In just a few hours, bloggers from the Global Voices community plus a number of groupies, fans, and supporters will be gathering for the Global Voices London Summit

Saturday’s meeting will be a chance to take stock, examine our strengths and weaknesses, discuss what works and what doesn’t, and try to figure out where we go from here.

If you’re not here in London we very much hope you’ll join us online, starting at 10am London time (GMT) and ending at 6pm. (Click here for the full schedule.) You can listen to what everybody says via audio webcast, and join in the conversation through live IRC chat. There will also be a live blog.Please click here for all the links and instructions for how to join us. We will have a designated IRC Advocate who will make sure questions and views from the online chat room get brought into the conversation. Read More….

Source: Global Voices Online

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

The Global Voices Online 2005 Summit just got underway a few minutes ago at the Reuters HQ in London where particiapants are giving everyone a short introduction about themselves and their blogging activities. Not all participants are bloggers, some are journalists, others from non-profit foundations and organizations and we even have a senator from Thailand!

Below are just some of the many introductions that were announced at the start of the conference:

Boris Anthony, from Canada – I *build* weblogs
Marvin Hall is from Kingston, Jamaica: very /old/ blog, 2 days old; blog about cihldren, biulding robotics, digital space.
Fred Petrusians – living in Spain, Brussels Belgium;
Roby Al Anpai is a Ailipino in Thailand – we work on press freedom.
Nart Villaneuve: blogs about ‘net censorship and filtering
Michelle Levesque [leveke]: I have an ego-blog
Julian Wilfson: civil society blog…
Lisa, from Telaviv in Israel: about life and humaniaizng the other
Peter Levitt: living in Oxford
Ben Palmen: based in London, blogging about C. Asia
Becky, from London: personally I blog about the issue of … technology…
Colin Maclay, managing director of the berkman center – I don’t blog, but I may one day
Urs Gasser from switz – run an information blog
Anthony Barnett – opendemocracy.net from London
Dan Gillmor from the US – blogs about many things including tech and … blogging
Jim Morelee from Cambridge, UK – here particulalry for the fun session abotut translation/lang issues
Jeremy from Prague; from an org named TOL, bsaed in prague. starting up a project to promote blogging as a tool for free speech in central asia, starting next year.
Kitty Airy – originally from the US, in London now; freelance journo worked on and off for reuters and lernet?
Mark Jones – based in London with AlertNet
Kevin Nguyen – from Beijing; working at boke.com, blogging about blogs and tech
Ben Walker – have radio/website called the theroy of everything..
Kevin Wen
Hossein Derakhshan – from iran; also known as hoder – currently homeless and unemployed…
Andrew Nachison, US – group blog I contribute to occasionally, on media and culture
Sharam Khozy – Iranian/Canadian. got addicted to the net by a good supervisor of mine, ron egert? at utor; – got addicted to blogs specifically by hoder
Peter Anderson; affil with harvard but also with eBay
Samis Said – work on int’l and arabic website
SJ – based in the us, blog about communication of all kinds
(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Rebecca is speaking now:

Some people here have been working on gv for a while. We’re very new, so you may be a veteran if you’ve been withus for 3-4 months. The whole idea of gv arose a year ago, maybe a year and a day ago; ew had a conf in cmabridge at harvard where we were able to bring some bloggers to cambridge and harvard. Ethan and I saw the way blogs were developing you had american logs talking, and blogosphere happening in other parts of the world; then yo u had people from africa, mideast, all over aia starting to blog and talking… wanting to be heard; bt a lot of people not knowing about each other. We wanted to brainstorm about how to create a more global conversation, and how to addres problems with media attention and we ended up with a conference lblog after the conference, and people started writing about the confrerence; and then we [drafted] a manifesto… put together on a wiki.

Conference is just getting started and thefirst session is being led by Rebecca and Ethan (via flickr)
It’s in several languages… translated into many langugaes. but basically the people who were in the room, and had been apriticpating on irc, said basically what are the core principles we bleieve in? not only the belief in free speech and the right of anybody on the planet to speak, and to speak freely; but it’s important that people listen. and this is sort of our central mission. Eventually we got support from the berkman center to turn this into a fral project and real site and in april we started posting global roundups, daily; here’s the conversation from around the world. Over the summer, we began to recruit what are now our six regional editors; we have haitham sabbah, mideast north africa; sokari ekine, david sosaki (for the americas) neha viswanathan (s. asia) (unfortunately the other two – nathan hamm, amorphous east europe/former soviet bloc; and east asia editor, jose thesauro? can’t make it today) but we put together a little seed funding… and we were able to hack our wordpress blog to its capacity (thanks boris so it can show feeds the way it does today…and it’s not like our regional editors are anything like full-time employees, but we’re able to give them a token [amount]… and to encourage them to recruit you to be part of our editorial team.

One of the tings we want to cover going forwrad is how we might expand the regional editors, if we want to do that; how bloggers might be diferent in editorial strucutre; how it might be different and how pro journos work. Also in adition to the blog, where our editors are posting roundups m-f in the middle, and then bloggers from all over the place; and once a week or so, doing roundups from indonesia, georgia, the caribbean… etc etc etc. Doing great work on the left hand – whaqt we’re starting to call the left blog. We also have other parts: a wiki where we’re asking people, anyone who feels we’re not perhaps linking to enough blogs from their region/country
can go onto the wiki [I'd like to be able to show everyone how to go there from the main page of the blog]

[Demonstration/display of how the blog and wiki at GV works]

If we just scroll down… it says wiki right there. People from some countries have put a lot of links from their country they’dl like us to know about. Others are much less fille out; were hoping this is one way to collect more info, links, countries. [cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/wiki/index.php/Bridge Blog Index]. We also have a bloglines aggregator, which it seems is taking a while to load. If you click on there you’ll also get to our aggregator; but getting links transferred form the wiki and agg; so all our reg editors are aware of the new material from the countries/regions they follow. This is a collective thing; sometimes people write saying “you’re not covering our country very well”. Our response is, please help us. ez – just a great example of this, and a tip of the hat to our freinds from cambodia. It’s very hard for us to know what blogging scene was taking place in cambodia; the fact that we have 2 people here from camb has a lot to do with the fact that they’ve filled out that page on the wiki. So if you’re saying you want more poland/turkmenistan/… [please] go to the wiki to add these things rm – one of the things wer’re doing is hiring a managing editor, who may be our only fulltime meployee ever; we’ll see. As we go forward, we’re trying to make sure we’re as balanced as we con possibly be;
that we’re getting all this content off the wiki onto the [feds] our editors are daily monitoring.

Now I’ll hand it over to ethan to talk about how we’ve gotten pretty influential in a pretty short time. Originally we’d go to 11:10 and then break and start again at 11:30. Maybe we’ll go to 11:20.

[blog posting in progress]

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Ethan has taken over the mic now and is speaking:

Ethan explaining how GV works (via flickr)

the goal for the first session is to give us a littel history. We should take us back in time to a year ago, when there were a bunch of us siting at harvard…can you raise your hand if you were there last year? (maybe 15 people) – so that’s a pretty small subset. The rest of us have all gotten here within the year. So this is first about where we are, and then about where we want to be moving forward. So keep in mind that this is an open discussion. We’re handing the mikes to poeple, but also intend to hand it to others. We want to talk about today, and think about where we want to be the next time we sit down in a room together; whether it’s this one, or one soewhere else in the world. So one way to undrestand what’s happened is to look at this crazy graph here; it’s a way to measure the # of people who come to the gv site. So back in december of 04… when we started this up : we had a total of 800 visits in the entire month. Last month we had 300k individual people…that’s a minimum #. we know from the way web stats work that sth will go up on a page and more than one person will see it. On the average day now, we’re reaching 12k people.

[Ethan points to stats onscreen]

Often they’re coming b/c they google something, and in many cases we’re the best news out there for it. We’ve risen to a google rank of 8… a measure of how powerful your site is. So our ability to get things litsed in google is pretty profound at this point. So when you’re writing something, whether about venezualea, trinidad… there’s a good chance that the wors yo uwrite are going to be the answer in google. That’s good and bad, and we’re going to talk about what it means… we’ve got something over 3000 comments : most of our short pieces tend not to get commented on; but some others have long comment threads, over 100 comments; with debates with people from v different far reaches of the blogospher. After the london bombings, we had a really terrific debate condemning the bombings; from the arab world; and a very angry reaction from some people from london and in the us. It ended upcoming to a head on our comment thread. This means eoplea re engaging with one another, which is fantastic news. One of the ways we measure how we’re doing is who decides to point to us; who llinks to us. According to technorati, it’s 1800 sites so far; that’s probably a low number. Out of the 17m weblogs, we’ve sais domething interesting to 1800 of them that they’ve decidd to point to us at least once. In some times, 30-50 times.
An intersting # from blogpulse : we’re in the top 100, we’ve come an amazing way… in the sense that at this point, rebecca and I basically don’t do anything. Back in april/may/june, you would hvae seen one of us three putting everything up on the site; in the coming months, [a few key editors] doing the same; now the regional editors are doing less of it, too; but doing other work, posting roundups, 7c…
one fo the reasons it’s important to bring everyone together in the room, is you may only know your regional editor; it’s hard to know whether tha rum and adik? would ever get to sit next to one another in the real world… .this is taking a conversaiton that for the most part lives online, in irc, and bring it back to the real world.

