give us a more accurate and representative picture of events and opinions around the world.

You can already see some of the fruits of our work together. Global Voices worked with Reuters on their recent Iraq Newsmakers event, where bloggers from the Middle East participated in a conference in New York via streamed video and IRC, asking journalists tough questions about whether media coverage of Iraq has been fair. In the near future, you'll see content by Global Voices editors and contributors appearing on Reuters websites, providing additional information and context to some Reuters newswire stories.

Global Voices Online is possible through the generosity of two groups: the editors and contributors to the site, and sponsors who make the site possible. We're grateful to everyone who has made Global Voices possible so far and we thank Reuters for making it possible for us to make this site even better.

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March 31st, 2006

Many to Many documentary featuring Global Voices

Ethan Zuckerman · 17:17 ·

Martin Lucas and the Center for Social Media have produced an excellent short documentary, titled “Many to Many - Public Media and the Blogosphere”. The twelve minute film provides an introduction to new efforts that are combining blogging with traditional media. Global Voices is featured alongside exciting efforts like Chris Lydon's Radio Open Source and PBS's POV Borders.

Our South Asia editor Neha Viswanathan and contributor Dina Mehta are featured, talking about their work on the Southeast Asia Tsunami Help blog, and the video captures some of the spirit and excitement of our December conference in London.

For anyone interested in how media thinkers are viewing our efforts, it's worth reading reports from Noëlle McAfee and Martin Lewis offer their views as media analysts of our December conference and the possible role of Global Voices in the larger world of media and journalism.

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January 19th, 2006

Sub-Saharan Africa

Black Looks, by Global Voices' own Sokari Ekine, offers a roundup of posts reflecting on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and observing the persistence of racism around the world.