Learning from ‘Global Voices Online’
If you need quick example of what We Media is all about, look no further than Global Voices, the citizen-media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Next week’s We Media Miami conference will feature a Thursday afternoon working group with Global Voices’ managing editor, Solana Larsen, and managing director, Georgia Popplewell. Today we hear from Jillian York, a Global Voices volunteer writer, and Lova Rakotomalala, a Global Voices Lingua editor, both of whom will be with us in Miami. First Jillian, an author and blogger, explains why she donates her time and writing skills to a project like Global Voices:
I’m a big fan of citizen media and get the majority of my news from blogs (although I admittedly am addicted to Reuters’ website as well). I am a frequent user of Newsvine and Facebook and, of course, I read Global Voices Online daily.
I believe that sites such as Global Voices Online, for which I volunteer my time, are contributing to the betterment of the world. Not only do regular posts on the site help to amplify important news stories from around the world, but GV’s Advocacy page helps bring to light issues that would otherwise receive little global attention. In addition, GV’s Rising Voices initiative is commendable in its efforts to reach the global community with citizen media projects.
I support these initiatives, along with several other citizen media sites in which I take part (Inthefray Magazine, Arabisto) in their efforts to bring citizen journalism to the forefront of today’s (typically biased) media and to help spread the unheard word.
By attending We Media, I hope to both meet fellow bloggers (I have never actually met another Global Voices editor or author – such is today’s virtual world!) and learn how to better utilize my connections to amplify overlooked and local citizen news stories. I also hope to be able to take new media knowledge back to my day job (I work full-time for a non-profit that helps people in the greater Boston area find jobs and develop their careers, leading to economic self-sufficiency). Finally, I look forward to networking with other writers, activists and media folks and collaborating on ideas for using citizen and alternative media to make the world a better place.
Lova Rakotomalala is an editor for Global Voices Lingua, an ambitious project using volunteer translators to connect non-English-speaking bloggers in many different languages. Lova is also co-founder of Foko-Madagascar, an organization born out of a TED Conference that aims to improve life for the Malagasy people.
My experience as a co-founder of Foko, which promotes citizen media among forumists and students in Madagascar, showed that citizen media is a concept full of both promises and uncertainties in our corner of the world. There is an untapped will of the Malagasy people to share their perspectives and concerns to the rest of the world through a larger and more direct platform than the one that currently exists. The Foko-Madagascar project is one of the Rising Voices grantees for 2007. This support will allow us to spread the message further that each Malagasy citizen can participate more actively in the fabric of their nation by expressing their thoughts in a worldwide forum through the digital platform. We know that it would be a major loss from a development perspective for Madagascar to be left out of the global conversation because we failed to try to bridge the widening digital divide.
This is why it is important that we participate in conference such as the We Media conference. We are here to learn how to communicate information more efficiently, not only among ourselves but also with the rest of the world. Being an author on Global Voices and one of the editors of the Global Voices Lingua project – Global Voices in Malagasy, I witness first hand the importance of communicating events and ideas among communities that are geographically, economically and culturally far apart. I am hoping that the conference will provide guidance on how to improve while performing that task.
