Global Voices: New Directions

Those of you who’ve visited the Global Voices web site are probably familiar with our core mission, and the ways in which we’ve been trying to fulfill it thus far. The central feature of Global Voices has been our international blog aggregator, which is driven today by a team comprising nine regional editors, six language editors and 60-plus volunteer authors. In the two years and three months since it came online, this edited aggregator has made major strides towards helping foster a more democratic global discourse by amplifying voices from parts of the world which normally occupy the fringes of the mainstream media, if they’re even heard at all.

In the past four days alone, Global Voices’ authors and editors have posted detailed reports on the conversations taking place in the blogospheres of Kuwait, Sudan, Bolivia, Libya, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Mexico, Molodova, China, and various part of South Asia, in addition to the numerous short items posted daily by our regional editors highlighting individual items of interest. As I write, for instance, an article arrives reporting on the suing of a blogger by the Bahraini government, followed by one from Turkey and another on press freedom in the Maldives. This material — which is Creative Commons-licensed — is linked to and used daily by journalists, bloggers and others, and is made available through a variety of customisable RSS and JSS feeds.

Last year Global Voices enhanced its multimedia offerings, with the addition of a branded compilation podcast and the launch of the Witness Human Rights Video Hub pilot program, a collaboration with Witness that resulted in a human rights video editor being added to the team. And an even newer version of Global Voices is rapidly taking shape.

Thanks to a grant received late last year, we’re on the verge of hiring an Advocacy Director who will coordinate Global Voices’ efforts in supporting online freedom of expression; and we’ll soon be looking for an Outreach Director to spearhead our efforts at putting the tools and skills required to create citizen media within the reach of more people around the world.

Another exciting project in the works is Lingua, which seeks to address a deficiency of the project of which we’re only too aware: the fact that the majority of the material on the website is in English. Inspired by the work of the team of volunteers who have been translating Global Voices into Chinese since June 2006, Lingua grew out of discussions that took place among francophone bloggers this past December at the Global Voices annual summit in Delhi, India. Lingua will comprise a series of foreign language pages where Global Voices material will be made available in translation. A key aspect of these pages will be a set of tools designed to connect and build the foreign language communities within Global Voices.

Lingua is one of several Global Voices projects we plan on discussing at the Global Voices breakout session, which will take place on Thursday 8 February at 5pm. Other areas we’re seeking to develop include more organised curation of citizen-created video; expanded photo coverage and the repackaging of some of the tools we’ve created for our own use.