These #s are important b/c we’ve become a very real influencer; when you look at the 300 people who come tlak to us in the psace of a month; a lot of them are journalists…They want to know what’s going on. so this project that started with a ‘hey! we want to…’ a year ago. Now people ar really listening to us. So this isn’t time to screw up. People are talking to us day after day, week afte week, about what’s going on in kenya, mideast, bangladesh.. elections, etc. If we’re not htere ot help them out, peopel start getting frustrated; why is my part of the world not represented? As we start stepping up, people start expeciting us to do better.

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

As we start becoming media, we’re playing in that game (with msm) and what we choose to cover / what we don’t cover is becoming an item of debate, of critique… everyone here has had the experience of having someone come to them and say they have the wrong opinion, aren’t covering the right guy.. We all need to challenge ourselves; look at who we’re linking to, &c, and say “am I uncomfortable enough with this?”. If you’re comfortable with everyone you’re linking to, you’re probably not linking to enough voices.

We’ve now gotten to the point where that critique is coming from the outside, every day; we’re spreading this to you guys so everyone knows what we’re hearing; so

1) don’t screw up :

2) make sure you’re transparent

about who you’re reading

3) figure out what to do next. that’s what today is all about.

When we met a year ago, we talked about an incredible range of ideas. We’ve demonstrate that the idea there could be a single place on the web where you could see an amazing diversity of perspectives; we’ve run with it, and been successful with it. minus a few very public screwups but there’s a whole other slew of ideas we were playing with, that have come up this year. But because this is a public organization, because this is our organization, we can decide this, all of us — you guys have so much control over what is going on here, these are things we have to decide as a group, if Rebecca and I decided tomorrow we wanted to do [something in particular]…[wouldn't be the same] whether we want to have global voices in other languages; whether we want to work on translation, move into other areas….but *we* aren’t going to decide this; you have to decide this.

GV has to be a platform for all of us to do projects. Neither (Rebecca or I) do this fulltime! We work on this every day, but not all day. Look at this conference : we didn’t plan a Friday night dinner; we didn’t plan to have a face book, but we had people step up and plan to do a face book… we didn’t plan to do a live blog on this, but now we have a live blogger who’s keeping track of this while we’re doing this! This is gv at its best. A chance for people to launch other projects.

Rebecca says: a chance to hear from regional editors?

Rebecca getting input on South Aisan and Middle Eastern Blogging from Nhea and Haitham (via flickr)
Ethan says – just to talk about some highlights of what’s happening, what you see going on in your part of the world. Maybe we can start with haitham? or with neha

Neha says: I joined GV in July. at that tie it seemed I had to read a lot of blogs and link to them… what I didn’t realize at that time was I would in future be linking to conversations, not just blogs; and that fair representation was [a big deal] India having higher representation than, say, Nepal. What I’m trying to do is represent blogs as a whole from s.asia, but also point to the most interesting conversations. In the last 3-4 months, we’ve seen a lot of conversations in the in. blogosphere… as rmack pointed out earlier, the more people point to issues, tag things as ‘globalvoices’ – I know that it’s working. And there’s interaction b/t blogs, which I’m really happy about. Suddenly we have blog saying I never knew about this, but GV is pointing to a post happening at the border; I’m really happy about that.

[Problems with the wifi and Ethan says: just an announcement; I know everyone's having issues with the wifi: some people should switch to linksys; gently, slowly, one at a time.]

Neha continues to speak:

I think in the last 5 months… it’s been amazing that gv has been such a strong center of gravity; I think there has been cross-participation b/t someone in china… one of the greatest points for me was when a blog post about Chile was translated into Chinese; opening up communication which would never have happened otherwise. Bringing all these convos together has really been the most amazing part for me. What I’d love to see happen in the next year is… have more than just English. We’re getting 8-10% of the world… to really open that up would be amazing.

Ethan says: – 2 ideas that have come out so far : 1 is tagging; the idea that if people are tagging with gv, and paying attention to those tags on flickr, delicious; the other is translation, which will be a major topic we’re talking about today; what are we doing with translation; do we have more on the site? how do we approach this in a way that’s sustainable?

Sokari says: – one of the most important things to come out of the African blogosphere: Africa has been presented in such a negative way in the past 10 years; the blogosphere has presented a diff side of Africa. There are Africans talking about positive things; about — even when you talk about crises; that it’s done in a positive way… us speaking for ourselves. Another positive thing: when I joined in October, I wasn’t aware of all the blogs out there; and there was one, an American’s blog, saying where are all the women bloggers? and I responded saying ‘where are all the African women? I went out looking for them… I was amazed at how many there were that I didn’t know about. That’s been an important opportunity; also for us to get to know each other; I’ve also talked to other volunteers in sub-Sahara about what we’ve learned about one another’s countries.

Recently on the Kenyan election this was a huge conversation’ others were saying, this is amazing1 another example was quit recently; there were some pictures put up on flickr, which had come through to me on a feed. I’d sent an email through to the African group about this. it started a huge conversation about rights and wrongs and photographs… which also made us realize that the African Diaspora had a v. different perspective than say Africans blogging /in/ Africa.

Ethan says: – before we give haitham the mike, bringing two things out of what sokari just said: one thing we’ve been seeing is : a lot of hat’s going on is an attempt to correct perceptions in the developing world in Africa a lot of people explicitly state that’s what they’re doing with their blogs. This is why when Brendan is asking questions, going to do interviews, he’s going to ask what should I know about your country that I don’t know.

the other thing sokari mentioned that she’s done a lot of is meetups. One thing we’re finding is that, as editors, as contrib. from country, we’re often able to say, ok, let’s get all the Tunisian bloggers together! sometimes when you get people together from a region, some of it is crossing of issues., which has been cool for many people working on this

Haitham says: – the mideast… it’s a great chance to present the citizen media; before that all the voices were there but not given enough attention. Always the human side – what is behind the news, how does the media represent… with all the problems going on in the middle east. What do the people behind the events feel… this is an important part of what’s going on in that part of the world; wrong perceptions of politics, etc; at the same time, starting to bring some balance into some areas within the blogosphere, talking about things from the far east to the mid-east; everyone’s different perspective, also about the conflict going on in Palestine.

For example, the Amman explosion, where we saw everyone supported these guys… but this is completely different from what the media always likes to tell us. which is what we’re here for.

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Rebecca says: – before we give the mic to Boris; one thing a lot of people are saying: is something about where we want to go and whom we exist for; are was there for some audience out there who is reading us just for our links? or for the service of the bloggers out there who want to find each other and talk? who do we exist for, who do we want to spend time [focusing on]

Catego says- why is the transcript on the big screen instead of our witty conversation?

Rebecca says: – Boris will talk a bit about how it’s set up right now. do we want to rearrange the way the site is structured, to facilitate our conversation… make the site easier to read; make it less overwhelming; or do we just want people to find their (local) communities? Boris ?

Here is Boris talking about the web architechture of GV (via flickr)

Boris speaks – hello

Ethan – would you ulike to look at it?

[Boris takes a seat]

What we’ve got now is a wordpress weblog which has been hacked; with a country clout [at the top], some country tags as well, more generalized free tags, so you can track down specific place and time… this is faceted browsing. this is where we are now – just a hacked weblog. A lot of things said by the regional editors now points to the need for a better tracking system and aggregator; a way to find voices, watch them, decide whether to include them in a roundup, blog an article about them, etc.

I’m mostly here today to listen to what everyone else is going to say; which would [inform] any architecture/structure that I specify

[buzzing of the mic]

I’m not used to mics so this is really strange to me… I don’t have much more to say about it… I want to hear what you guys have to say, about improvement that can be made; especially re: how we can track and find and pass on these voices.

