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

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.

Global Voices is pleased to have been a partner on the G20Voice project, along with Oxfam Great Britain, Save the Children, One, and Blue State Digital.

See the G20Voice coverage at http://www.whitebandaction.org/en/g20voice

Depending on your attitude toward the passing of time, 2009 is either already or only six days old. In which case the Global Voices holiday/new year presentation will strike you as either sadly belated, or, like a Christmas gift delivered long after the season, an unexpected delight.

We'd originally decided against presenting this publicly, both because it represents a mere fraction of our community, many of whom were too busy with work and holiday commitments to contribute, and because of the sombre tone of the events being reported on our pages of late.

But then we decided that the latter was in fact as good a reason for presenting it as not. So here it is: our belated, and hopefully also delightful holiday/new year presentation, complete with modest funding appeal at the end. View it full screen for the best results.

We hope you enjoy!

We've just launched our online donations page, and we're hoping you'll consider supporting Global Voices with a financial gift. For while our sponsors have helped us get this far, we need the additional support of individual donors in order to remain independent, free and sustainable, especially during these difficult times.

This month marks four years since a group of bloggers from around the world gathered at Harvard University to talk about how blogs and other then nascent technologies could enhance online global dialogue and political advocacy, resulting in the formation of Global Voices. Today, we're a vibrant global community of more than 150 active volunteer authors and translators and more than 20 freelance part-time regional and language editors, and a leading participatory media news room for voices from the developing world.

Your donation will help sustain the efforts of our authors and translators who work around the clock to bring you updates from conflict areas, natural disasters, and from the frontline of battles for freedom of expression.

Even a small contribution will help pay for server expenses, monthly fees for editors, and a small team of staff.

Additional funding will help us keep actively translating our content into more than 15 languages, and add new languages to the mix, ensuring that individuals and media professionals around the world have access to the diverse voices coming from citizen media at a time when coverage of international news is under serious threat.

Donate now to Global Voices, and declare your commitment to helping amplify stories, images and videos from ordinary people across the globe who use the internet to communicate with their fellow world citizens.

Thank you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you in Budapest in June!

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

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

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

It's known as the universal solvent, Adam's Ale, government juice, council pop, H2O, dihydrogen monoxide, hydrogen hydroxide, has a ton of different names in Arabic and yesterday (March 22) the world was called upon to pay it special attention.

World Water Day 2008 marked the start of the fourth year of the UN International Decade for Action on Water that began in 2005, and to mark the occasion portals like ih20.org aggregated stories and videos while bloggers weighed in with insights and commentary from various corners of the world.

Madagascar blogger Malag@sy Miray posted a striking print advertisement (pictured above) from the Global WASH Campaign and noted that

A Madagascar, moins de 15% de la population disposent de l’eau courante dans leur logement et les ménages qui en ont se trouvent en majorité en zones urbaines [..] Or avec le taux de croissance démographique en vigueur actuellement à Madagascar, il serait faux de croire que ces buts seraient atteints par le seul équipement en réseau d’eau courante, sans une rapide prise en compte de la nécessité des mesures adéquats d’assainissements.

In Brazil, dozens of bloggers rallied around the appeal by the Faça a Sua Parte [Do Your Part, pt] blog, which sought to draw international attention to the critical lack of clean, safe drinking water worldwide, and remember that in Brazil, the world's richest country in terms of freshwater availability, forty million families have no access to drinkable water. Brazilian bloggers expressed the view that the country has an important role in preserving drinking water and are doing their bit to raise awareness about the importance of managing their precious water resources. Bloggers like Denise Rangel [pt] reminded readers that individual attitudes make a big difference to the planet:

Você já imaginou o quanto de água é desperdiçada no simples ato de ensaboar as mãos com a torneira aberta? De acordo com a Agência Nacional de Águas (ANA), são gastos cerca de sete litros! Não é mais admissível que ainda haja pessoas que se recusam a mudar pequenos hábitos que, além de trazer economia para seus próprios bolsos, proporcionam um grande bem ao meio ambiente e à vida de outras pessoas. O combate ao desperdício deve ser um hábito estimulado pela família inteira. Basta fechar a torneira ao ensaboar as mãos, ao escovar os dentes ou tomar um banho mais rápido.

