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.

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!)

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!

Global Voices is launching a new project! We're seeking a half-time project manager.

The project: Global Voices is launching a project to research, design, and build a translation exchange to facilitate the flow of information globally, with an emphasis on developing world, citizen media, and ethnic media content. The project seeks to match translation resources to the needs of media partners, for the purpose of facilitating the flow of news across multiple languages, and from local to global news contexts.

The goal of the project is to facilitate flows of news and information across multiple languages to support the polyglot Internet - read this post by Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman for background. The specific objectives are to research and develop a translation exchange mechanism to match supply and demand of translated news and information, and to pioneer a new mechanism for distributed translation of content and repurposing across a network of sites.

The Lingua translation exchange project will initially be a one-year initiative to identify opportunities and challenges, convene partners and interested parties, and determine feasibility. A second stage, to design a model for the exchange, and oversee its creation, may also occur in year one.

The job: The program manager for the Lingua Exchange initiative will manage the project, from inception to completion, including the following:
-oversee research on translation memory tools and work with the GV translation community to explore how to integrate these tools into GV projects.
-oversee research on technical, editorial, legal, and marketplace challenges of setting up a translation exchange for Global Voices and partners, as well as for a broader community.
-work closely with technical staff to identify technical solutions and challenges to integrate or link a translation exchange into existing Global Voices initiatives.
-manage collaboration with interested partners and the online translation community; represent this project and Global Voices at relevant forums.
-set up and work with an advisory board, members of which will include interested organizations and experts in translation communities.
-manage the workflow and communications with GV staff and community, and organize and run any meetings and work outputs that further the goals of this project.
-track the work flow against the stated goals of the project.

As Global Voices is a virtual organization, the project manager will not be expected to relocate. However, he or she needs regular access to high-speed internet connectivity and will be expected to travel. Salary and other compensation will depend on the candidate’s experience. Start date: as soon as possible.

Our ideal candidate will:
-have a combination of relevant expertise in online media, translation, and project management.
-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.
-speak and write English fluently, and be highly proficient in at least one other language; polyglot speakers highly desirable!

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.

Update (June 18, 2009): Applications for this position are now closed.

Public diplomacy over the last decade has been dominated by strategic communications thinking with an emphasis on projecting messages about U.S. official viewpoints in a time of war. At the same time, media have undergone fundamental changes, both in the proliferation of satellite broadcasting, and in the advent of networked digital communications via internet and cell phone networks that allow mass participation in the creation of content.

The new U.S. administration has promised a different approach - focused on listening over lecturing. What role should public diplomacy take in this context? Should it be redefined? Upgraded? Demoted? Should the U.S. government continue to support international broadcasting efforts, or disband much of that in favor of support for more participatory approaches? Is this a time when less might be better?

An event on Tuesday morning in Washington D.C. (Tuesday evening Asia time) called Media as Global Diplomat, organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace and ITVS, will explore “how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world”.

It will be interesting to see if the public diplomacy world begins to take on the lessons of participatory media - and focus less on messages and projecting an American viewpoint, and more on listening, and thinking creatively about how the voices and perspectives of others are treated as partners in conversation.

If you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about public diplomacy - take a look at ProPublica's investigative series into Alhurra TV - the BBG's effort to reach the Middle East through a USG-funded “commercial” TV network. Alhurra and related radio project Radio Sawa might be the epitome of Bush-era thinking of how to mimic commercial mass media to project American messages and viewpoints to the world. Regardless of whether they were right for their time - and there are good arguments that they weren't - it's worthwhile asking how relevant such efforts will be in a time of abundant media - given hundreds of competing satellite broadcasters, and the paradigm changes to communications brought about by the networked public sphere.

Join me and Rebecca MacKinnon to find out. Rebecca will be live-blogging the event on her blog, with some backup from me. I'll also repost that on burning bridge. I will be online to moderate and follow the live chat, bringing your views and questions from the live chatroom into the event. That way, we hope the conversation can be expanded beyond the room to include everybody watching and reacting remotely.

If you have views in advance that they'd like to express, please post them in the comments section of this post.

Below is the full program and schedule, taken from here.

Challenge

We are in a disruptive period in media, the result of an explosion in digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content. And with disruption comes opportunity. This summit, moderated by Ted Koppel and entitled Media as Global Diplomat, is a forum to ask key public and private sector leaders how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world.

Agenda [All times EST]

(9:00 a.m.) Welcome and Framing the Day
Sheldon Himelfarb, Associate Vice President, Center of Innovation for Media, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, U.S. Institute of Peace

Hosts Remarks
Ambassador Richard Solomon, President, U.S. Institute of Peace
Sally Jo Fifer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Independent Television Service

Media & Public Diplomacy: The Challenge at Hand
Ted Koppel will address the dramatically changing global media landscape and its implications for public diplomacy and peacebuilding.

(9:30 a.m.) Public Diplomacy 2.0: Rethinking Official Media
In this new era of digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content, what is the role of government-funded media in bolstering America’s global influence and ability to manage conflict? This panel will discuss where traditional strategies for media-based public diplomacy are effective and where they need to change.