Ethan says: we wanted to get Boris up here b/c so much of what you se and know of gv has to do with how he has customized and built this interface so far. We’re incredibly grateful with what he’s done; the last thing has been this beautiful new logo…Everyone has raised diff questions about what it is… people remarking it looks like something from Nepal, like flower patterns in India… where it actually came from –

[Ethan shatters various alternate legends]

[transcript redacted to promote future mythology]

What it comes down to — where the rubber meets the road — Boris has a huge amount to do with it. when it comes to making these tools do what they want to do, keep in mind none’s ever done what we’re doing before no one’s ever don it. if we try and it doesn’t work, it’s not bc we’re not doing any work; it’s because no one’s ever done it before. this is our history session. if anyone else has one or two things to say on what we’ve done and where we’ve been…asks about the gv draft manifesto

Ethan says: – sj raises a really good question maybe a year into it, this is what we really believe? maybe this is what we’ree into and we ratify it today…any other questions about our past?

Becky – I know you’re a tool for the mainstream press… but how are you ? going to handle [exposure]

Rebecca says – we’re getting increasing exporusre; were finding joiurnos are using us for story ideas…we find that we’re being linked to for some story, and I say ‘gee, I wonder where they got that?’

Rebecca – and a number of our managing editors are starting to get calls from journalists… who want to know who see them as epxerts who can comment on various issues. We’ve been sighted on cnn, they have a blogging show, bbc has been calling people all the time…News agencies have been calling us a lot. Brendan – as a journo and not a blogger, this is an extraoridnary resource. It /*is* our international new bureau and that’s how we look at it. We wouldn’t have int’l coverage if it weren’t for gv. I’s a tool that I use adn that the whole newsroom uses.

Rebecca says: maybe one last q, and then a small break, os we can resume the 11:30 session roughly on time. We’ve got people joining us remotely and don’t want to throw them off too much.

[A question is posed at ths point] : what was the architecture of the site – there are open secitons where people can comment; security issues, how much was that an issue? did you have to close off sections? …

Boris says – have we ever deleted a coment?

Rebecca says: a few

Ehtan Says: – the only thing not open is a pretty powerful spam filter. aside form one crisis…other than that it’s worked very well. our policy has basically been to say keep it as open as possible; only whe nit’s going to destroy the community do we come in and shut down [offensive comments]

[Session 1 ends now and it is time to stop for a break... session to will begin in 5 mins]

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Much is made of the “blogging vs. journalism” argument. We believe there can and must be room for both in this world, and that the world will be better for having both. In this session we explore the potential for synergies between professional journalists and citizen-bloggers. How do journalists and bloggers interact in the world outside the US and Europe? How can bloggers become journalists and journalists become bloggers? How do the two learn to work together and respect each other? How can we combine the value of professional journalism with the power of citizens’ online conversation to help all members of the human race understand each other better?

Led by Rebecca MacKinnon, with input from Jeff Ooi (Malaysia), Ndesanjo Macha (Tanzania), Dina Mehta (India), Georgia Popplewell (Trinidad & Tobago), David Sasaki (Americas Editor), Onnik Krikorian (Armenia), Ben Parmann (Eurasia Blog), Lisa Goldman (Israel), and Dean Wright (Reuters)

The session begins (besides a few lunch announcements) with a videoconference with Dean Wright from Reuters (via flickr)
He gives a brief introduction of himself: (paraphrasing from the transcript) “I started with Reuters bringing global material to a consumer audience. This is an area where many networks in the US have dropped the ball on recently. There is a good fit with Global Voices, which has a similar interest to Reuters in bringing international news to a US audience. Recently with the penetration of broadband paper media and old broadcast outlets aren’t the only game in town and that kind of media isn’t going to work for most of the world. As trust in the media has declined recently, it makes sense for us to want to reverse that trust. Bloggers have seen themselves as holding big media to account and I think that is true, I think it has happened. I don’t think that the Jason Boyer scandel would have happened nearly so quickly if it hadn’t been for bloggers holding MSN’s feet to the fire. So we at Reuter’s are very interested in working with the people of Global Voices.”

Mike is handed back to Rebecca MacKinnon: “Thank you for letting us use your facilities. Before I open this up, (Dean feel free to jump in) I’m often asked, are you guys trying to displace, to become an alternative news agency? Doing journalism, citizen journalism, what are you? Are you doing news in a different way, or something different? I tend to refer to what we are doing as citizen-media, rather than citizen journalism necessarily. I think that there are some peoplem who are watching the news and there are lots of people uses to reading most of their news from the computer. I’d like to hear your persceptives on this. Different people have different perspectives on how you feel, what you do with blogging, how is this the same or different from what pros are doing? Have you interacted with professional media? How might professional media? How might Global Voices help facilitate a more productive interaction? The reason I went into journalism was to inform the public, for people to be free and self-governing, people need to have control over their lives, and to know who to vote for. This is why many people go into journalism and why many of us are blogging. Most of us want to have a more intellectual global discourse and inform our fellow citizens. Professional and bloggers have a lot of the same ideas. I think that its a good opportunity here to have a good conversation about how we further that aim from different sides. With the professionals being paid to so the objective thing to go track down facts, and us helping people get into the stories of various countries and get persceptives from the ground level. I want to start with Dina Metha, a very well known indian blogger, and a global blogger, who has been instrumental in tsunanmi blogging efforts, and earthquake blogging. The tsunami blogging was an example of the synergy that happens between citizen media and interaction between the professional media. I would love you to talk about what you think worked and what didn’t and what our community might do to help make things work better in the future.”

Dina Mehta talking about how blogging helped during disaster relief efforts (via flickr)

Dina:I don’t know who knows bout the tsunami blog. Many of us in bombay we’d never met, but were feeling helpless sitting at home and couldn’t just pack up and go down to the affected regions… so we just said let’s do a blog. We didn’t know what we wanted to do. Within hours, we had hundreds of people writing and translating. We wanted anyone to put in a post from the affected reasons, in real time, real voices; by the end of day 1 we had 200 people volunteering and doing stuff. We used blogger, very basic platform, which was good; there were people who had never blogged. They were able to do it, there were really no entry barriers b/c of that. We of course then translated things to a wiki; with a post everything gets lost in the archives; and building news and info around – bridging people ho had help to offer with those who needed help. that’s the basic use of the wiki. This is one of the experiences that changed my life; I believe these are tools that bring in so much empathy, and I really mean empathy; it’s not some tv telling you about some region you know nothing about; we had people sending ups sms messages from the ground; we out them up immediately; pictures we put up. Also interesting: as with groups and people working together there will be tensions; people who say “let’s make it an ngo, make something bigger out of it”. Some of us resisted that thought; we said, we’ve got a model that works; we used it when katrina struck again; and started innovating around it with katrina we started setting up skype lines…I was setting up something in bombay, neha was setting up something… we covered the whole spectrum of 24 hours (london, berlin?) People believed there was a voice they could talk to; we were pointing them to paces on line; we weren’t the [original sources] but we were trusted and could point them…if you want to call it activism, sort of like a movement – it could happen in next to no time at all, using technologies s like blogs, wikis votelephiny, even im. It’s like a ?society, at the margin; there was no ceo, no cioo, people said “do you want to donate bandwidth? where are you going to donate the bw to?” and there were people keeping telling us that no, we should have an organization, we should.. but the beauty and magic was of the way it was and worldchanging and boingboing – that’s when the traditonal media came in; when we had bbc and nyt coming in; we had interviews with indian media much later; which was sad. They had no clue of what was going on; just a website which was collecting stuff that was a turning point of sorts in the indian media. neha correct me if I’m wrong; but almost every week there are a couple articles about blogs now, more than just online journal articles.”

Rebecca MacKinnon: Thanks. If we could pass the mike to Georgia, put you on the spot here

“We play cricket in a different style, so should we blog in a different style” – Georgia Popplewell (via flickr)
Georgia – The caribbean is an unusual place to cover. There are 15 different regions to cover… always diff issues. My roundups are a bit fragmented; it’s also a region where the press is some much… the press is not so much free as not lazy…there isn’t massive censorship; just people not saying things in journalism with relationships with people in power, as throughout the world. So it’s sill a very young blogosphere; a long time until it becomes mature. Trinidad, for instance… free wifi… there’s a burgeoning growth in radio and television. There are certain key bloggers, a lot of whom are in Trinidad, now doing pretty serious citizen -journalism. Well, a few; and people who write easily about things. The other day I appeared on tv; there hadn’t been a whole lot of coverage about blogging in the local press; one of the magazines I write for has done things b/c those people are more interested; but the other day : called form a long-standing journo to appear on tv, to coincide w/the week we qualified for the world cup I sensed I was there out of obligation for variety; but I had to remind him that he had quoted a blogger about football. Certainly if more people could write seriously the journalistic communities would certainly [cover it?] I’ve noticed since I started rounding up the Caribbean for Global Voices, that people start to change things; since they know that I’ll ink to them if they cover certain things that alone has shifted things. I’m one of a few Caribbean podcasters.. I find the whole idea of use (of blogs?) in other areas…b/c of the ideas I’m trying to get attraction for, audio in education…still has limited appeal… a government school. You wouldn’t use a blog to communicate with the parents. it’s at least not a case of “we’re not going to do it!” just that it doesn’t seem to apply now…I think the journalists, once they realize the blogosphere is a source, they will leap on it; they are overworked. If they can get help with research etc they certainly would. The people I link to in the caribbeab all share globalvoices from the time I link; they often either mention or remention; there’s a kind of evangelism brewing certainly among bloggers. the fact that people know they’re being heard makes people step up and realize they should be more thorough, etc. My 3d or 4th post was about the blogosphere, which brought in a number of feelings among people; they though it was saying that all blogs should be political, which is not the case but in a way it was good b/c it caused people to react.

Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Lisa Goldman – It’s almost impossible to have a sane/rational conversation about the mideast these days. People have agendas, problems listening to each other. I blog about listening to the other side. Recently there was a huge controversy b/c I talked about a dilemma faced by a Palestinian cameraman; he told a group of Israeli and Palestinian journalists who meet in Amman to discuss cooperation That elicited an amazing, stunning, unexpected amount of controversy, and hatred as well. There – the Israeli blogophere is an interesting animal. Most bloggers whose native language is Hebrew don’t blog about politics; but about intimate personal issues. They don’t want to explain about [anything but] their lives; the books they read, the flowers they’re planting. The English bloggers attract a lot of controversy; for many reasons; from anarchists in favor of a one-state solution to are-right-wingers living on the west bank who believe that territory was given to them by God. I think the fact the blogosphere is so diverse and reflects a wide range of opinions is good; and in roundups I say, they’re all so convincing, how can you figure out who’s right?? If you have an agenda and strong opinion, you’ll just find something to confirm your opinion. I’m trying to get around that; it’s very hard. Right now I’m taking it on the chin from everybody; I’ve been called a useful idiot, a propaganda tool; jew-hating and anti-palestinian…Sometimes it keeps me up at night. Other times I say, come on, it’s just a blog. I do believe in bridge-building. But I think it will be a long long time before [people are really listening to one another] I want to close by saying that 4-5 months ago, a journo for Ma’ariv wrote a column, saying I don’t know why everyone says the Israeli blogosphere is so boring…The fact of the matter is there are fascinating blogs out there; but not written in Hebrew, written in english. I linked to a bunch of them, and led to a bunch of traffic. Israel is very wired; hardly a home without a wireless connection. Everyone’s really into tit; but they see it as a high-tech tool more than a political tool. I welcome you to my roundups where I will try very hard to make sense.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Thank you… later this afternoon we’ll be talking about language. I’m grabbing people, but at any time if people have something they want to add or elaborate on, jump right in.

Traditional journalists – we are not here to replace you, but to provide sources – Jeff Ooi (via flickr)

(grabbing jeff ooi)

Jeff, you and other Malaysian bloggers have really been doing your part to bring issues forward that the media is not talking about. But to what extent are you a journalist, and to what extent do you think you are something different.

Jeff Ooi – Thanks! I’m Jeff Ooi, from Malaysia; got its independence 48 years ago. We’ve retained a lot of [good] things about being a colony of the uk; the government system has remained intact. But there were a lot of things where we tried to get equal with the rest of the world; and that’s where we have faulted. for instance, most if not all are owned by political parties, incumbents in the government. We have never changed government since we gained independence 48 yrs ago, and that is peculiar. A lot of journalists gain [position?] by [paying homage to political leaders] that’s where bloggers can help, with missed information, etc. When blogs came out, 2-3 years ago they were despised. But there has been a lot of changes since then. The biggest onslaught on bloggers who tend to blog on alternative views of major political events, are basically — the onslaught took place in the oldest English newspaper. We noticed that 1 yr ago, bloggers were termed as ‘unrestrained do-gooders’ and after a year, that stance coming from this oldest paper has changed and they said “bloggers are now the byword for freedom of expression”–Bloggers have taken on the views that 1) they are taken seriously as senior editors… and there were certain news items which editors would not run because they’d make an enemy of a politician; so they would pass it on to bloggers. When that kind of info was passed on to bloggers, we thought it might be a booby trap, and we had to verify the facts and unknowingly, we put into practice “two independent sources”…so that’s something interesting that /has/ happened. 2) we try to engage the senior editors by challenging them. You can call us names, but why not challenge us by starting your own blog or started by the smallest newspaper group; it didn’t last more than 3 months. I think plurality should be kept at all levels. Now, there’s a lot of trouble here : 1) they have to obey their political [masters], 2) they don’t want to sink to the level of ‘unrestrained do-gooders’ 3) there was an interview of 3 editors-in-chief or senior editors; each was asked about bloggers, and if bloggers are really replacing the role of journalist. Because at times bloggers broke news SARS case [blackout in the msm]

…Tsunami 3 mo later, aftershock in nicoba? islands… happened at midnight simply no more online updates on newspaper websites. We don’t know if we are replacing journalists, but that’s not our primary goal. We wanted to forward/project a context for all info printed in papers; mostly people say the truth only lies in online media, not print media in Malaysia… taking stock of blogosphere in Malaysia (where you have democracy, and freedom of speech [if not after speech] enshrined in the constitution. This is related to many things — migrating Malaysia from a production-based con to an information-based economy and why so many stories don’t get run; That’s where we are pumping hard still.|Still ongoing, but the latest olive branches come from online orgs. next week, by the time I get back ,the former prime minister of Malaysia will host a world blogo-peace forum for 3 days! Bloggers will be given press passes for the first time ever…

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Continued Transcript:

Dean Wright – Can I jump in for a second? Speaking as a rep of the main stream media, I think it’s not an either or situation… the tsunami showed, and as emergencies have shown, we in the main stream media need bloggers who are in place around the world… certainly in the us, when the tsunami hit, there was almost no footprint of any us media orgs in affected areas. In many areas that was the only way we would find out what was going on. So it really is… there is a symbiotic relationship here. Another point that Jeff made that was really good : we can find context… report context It’s difficult as a main stream journalist to report all sides of a story when you’re just parachuting in. What we at Reuters can do.. how we can benefit from the blogosphere is being able to report many sides of an issue. This contributes to the conversation that the world has with each other. It’s one of the things we at Reuters take seriously, bringing that conversation to the world to the fore. We have a mission, at Reuters, to be independent, free of bias, to report news straight down the middle, and we do. But we also have are ways to show the many voices on all sides of an issue.

Rebecca MacKinnon- Thanks Dean. Now to Neha

Neha Viswanathan – I don’t think you can say b and j are related to each ohter in a specific manner…it’s very contextual, especially in India; main stream media is scared of reporting what really goes on in India, to scare away for investors. When journalists don’t do their job, bloggers do it. But at the same time, in Nepal, the blogs support main stream media. For instance, the issue of (? Fm), stopped by the government, or when bbc was stopped by the government, bloggers stepped up and said no, we need this media. It was bloggers who filed a case in the supreme court, and aggregated opinions from around the world about freedom of expression in main stream media. Another thing : challenging media. In media we have huge instances of plagiarism; where newspapers borrow from blogs without giving credit. It’s a huge issue. Finally, do bloggers want to be journalists in the first place? Do they want to be seen as members of the press? Do they want id cards? Recently we had a huge fiasco, the ibm fiasco – where an institute has paraded itself as something its not; a blogger had to quite his job because he felt it jeopardized his interest in the company. He explained he has an opinion, and has a right to his opinion whether or not he’s a journalist…these are some of the issues seen in south asia.