Sérgio Coutinho [pt], on the other hand, expressed the view that it is necessary to stay ahead from the myth that if everyone makes a little effort the planet will be saved:

Seria interessante que o desperdício industrial de água, com centenas de litros jogados no lixo para a produção de uma só mercadoria (20 litros por frango, por exemplo) também sofresse com a regra “da parte de cada um”.

In the Middle East, Tel Aviv-based Yael K was woken up (by her cats) in the middle of the night, only to find that her thoughts turned almost immediately to water:

What? Doesn’t everyone else think about this issue in the wee hours of the morning?

For those of you who don’t know, our region is in the midst of a quite severe drought that has been going on for the past 4 years. We’ve had way less rainfall and snowfall than we generally get and far far less than we need in this arid desert region. For those who don’t know, right now the mid-west in the U.S. is getting far more rainfall and snowfall than they usually get and far far more than they need –in fact, they are being seriously flooded with lots of loss of life and damage to property and so forth occurring. The U.K. also got hit with severe flooding this year.

So my 4 a.m. thoughts ran something like this: Such a shame that those poor people are being flooded and us poor people are water-deprived. They’ve gotten more water in the last 2 weeks than we’ve gotten in a full year. All that lovely water is running amok in people’s houses and then will eventually drain out to the sea and become salty and even of less use than when it is destroying property and washing out roads. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way to move all that water from places it isn’t needed to places that it is? If our global warming trends and climate changes continue, at some point water will be worth more than oil and will go for a pretty penny. Then I fell back asleep.

Carl, in Jerusalem, recalled a post he wrote nearly a year ago considering the implications for Israel's water supply of any land-sharing arrangement with Palestine or Syria, and expressed concerns about the near future:

With warm temperatures hitting this weekend (temperatures are expected to hit 29 degrees Celsius today and 31 tomorrow), the winter rains are likely finished for the season. Unfortunately, we did not have enough rain this winter, and if the water levels run too low, the aquifers that supply our water may be irreversibly polluted. The existing desalination facilities are insufficient. We have a major problem that could potentially hit full force as soon as this summer.

The WITNESS Hub, meanwhile, presented the the other side of the argument, posting the first “chapter” of “Drying Up Palestine“, a 28-minute documentary by Rima Essa and Peter Snowdon which describes itself as “a film about what it's like to try and live with less than one raindrop out of every ten”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRAFT PROGRAM

June 27, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

June 28, 2008

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

Session 2: “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”
The rise of blogging, social networking and micro-blogging services like Facebook and Twitter, video- and photo-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr and the spread of mobile technology have given ordinary citizens the means, at least potentially, to participate more fully in the democratic process. This session looks at the impact these tools have had on recent elections in Kenya, Armenia and Iran and poses the question: is citizen media having an actual impact on democracies in transition?

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

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

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

As Delphine Nerbollier tells us in her interview (Fr) with Shahinaz on the NewsLab blog, Shahinaz broke with family tradition and left her native city in 2005, and now leads an independent life in Cairo. At 29 years old, she works as an telecommunications engineer with Orange, a job which, for her, raises a number of ethical questions. “Orange moved to this country to so they could pay engineers lower salaries, and I'm against that sort of thing,” she says. “But you still have to live, don't you?” Unlike the majority of Muslim women in Egypt, Shahinaz has never worn a headscarf or veil, and has no plans to do so in the future.

In this special edition of the Global Voices Show, Shahinaz talks about her own reasons for blogging; the risks faced by Egyptian bloggers who dare criticise the authorities; her friend, the imprisoned blogger Kareem Amer (whom she encouraged us all to write by giving us self-addressed stamped envelopes); and the activist blogging scene in Egypt.

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