Panelists:

• Kathy Bushkin Calvin - Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, The United Nations Foundation; Former President, AOL Time Warner Foundation
• Ambassador Edward Djerejian- Founding Director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
• Abderrahim Foukara- Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief, Al Jazeera International
• Ambassador James Glassman - Former Under Secretary of State Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State
• Andrew McLaughlin - Director of Global Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google
• James Zogby - Founder and President, Arab American Institute

(11:15 a.m.) The Global Media Marketplace
What is the responsibility of free market commercial media to serve the greater public good in the global media age? This panel will consider the role of “unintended” stereotypes in shaping the image of the US abroad and the perils of uninformed citizens at home due to declining news coverage of international events.

Panelists:

• Edward Borgerding - Chief Executive Officer, Abu Dhabi Media Company
• Carol Giacomo -  Editorial Board Member, The New York Times
• Mika Salmi -  President of Global Digital Media of MTV Networks
• Smita Singh - Director, Global Development Program, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• Sydney Suissa - Executive Vice President of Content, National Geographic Channels International

(12:30 p.m.) Lunch

(1:15 p.m.) Special Screening: Waltz With Bashir
Ari Folman's animated documentary on the horrors of the 1982 Lebanon War. Academy Award nominee and winner of 2009 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. Waltz With Bashir is part of the ITVS International initiative and will be introduced by introduced by Calvin Sims, Program Officer, Media Arts & Culture, Ford Foundation.

(2:45 p.m.) Independent Documentary and Participatory Media
In discussing the film, this panel will consider the potential of film and video to connect people around the world and transform conflict. How can this powerful content be deployed as part of a more effective US public diplomacy strategy?

Panelists:

• Tamara Gould - Vice President of Distribution, Independent Television Service
• Yvette Alberdingk Thijm - Executive Director, Witness

Cross posted at my personal blog.

In August I had the pleasure of joining this wonderfully energetic and talented group of writers, translators, activists, and bloggers. As the new Executive Director I've been learning every day, and I am proud to be a part of this community as we expand our networks and look for new ways to sustain our work.

In 2008, we've had a number of big changes. First, after being supported since 2005 by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Global Voices took a big step towards its future by registering as an independent nonprofit organization. We are now officially “Stichting Global Voices,” a Netherlands-based foundation dedicated to supporting and facilitating citizen media and blogging.

Our mission remains the same: to call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens' media around the world; to support the emergence of new citizens' voices; and to advocate for online freedom of expression around the world.

While we continue to have strong informal ties to Berkman, we now have a constituted board, a growing staff, and independent administration. While our registration is Dutch, we remain resolutely global in character and virtual in our operation.

We have no office; instead the world is our workspace. Our board members hail from Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Utah, and Massachusetts; our staff are in Trinidad & Tobago, Taipei, the Hague, Washington D.C., Toronto, moving between Copenhagen, Puerto Rico, and New York, or simply homeless, caught on the jetways between Antananarivo, Dhaka, Durban, El Alto and Kolkata. Our editors hail from places such as Brasilia, Cochabamba, Almaty, Kiev, Paris, and Beijing, and our authors are simply everywhere.

From the start, Global Voices has been a project powered equally by a volunteer, community effort and by the support of donors. In 2008 that community has continued to grow; we now have some 120 authors and some 130 translators contributing their time and effort to make GV a success.

Financially, GV has also continued to grow. Our donors have included the MacArthur Foundation, Reuters, the Knight Foundation, Hivos, the McCormick Tribune Foundation, Google, and the Open Society Institute. In 2009 we're also lucky to be supported by the Media Development Loan Fund on strategic planning, as a fiscal sponsor, and on funding support. We also have the support of the New World Foundation and the Arca Foundation. And while the financial collapse in 2008 has been hard on everyone, we're hopeful that we'll be able to maintain and grow Global Voices through a combination of volunteer effort, donor support, partnerships with other media, syndication, and possibly select advertising.

With that in mind, we've recently set up a donations mechanism, to help us cover the costs of running our newsroom, paying our server expenses, and supporting our small, dedicated staff.  Even a small contribution will help us to keep bringing you the best of online stories and news from many languages and around the world.

On programs, we've had an excellent year, and are tremendously excited by all the work and projects that await us in 2009.

A group of Global Voices authors at the GV Summit in Budapest in June 2008 (photo by Joi Ito)

Our newsroom is garnering international recognition for its work finding and amplifying unheard stories; we're finding that we are particularly useful in times of crisis and natural disaster. These stories are gathered on our Special Coverage pages, which in 2008 focused on events such as the Kenyan elections violence, the Myanmar cyclone, the Sichuan earthquake, the South Ossetia conflict, and the Mumbai, India attacks. We also ran popular special projects together with Reuters around the Beijing Olympics, and Voices without Votes, about the U.S. presidential elections. For 2009 we're looking forward to continuing our coverage of underexposed and underrepresented stories, especially in light of the continued decline in international media coverage around the world.