Rebecca MacKinnon- Thanks. I want to throw out a number of questions…One of the things we try to accomplish is, to also hash through difficult questions… we’re bringing attention to bloggers some of who might consider themselves journalists some of whom don’t, some use real names, native language, some not. How do we vouch for their credibility we’re using a distributed net – trusting our regional editors have a pretty god idea of who these people are, why they’re linking to them in context; That it’s not a cia agent posing as an iraqi blogger or something like that. There is that kind of question – how do we make sure people trust what we’re doing? As we try to call attention… perhaps making sure we’re not calling attention to false voices/disinformation. Also, what is the responsibility of bloggers? Jeff talked about how we’re really stepping up attention. Does this change how people are blogging, or linking? Do you have to make sure you’re not linking to someone with neo-nazi affiliations, would that affect your own credibility and that of global voices? To what extent does the responsibility for what one person you linked to [did] reflect upon you and then the larger community we’re increasingly a part of –I’m very interested in hearing these issues and people’s perspectives on that. It’s one thing when you’re writing about the people you know; another when you’re writing about hundreds of people, and trying [to be comprehensive, etc]

John West – What really interests me is fusion and on how you build trust or reliability; there are many other ways – webs of trust, peer review + centralized review, on sites like slashdot or on wikipedia… all of those sites make user contributor/history available, complete versioning if you like once those systems are introduced (it may be that blogging communities don’t want to do that, if it offends their ethos — we are focusing on voice, and that voice should be unfettered but if you’re focusing on the info side of media; as well as voice; these mechanisms exist and can be adapted. They would be coming more from the professional media side, seeking to embrace blogging. but that would make a huge difference in the way newsrooms with limited time review 13 diff sources coming in from Sri Lanka. That’s the first point. This second : we’re largely thinking about media as it reflects international and national. I work with internews; working mostly to develop new traditional media; mostly helping people get things up and running : tv, radio stations; improve the ones that exist. Less than half the people in the world have significant access to media; finding a remote village with sat-tv doesn’t really [capture] it. Finding media in your own language, even in the right gauge (many languages have high and low level] with correct degree of sensitivity to local issues; less than half have significant access to radio/tv. Our work is geared to extending the reach of diverse/independent media, largely traditional. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity; the blogosphere will arrive at the same time; if you’re talking about going into the sahara in w. Africa, or rural India, or many other places; about the bottom of the pyramid; the 1.2B people who live on less than $1 a day The blogosphere will arrive at the same time as traditional media. So we now have an opportunity to build completely fused media. Sorry – I’ll stop in a second… but a lot of this discussion is about how the blogosphere interacts with currently existing traditional media. If (nobody really knows) we think more than half the world’s pop can’t be classed as having significant access to media, let’s try and fuse it; make sure.. and I’m issuing an open invite to everyone in this room. We have projects of various different kinds on 50 countries in the world, come talk to me about how we can do [these things] in your areas.

Rebecca MacKinnon – This is absolutely true. We’re at a point where we can shape the future. One of the reasons I’m here instead of at my old job is I believe we [can do this], decide what to do to shape the future, who we can be working with at all these different levels, so people can communicate about what matters to them.

Mary (Page or Joyce?) – I’m glad you talked about credibility. I want to talk about the strengths of subjectivity, to me, journalism is about telling someone else’s story; blogging can be telling your own story. For me this is so important; since I’m doing a democratization blog; this is people saying this is what democracy means to me; it will be biased b/c it’s their opinion, but there’s a place for subjectivity and “what this means to me”. There’s a place for bloggers that /cant/ be taken by traditional journalism; which is interesting.

Rebecca MacKinnon – it’s almost like a convenient division of labor; wire journalists say I’m supposed to be out here being objective and straight; and bloggers having license to be subjective

Sokari Ekine – Just one point. As long as we’re individuals, we don’t have protection from any organization; we can blog anonymously or as ourselves if as ourselves… sometimes, writing about issues in our own blogosphere –For instance I blog about lesbian and gay issues on a continent that’s really homophobic, every time you press ’send’ you set yourself up for some very negative responses. Lisa said something about people saying why was a self-hating jew on the one side, and a [palestinian apologist] on the other side. Every time I send out posts, I have no protection other than myself. I have to deal with that; I’m not within an organization that can have some support…so do you self-censor?

Ory Okolloh- I think ndesanjo from tanz was going to speak on journalists in Africa; I don’t think…

(interjecting)Rebecca ManKinnon – His plane just got killed by weather; so despite the the obstacles he surmounted, it got cancelled.

Ory Okolloh – I just want to say that in Africa… from Kenya, it hasn’t been off to a good start. The first interaction was plagiarism didn’t publish as his own, but there was no source given…The blogging community eventually forced it to be cited; with a formal apology letter from the editor in chief. There was a whole debate about what plagiarism was. It was relentless…(the response) there have been a few websites that have appeared, but where I see the role of bloggers in Africa : we’re playing a role that the main stream media isn’t doing. I write from an individual perspective; sometimes I’m more real – about observations -then we have lazy journalists, then there’s corruption…[these are all differences] there are some online journals in Nigeria; I see bloggers as filling that huge gap and spurring journalists to be more serious. If I can over the referendum as an individual with on resources just observing Nairobi today with cnn/bbc/reuters all telling people they don’t know what’s going on [and are reading here?] There’s a huge gap there. I hope as more get online, both western and African… [why are /we/ not covering Africa as Africans?] I see global voices linking to what’s going on .But the role is more than just being another voice.

Rebecca MacKinnon – Lisa next.

Lisa Goldman – about main stream media: yes, when you’re writing a story, you want to attract readers; blood and guts gets readers. When I went to gevalia recently, I photographed people on a beach at a picnic, and a girl from a birthday party and without comment I put it up on my blog. I just said “a day in gaza” and opened it up I had comments saying “I =thought everyone in gaza was a masked gunman…” “i’d never seen a photo in the main stream media of people in gaza just living their lives. Main stream media has to find a balance [including] what people want to hear and what their editors want to hear.

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Rebecca MacKinnon – I want to go to David, our Americas editor. David is not a very old guy; I know he struggled with the question of whether he should become a journalist and go to journalism school; or continue in this wild and wholly world of independent media. I’d love your perspective. I know you recently attended a training course on bloggers; how to use the web for research, etc. I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether you think training etc is something bloggers should seek out…and global voices – does this change the way you view responsibility on your own blog? How do you think that changes what you do on a number of levels, on Global Voices posts and on your own blog?

David Sasaki – I do struggle with that’ I’d like to be a journalist; I do distinguish b/t what I think blogging is and what investigative journalist is what I hope happens is that investigative journalism goes to one side, does it very well, with competent journalists; decentralized, all over the world, done by everybody with Global Voices, I feel like I’m a host at a party, talking to different people, like me introduce you to this person… tracking conversations. But in my mind, the blogosphere isn’t a “medium” as much as it is a café, a conversational space. 2d question : I haven’t dealt that much – have been thinking about it, as my own blog [posts] have changed a lot – On my own blog it’s a space to have fun, while on Global Voices I can be more serious; but it’s a matter of responsibility. The Americas – all the regional editors cover very broad, diverse places; diverse linguistically, culturally. You need to know the cultural and political history; and that’s tough; you get put on this pot, and you have to know how to say “i don’t know” “talk to this person” but I think I’m getting better at that, and you have to recognize that I’m learning, you’re learning. Also, you have to realize that reporters are individuals too; often we say “the NYT said this; Reuters said this” we should be willing to name the person who said it. I’d love it if a reporter called me up, talked to me [personally] — we all know the feeling of someone quoting you and not mentioning you by name at all. We should have more contact with journalists…I often end up meeting a blogger, and say “I know you, I read you, I’ve seen you on flickr” and give them a hug and I don’t feel that way about journalists. I’d like to… would like all journalists to hug me, today.

Rebecca MacKinnon – he wants to be hugged I want to know more about how you think about logging on your own blog… bout giving your own opinion; but saying we’re not going to be a platform (as Global Voices) for people’s personal views… for instance when we ask someone to do an overview about a country ;it’s “here’s the conversation happening online in our country and here’s the range of opinion” we do have different views in how neutral that can be, or how opinionated that can be. For instance, Indonesia.. When the poster has a strong opinion about what’s going on to what extent is it okay for those biases to come out in a Global Voices post? Iria? When writing about the Venezuelan blogosphere, what kind of posts will give you credibility, and help people understand Venezuela?

Iria Puyosa – So far I have been trying to be as inclusive as I can be selecting bloggers from different pov’s, opposition, pro-chaves, independent, to represent them in the most respectful way, avoiding being so extreme. I try to keep [my own opinion] under control to make other people’s points of view the subject of conversation

Rebecca MacKinnon -a number of hands up… david?

David Sasaki – you asked the 2d questions before the 1st question. What do you want Global Voices to be, and how do you want it to be looked at? What do you want your audience to feel? You and I were both in china… we both had strong personal opinions about what we were seeing… the opinions I expressed to my wife at the time were different than I’d express to Europeans…. than I’d express in a diplomatic gathering (all different by degree) different than I’d express on a panel. The larger the audience, the more they’d misunderstand or blow out of proportion the extent to which your personal bias is influencing your reporting. If you want Global Voices as an organization to support many povs, fine; have people express that in individual blogs. But if you want it to be seen as a neutral source, you should be careful to have people with strong posts on personal blogs; because the audience will not distinguish b/t what is personal-personal and what is written for Global Voices

Rebecca MacKinnon – that’s a good point; its true. A lot of loggers make a big distinction b/t what they put on their own blog, what they link to…a lot of other people don’t make that distinction. The public isn’t necessarily clear what you mean when you link to something.

Brendan Greeley – Also speaking as a journalist (and I will give you a hug after lunch)

[shenanigans]

Dean Wright – I wish I were in that room.

Brendan Greeley – One thing we need as journalists, other than more hugs, is training. One of the question’s I always have, using a blog in the newsroom: how do I know I can trust that? Interesting b/c it’s something journalists learn in journalism school; you have to face this every day when standing in front of a person, to look at a thousand non-verbal cues; and those cues exist on blogs too. You live in the blogosphere, so you know these things…you know what [the cues] are. If its a legitimate entry, they’re probably young, if it has a Global Voices badge, it’s probably a little more reliable at least; What would be a tremendous resource for journalists who are getting started…– it’s all in the journalists judgment on what they should rely and on what they shouldn’t — would be if you could put together an guide on all these things that you just know that we couldn’t be expected to. A wiki of things / clues you should look for on a blog about whether to trust someone or not [or on a wiki! --Ed] would be tremendously useful.

Tom Steinberg – There’s a very strong response for something happening in Britain recently : An anonymous blogger here, a bit like the Drudge Report, called guide faulkes, running a blog called Order Order they set up something called a ‘press plagiarims of the year’ award with a fantastic trophy I hope someone find online consisting of a gold pair of scissors, a gold bush, and an old jar of glue. As he reported himself, he got astonishing traffic for this b/c everyone in the main stream media wanted to know if they’d gotten called out. There’s probably been no greater education in the world of blogs (for main stream media in England) as realizing that at doing this could have gotten them into serious trouble.

Cecile Landman – I want to… address the trust issue. It is not the same as looking at Fox, CNN, BBC, and at the paper you read you always make a choice about trusting that. Blogging is growing and people trust less and less the main stream media…There are so many organizations in the media who try to get people to think in one direction; especially in this time when war is [to the fore]…

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Rebecca MacKinnon – to Dan Gillmore: You’ve written a guide for bloggers. What is your take on this? observations?

Dan Gillmore – Global Voices has to make its own decision about what it would be. If there’s an aim to be more journalistic in some way, there’s going to be a need for greater transparency of who are the people writing. Where are they from, motivation…? Transparency illuminates a lot; you can’t illuminate bias or point of view, and in blogging you may not want to try, but you may have a better shot of getting through the speedbump you’re going to hit too, that someone games the system in a way that will discredit the whole thing…

Dean Wright – following up on Dan’s point about transparency…This is also a lesson the main stream media can learn – in being more transparent about their research and sources. Why do people in particular main stream media tend do be suspicious of (content especially) blogs? A: we use sources, go to thinktanks and politicians; go to people who have a title, maybe an academic. We’re comfortable with that level of authority. Now online we have people establishing authority through lots of different methods; compelling stories to tell, good writers; a lot of main stream media folks aren’t comfortable with thee alternate methods of establishing authority. I work for a global discussion program; it’s my job to be subjective. I don’t care if you’re subjective, I want your view on things. We have discussions about the death penalty, elections, free speech; it isn’t whether you are objective or not – but what I ask my colleagues to do is, “take out ‘blogger’ and put in ‘first-person eyewitness’…”and they’re a lot more comfortable with that. Tthese are just some of the discussions we have…

Rebecca MacKinnon – when you read blogs from Egypt, e.g., it ’s just linked going down to a cafe, listening to conversations, finding out what the buzz is.

Onnik Krikorian – I’ve gone into journalism. I don’t see this as making me different from any other blogger… as someone else said, as long as the content is good, if you like the way it’s presented; you will choose whether to respect it or not. Just one other story. I suspect, and others may as well, that some media feel very threatened by blogs. I just want to tell a story re: elections an Azerbaijan . I’m based in Armenia, but looking into Azerbaijan. and someone posted a photoblog; they also said on the page “you’re free to reuse… as long as proper attribution? is given”. Ironically, I’d just started writing for these people as well. They sent me a warning… asking me to remove the photos. I sent back a note, and said, on your disclaimer page, it says…and they wrote back and said, no no, we don’t want it…I personally think they highlighted me, and didn’t want a blog to use their material…. maybe they’re worried b/c we can update more interesting info than this site can. During the Azerbaijan thing, maryam’s ost about ? info was some of the best info out there. I want to ask Jeremy a question — he also has an online publication dealing with former soviet space; he is also one of the reasons I considered blogging in the first place. I want to know as the editor in chief of an online publication, why is he considering blogs?

Jeremy Druker – I was going to [speak] anyway, I think all this talk about the mainstream… was framed improperly from the beginning. It was really a good story that this new medium could threaten conventional journalism. But it gets to the point, really what people have said — it’s a great complement to traditional media. Our mission : we’re about freedom of expression and getting local voices out. so we’re main stream media but we have a mission. We’re interested in getting local-language blogs, and promote them; and to promote freedom of speech locally. As an editor of a net publication, I see it as an incredible complement to our content. We have rather heavy analytical articles not often ’slice-of-life’ and I see blogs as an incredible way to tell our readers something we’re not telling them in our normal content. In that, very heavy political articles about transformation, transition, where things are going; once we get these blogs [set up] — someone in … Ireland, Iceland, Asia — we’ll have an idea of what [these people] are doing. Then we [can] have a great amt of commentary and a great amt of slice-of-life. People will still want analysis, and will want it from people in those countries, not from journalists that parachute in…

Onnik Krikorian – One of the things about Azerbaijan is there are [basically] no local reporters. Bloggers are just a source; journalists have always worked with sources; you’ve always worked with local people, and attendees at some protest meeting giving their very opinionated view. I’m lucy from the bbc; getting schizophrenic here, trying to describe why that is I’ve been a main stream journalist and a reporter; I’m not sure what I will be in the future. Will I be a ms reporter again, I’m not sure; will I be a blogger in the future, certainly. We’re certainly very interested in being in contact with bloggers; and we want to know from bloggers, and from Global Voices — what do you want from main stream media? What idea would you like to see in your next phase of development as paper retreat from? on the ground for various reasons, like it or not; there are many reasons why working together will be fantastic. atm, the resources are weighted on the main stream media side; but whether this will continue who can say? [a couple more questions, then sj with a quick wiki-demo; then steinberg talking about pledgebank]

Dan Gillmore – it’s not a journalistic competition; at least it shouldn’t be. The more the merrier, the competition that worries mass journalists is financial. That has relatively little to do with bloggers; it’s the swarm of companies tracking the main media revenue base So just keep doing this… don’t worry that it’s scaring journalists from a journalist point of view. They’ll respond in a good way to this (kind of competition) re Asia blogging (newyouasia.net): What do you make of all this? just quickly, we have a local girl who started writing for our blog… there are quite a few English-speaking posters in Central Asia, and they are some of the more active people and regard blogs as proper journalism; this is what I take from the discussion: I’m not really interested in what we’re doing, if we’re in competition with normal news sources; but what do people in the Caucasus and Central Asia think; how can we make them blog more?

Rebecca MacKinnonack – that’s a great segue into the next session, since we’re talking about how to bring people more into the conversation. I’d like to thank Dean again…many more thoughts before we say goodbye?

Dean Wright – these are thee kinds of conversations we need to be having. I think the reporting Global Voices is doing a round the world, is in line with what Reuters needs to do more of in the future…

Rebecca MacKinnon – I’m hoping we can continue to discuss precisely how we move forward… on the email lists, on irc, on the blog[s]…

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Why is it that some countries have developed vibrant local blogospheres (Iran, Jordan, Cambodia etc) while others haven’t? What conditions are required and what outreach can be done by the Global Voices community to help enable and encourage blogging in communities that could greatly benefit from this new citizens’ medium?

Led by Ethan Zuckerman, with input from Roba Al Assi (Jordan), Ory Okolloh (Kenya), Neha Viswanathan (Global Voices South Asia editor), Sokari Ekine (Sub-Saharan Africa editor), Iria Puyosa (Venezuela), Bun ThaRum (Cambodia), Enda Nasution (Indonesia), Andy Young (SiberianLight), Hossein Derakhshan (Iran)

Ethan notes that there is in fact profiling going on… and that if there were 2d and 3d days, we would break up into groups and do brainstorming. He encourages people to use the time immediately after this meeting and take a walk, have a smoke, go to dinner togther; another way to have the collaboration continue beyond the session. This session is mainly about talking about what’s worked in terms of building local blogospheres. Part of the problem we’re confronted with jointly, is how to build more really vibrant, dynamic blogospheres. If our whole job is to point to conversations, we need them to take place.

so we owe it to ourselves to get engaged in the work of building these local blogospheres and bringing people into these blogospheres who might not otherwise be there… There was this dinner I was at with robba with haitham in amman; everyone was saying, this is great; we all know eatch other, we’re excited, but we’re all from west amman. So how do we make tihs broader? how do we learn from other blogosphres that have been doing this well? In areas where this is already working, where there is another dynamic blogosphere…

What can we do to work on this? Let’s focus on what has worked, but also on what hasn’t worked. Look at kenya: for people not familiar, there are hundreds of blogs; great aggregators -it’s really political… I’ll let ory talk about it.