Our outreach initiative, Rising Voices, now supports 17 projects to bring blogging and online media to underrepresented communities. Rising Voices is developing from a micro-grants and training program into a network of online community media projects that support and help each other by sharing best practices, training, and knowledge. We're sponsoring another round of micro-grants in January, and planning to expand the network beyond grantees to support other projects in the burgeoning citizen media community.

Our translation community, Lingua, is now translating Global Voices content to 16 languages. Lingua has grown incredibly, from only Chinese and Spanish in early 2007, to “one of the largest volunteer-based online translation communities in the world.” The Lingua community is likely to keep growing in 2009, with another five languages in line to set up sites.

Our Advocacy project has had a busy year, in the face of increasing pressure and attacks on bloggers around the world. In 2008, Internet journalists became the most targeted of all media producers in repressive environments. In response, GV Advocacy has reported on online media persecutions in 40 countries, conducts training and advocacy at conferences and workshops, and provides resources and guides for blogging anonymously and using web 2.0 tools for advocacy. We've translated our guides into seven languages and seen more than 12,000 downloads in the past 14 months. In 2009, we'll be continuing with these projects, and also expanding our news coverage of attacks against bloggers, including podcasts and video reporting.

One of the best things about the Global Voices community is the constant brainstorming about new ideas, projects, and ways of working. GV started as an experiment in the power of networks, and some of our most successful projects have grown out of ideas generated and driven by individuals in our network. For 2009, I'm certain we'll see ideas come together that are only possible when many work on a common goal, but with each contributing their own specific skills, knowledge, and enthusiasm.

With that in mind, we encourage you to join us! Subscribe to our daily digest email and RSS feeds, and don't hesitate to contact us if you would like to become a Global Voices author, translator (or donor!).

Thanks to all, and Happy New Year.

The report, “Media Re:public, News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age,” analyzes the challenges and opportunities of networked digital media. While United States media is the primary focus, the report addresses structural, economic, and news and information-gathering trends that are relevant to the entire world. As such, it's relevant for anyone interested in the effects of digital media technologies on news media, on citizen participation in media, and on the future shape of our collective media experience.

Multimedia intro to the project: Media Re:public: News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age

The key message of the report is:

A myriad of innovative new media organizations have sprung up to take advantage of the opportunities that stem from low-cost distribution networks. Meanwhile the economic base of many of the large media companies continues to erode. Despite the demonstrated success of many new media enterprises, the euphoria over the rise of participatory media has been tempered by concerns over the quality and credibility of online media, the possible fragmentation of audiences, a decline in editorial standards and the persistent challenge of effectively reporting the news.

In addition to the main report, the Media Re:public includes a dozen supplementary papers and case studies, on subjects such as digital media literacy, democracy and media, and the role of editors in a networked media environment. Global Voices' co-founder Ethan Zuckerman also  contributes an article on international news in the digital age. Ethan's key point:

Given the decreasing coverage of international stories in commercial media, it's a poor idea to wait for research to begin exploring new strategies for presenting international news to American audiences. Media outlets - commercial and otherwise - concerned with delivering international news need to experiment with new strategies in storytelling, connecting personal stories to international events, and presenting international stories in conjunction with stories more likely to catch the viewer's eye.

Media Re:public blog and comments on the project can be found here

The Initiative was launched as a response to corporate participation in online censorship, especially in China. It took more than two years to craft, and much of that time was spent articulating a set of principles and devising mechanisms to encourage compliance acceptable both to human rights groups and to businesses.

Rebecca MacKinnon, one of Global Voices’ founders, participated in the working group, and writes in RConversation:

A few people have called me asking “does this thing have any teeth” or “is this thing more than just a figleaf for companies to get congress off their backs?

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, Human Rights First, and the Committee to Protect Journalists would not be putting their reputations behind this thing if they didn't think it was meaningful.

That said, the initiative must prove its value in the next couple of years by implementing a meaningful and sufficiently tough process by which companies' adherence to the principles will be evaluated and benchmarked.

Leslie Harris of the Center for Democracy and Technology, one of the initiative’s conveners, writes on her blog PolicyBeta:

Not merely aspirational, the Initiative requires concrete commitments from participating companies to engage in a high level of corporate due diligence and risk management with respect to the demands they receive from government, and greater user transparency about the impact of those demands on freedom of expression and privacy, in all markets where they operate. Company fulfillment of these commitments will be evaluated through an independent and credible process for accountability.

The Chinese/English anti-censorship blog, GFW Blog provides a succinct summary, a list of quotes and from participants, and their contact information.

Not every organization involved ultimately signed on to the principles. Amnesty International and Reporters sans frontieres both stepped away from the process. RSF believes that the Initiative is a “step in the right direction” but lacks enforcement capacity, and lists their main concerns here. Amnesty UK's Internet repression page doesn't discuss their position, but it does have a video of Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman explaining online censorship.

Fundamentally, it seems that some organizations feel they can be better advocates if they don’t have to compromise on principles, while others believe that engagement and the creation of a process for dialogue leading to incremental change is more important.