[Mic handed over to Ory by Ethan]

Ory: when I found the kenyan blogosphere … it was mostly linking to personal notes…I made it my business to study technorati and the best way to find other kenyan blogs was to come to my website b/c I would go through technorati religiously every day, and say ‘guys check tihs out, go to them!’ It’s important to support new bloggers by linking to them; encouraging them to keep linking. A lot of times noone thinks new bloggers are interesting, or thatanything they say matters. The second imporant thing was to creat a home where it became more esay to find everyone…We created a kenyan ring. Another home is kenyaulimited.com — a brand new site alunhced last week. redesigned, done by volunteers… It’s rpetty nifty. there’s as wahili version available, translated by a blogger… you can see al the posts down there an open blog: a group blog. if you do a gv roundup you can crosslink to it from the kenyan home, there’s this guy, we call him the godfather who created the kenya ring… this is mentalacrobatics.com and there’s actually – it’s funny, it’s become tall these personalities now, people who compete to be first to comment on each post… turned into a community.

I think a lot of it was finding people woh are just doing it… There are a lot of peopel -= a woman doing political stuff; they felt more comfortable reading about it? b/c she was a woman. And [some] people write about sex, some about other things; there’s a lot of diversity, there were memes that got everyone excited; then we got tired of doing it; but it got pepole involved in the group. We’re also turning this into a place to work on projects offline; when I went to kenya, I would find people who commentedon my blog, and say you commented, why don’t you start your own blog; you have something to say.

Ethan: you mentioned most of these bloggers are from the diaspora. are there ar lot of f2f get-togethers?

Ory: some people meet.. but some are anonymous, and want to keep their identities separate. Some people were resistant to have connections, as if they were pen pals; eithre b/c they weren’t social, or b/c they preferred 1-to-1 interactions. But there’s a lot of online interaction; kenyaunlimeted has a chat room; im; phone… with people I’ve never met… people will sometimes clal e, email me, say ‘are you okay?’ The sense that it’s more than a virtual world, but also a community – it’s made a lot more people comfortable; you feel like you can write — there’s very litel censorship and we’re all very young; this is another important htin. it’s become a psace for young kenyans who don’t have ioutlets anywhere to tpexress themselves to write without feeling judged.

Ethan: to take a couple lessons away… supporting bloggers by linking, commenting as they come along, religiously linking to new lbogs, creating a home a center for all these with instructions, including in local languages; trying to build up behaviors; like a competition to post together; let people know you’re there and recognize that, despite being virtual, this is a real community.

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Ethan: Another community I’ve bene really impresed by and wat to talk about: jordanian blog community. I want to ask roba two things; [what's going on today with blogging], and what happened after the bombings.

Roba: I blog on jordan now; and haitham, etc are also blogging there; we discuss all kinds of tihngs. we discuss wikipedia, we discuss what we can do around jordan; for instance — [mentions initiative to allow students in high school and college to blog] including methods of how to blog, what not to blog, and tips and stuff.

Ethan: the blogosphere reacted in an interesting way to [the recent bombings in amman]. maybe you can comment on this…

Roba: all the media is gov’t-controlled, except for two channels that came out ecently, in september of this year. So everyone was very upset with how the media is covering the bombing events; all bloggers took it to heart to take pictures of demonstrations; to get uncensored civilian view. It was amazing…everything was completely unedited. People were able to say whztever they felt, pro-islamists or whatever.

Ethan: two responses that interested me… one was that a number of bloggers put together a virtual newsroom. For instance haitham put together screenshots of tv coverage, with translated captions and it was an example of how bloggers can respond to a real public event; j to mobilize and become a force of reporters.

Roba – I was impressed by the reactions of bloggers; I got news from them before I got it from tv stations, which was amazing on a different level. One must not forget that 50% of jordanian bloggers don’t live in jordan. I found out about the bombings from lebanon, not jordan… it’s amazin ghow linked each country is.

Ethan: asking tha rum to talk about the cmbodian blogosphere.. which has been a huge surprise to many of us; and really exciting to discover. Maybe you can tell us how blogging has come about, how bloggers are finding out about it, and what’s worked to create that community?

tha rum: I think blogging in camb is starting to grow or be popular, when local media write about it. There are 3 articles as far as I know about blogging…then I found out more people create their own blogs, and provide their own ? in cambodia… the country is low-internet penetration. But young college students, with access to computers and the internet, can create their own blog. and they — it’s beocme bigger and bigger. We had a blogger meeting, but not many cambodians… mostly for any bloggers… they try to organize meetings and few cambodians ttended this meeting.

Ethan: do camb bloggers interact much with one another? do the ycomment on each other’s blogs?

tha rum: I know some cambodian bloggers living in oc, and starting to comment to one another…for the time eing, mostly people blog in english. b ut there are some in khmer…input also, the unicode, the standard form [is just now becoming available] recently there were many problems wiht khmer charcters…

Ethan: on india : a lot of people took to livejournal and other community sites a while back most of the indians are on blogspot .com

Neha: People who hadn’t heard of blogging became part of the blogging scheme (neha speaking) and eventually started out on their own individual blogs. I find that the indian blogosphere is a bit inward-looking. it’s not as linked up to the int’l blogosphere as it probably should be. There is a wonderful site, called theysaypundits?.com, not a reblogger, but links to a lot of indian blogs much like gv. it focuses on other issues, like humor and movies and music; and there are a huge number ofNRI (non-resident) blogs. The level of interaciton [ /there/ ] is prtty high. For instance, when a blogger qut his job; the mainstream media took note of thta. And every time there’s a major controversy on the indian blog scene, the # of blogs goes up 5-10%.

Ethan: background; a blogger accused an indian uni of givin gout more or less useuless degrees; and the uni went very aggressively after him that some might argueended up costing him his job. And theysaypundit started to focus on this. In support of this blogger, all the other ones started putting up individual posts; there was a meta-post with 200 or so links to other bllogs coming out in support of this blogger; people who never had a blog, and wanted to speak up about this issue, sarted a blog with this one post; support gauram[sp]!
There is a blog called everymancity? a group of bloggers that want to help out an ngo in na education endeavour. So I see lots of collaboration with issues, including education happening on blogs.

Neha: wikis haven’t caught on yet in india, but there is huge potential for that as the regional editor for se asia, I feel there is sometimes a competiton b/t the indian and pakisatani blogosphere; recently there was a huge issue, with an open lestter written to th epakistanis, which was probably responded to by an open letter to the indians; it wasn’t a pretty scene. people were taking sides. and on the one hand, some people were saying about ‘this is what blogs are about, [baad!]‘ and other saying, If you want somehting to argue about, go take on bush… but there are all kinds of things going on, music, movies, etc; but whenever there’s a big issue, people really wake up.

Ethan: it sounds like if we really want to encourage the indian blogosphere, we need a really big lawsuit. But the people who came online about iipm, have they continued? was it a one-time thing for them

Neha: it’s interesting; there were a lot of journalists who became bloggers after this. They came online, there was a lot of nasty google-bombing that was going on. Istarted a thread, just asking anyone who started a blog on blogger to leave a comment; about 40 of them left a message.

Ethan – what hasn’t worked well in india? are there things you’re hearing in kenya, jordan, other parts of the world, that haven’t worked in india?

Neha: I can tell you what works in india; popularity contenst. there’s a lot of contest about gtting the highest technorati ranking; I’m sure this is in every blogopspherre. For that reason, collab-blogging hsan’t really taken off. there are som ewho are really into it, but you’ll find the same group of 10 bloggers on /every/ collab blog, an thee others aren’t taking to it. [similar to wiki growth --Ed]. The other thing is exclusion form the indian blogosphere; they konw about the 10-15 ibiggest blogs; but they’re not attending to the smallest blogs who are really international. This worries me a bit…

[Ethan is trying to pull up indiablogstteet... url?]

Neha: this worries me a bit b/c it’s becoming really inward-looking. We seem to have more for ranking than for links now in india that’s incredible, b/c there’s a lot of ‘you scrtach my back, I’ll scratch yours’ kind of thing. About a year and a half back, there were a lot of people who were outside of india pointing into india…

comment : I wish there were a technorati contst about who has the most /outbound/ links, not the most inbound links… (scoble, from the techno to p 100) there are 200k? people on the ‘net in singapore. in indonesia, it’s 5 times bigger. but this is still a small % of the whole population.

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Indonesian Blogger: A similar thing in other blogosphere; people write about their personal life, which is ok, but looking at gv, I think we have different directions b/t the personal and what we put on gv. I see two steps we can do here. first we can, in indonesia, get people on the net to blog… so there’s about 10k estimated bloggers in indonesia right now. from 10M to 10k is still a smaller % … every day there are pepole syaing I want to get on the net, please teach me. So I tried to make that one. Second, people already blogging should have more awareness of their surroundings. Not only writing about their presonal life, but also better-awareness about what happens in their environment and higher awareness of using the blog as tool to achieve a goal.

Third : using blogging as a tool… as I said before. getting more people blogging, then using it to write more about what they should achieve. There are 3 gen of bloggers right now in indo; 1) personal/? , 2) peopleworking in IT and 3) focus on media. The media is too /liberal/ in meedia, unlike other contries; it’s grown less in quality, and bloggers have become the watchdog; we even started a mediawatch org trying to correct the media making mistakes.

Ethan: great stuff. so I think this idea hat blogers come in generations, is somethign that has a lot of familiarity to a lot of us. I know that as a US blogger, first there was a closed club; then there was a lot of geeks doing it; I think it my have tone further in the us right now. the notino that there may be one path as this evolves; what stage are we in? whta phase are we in? I’ll ask iria to talk about what’s going on for her and her community.. so if you an just pass that mic back?

iria – the first ones were the geeks; the pioneers. people share a lot ofresources, and tech issues; console, interface, how to add resources like commenting tools, and linking, and tools for feedback. There’s a lot fo conversation about that; many people interact and share more [things] personally. I think it’s a fact of all this that building personal relationships is also tied to the, maybe cultural identity; people tend to get together for meetings and parties, getting into personal relationships with other bloggters, linking going back/forward… sometimes difficult to udnerstand posts b/c they can’t — had sometihng personal about othre bloggers, and you can’t figure it out. some people are in the know, others have to figure it out. 2d generation – not all the tech knowledge of the previous one, ubt cfocused on conversation; entering other types of relationships. One thing that worries me : we’re hypercritical; there is a lot of self-criticism about tahat impasse. We talk and talk and nobody listens to us… but we are comparing outselves with france or italy … so we want to change the world, and be quoted by the nyt.. but this isctually getting more tools than would be expected by the size of tech in venezuela

Ethan: as people are blogging about [vz] politics, [there's this high expectation] that people will be writing about it, getting storeies into the nyt… are local media taking interest?

Iria – not really; a few magazines… but it’s kind of trivial. I don’t see any msm taking it into considerinag. even though a lot of blogs are taking various information; we have video, audios ,interviews with chiefs? of industry… first-hand informatoin. msm isn’t taking interest in this…

Ethan: two brainstorms: hook up iranian with cambodian blogosphere to solve the char issue hook up the vz with the indian blogosphere, wher the media takes blogs far /too/ serously. I want to put hoder on the spot, knowing that he’s written sometihng about how to build the local blogosphere…

Hoder – maybe it’s a cultural thing; maybe it wouldn’t work outside iran… but I can give you some suggestions about what to do if you want to promote the b’sphere. When we started this thing in iran, we didn’t have any credibility… and that’s a v big and important issue.
so I did my best to try to find some big names; some journalists, writers… journalists are begtter known than writers,a and could befome better bloggers; into curent news. and writinga bout the situation right now. So I really tried; spent so much time gteting one person who I thought was a good candidate to do that. He proved v. successful and now his site has been around since the beginning almost… his name is ? There are many things I think are importantin the community. one of these things is : maintain a list of every othre blogger; people can go there, find other blogs, start reading htem; b/c especialyl for the newcomers, it’s very difficult to get attention, and not to lose the motives l, the motivations that are there in the begininng. And the well-known bloggers have to take care of the newscomers; it’s important to support them,linking to new posts, intertsting posts, and all that. It’s like gardening in some ways; you plant a seed and then yhave to take care of it for 6 mos or something. The whole blogging thing is about individualism; and some communitieis and cultures aren’t open to theat level of india. expression. In some communities, if youf do all these things, and they don’t have all this room for it to grow, it wouldn’t work out.

Ethan: I’m asking sokari about these ideas that have been bounced around… maybe we can turn this convo into a brainstorm based on discussions we’ve had already about what has bene tried already, what are some new ideas…Then think about this within our community.

Sokari: more focues on a population of individuals… in nigeria, we have a po pof 150M and only maybe 100 blogs, with half of them active. The kenyan blogosphere is really amazing; one thing we have to do in nigeria is create a kind of community. it is v. different, politically and ucltureall than kenya; we’re much more diverse; there is debate – -are we nierians or ebo or hausa? those dscriptions are often much more powerful, whic might be one of the reasons we don’t have the same community. There have bene a # of initiatives; such as a forum called nairoworld, which feeds the bloggers… but what’s happene there, is that it’s so confrotntatnional is thatpeople are leaving as soon as they’re joining. [wait, nairaland] and there is a blog aggregate which was set up, just a list of nigerian blogs (nigerianbloggers.com)For me, for the nigerian blogosphere, which is practically nonexistent… the [comuniyt-building] is slow. I think the kenyan example is the one we should be following ourselves; but I don’t know if it will work…
metasj

Ethan: an intersting question is if the same strategies can work somehwere else.

Ory: just to agree with whatsokari said, the [online] forums are ery different… they just turn into who can shoult the loudest. and there is a lot of idversity, but rarely does it become an issue of [tribe]. there’s also a lot of support; whether you’re more personal or political, I don’t get as many comments b/c people perceive me as a serious blogger so noone wants to crash my blogs. and we also have women acting differenl online; they want a space that they can control. if I were to have the same discussion online, it’s very… you know, it’s a different dynamic than with a blog where you can control the space and ther’s a bit more respect for each person’s space. Another thing, tethered to the sense of community : sometimesI think there’s too much concern over how ‘transformative’ blogging can be for kenya or for politics; I look at it on an individual basis – what ioes it mean for someone who didn’t have this space before to have this space suddenly? It might not change kenyan media, but it has been transformative to a lot of people I know; the poets who’ve bene ble to publish their poetry; for those people, it’s made a difference (on that smaller level) not so much on a macro level for africa. maybe that [focus] can help to build more community.

Sokari – in the nigerian blogosphere there aren’t as many wonmen (I think) than in the kenyan blogopshere; ory and I were just talking about that over lunch; tehre’s a high level of ego running around. itn that sense it’s difficult to build a sense of community, if dealing with people’s egos. I don’ tknow how we break that down so we can have… so there is something we have tin common to help us work together and give people have had to delete comments b/cyou aid something that someone else didn’t like. People aren’t respecting this is a fourm, where you have yours and I have my opinion… I’m not sure how we get over that. And as neha was sayig about the indian communit, there is this competitoin about who’s got what ranking.

Ethan: I want to poen this up, specifically in the context of figuring out how do we solve sokari’s and all of our problems – how do we get more people wihtin our communities blogging; differnet people; what stuff cna we do individually, together to get ourselves there? We have a queue of people – enda, jordan, irc… I sweear, irc is third

1) we are not too fond of getting public figures to blog… ut it’s really true in the case of indonesia. just recntly, there’s been this nedog model? started blogging; it created a lot of attention. it is a ? model in an islamic country… that’s first. more public figures to blog would be good. second: I’m not sure about corporate blogging. but if more corps start to blog, ti will also ive more authority to this edium; more will take it more seriously; and we can also build and help this blogospehre more.

Ethan: if we can all get nude models blogging, this will /really/ get your blogosphere started. Something to consider in the future. Jordan – I’ll jump right on that one… you sort of raised one question I had; but what does a successful blogsphere mean? what’s the problem rpesumpposing this question? the # of blogs, the # of comments.

Ethan: what would you want to see started in poland?

Jordan: throw the q back at me, eh? I want to sread some information about poland, and get people to dialogue about poblems. There are a lot of people woh read the posts, but not a lot of epole who post responses. is that a success or not? what is the problem to this question?

Ethan: one question about this :L are weactivists, pushing a certain agenda, or are we documenting this?

[Cat's noting the discussion in irc is a bit behind b/c there's a problem with the audio]

[should we try to be focusing on making people have political and social blogs, and less personal blogs? At first there was agreement in the chann that personal is less interesting; another said that in the africa context, we want to get the word out about politics... since it gets more int'l coverage , so someone asked, if I'm fronm africa (which I am), I have to write about politics or I'm not interesting or important. Final comment: do we have some sense taht we could control the # of blogs or issues they could address?]

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

in my carrib post today… a couple days ago, I postd the agenda for this meeting. and tyndale? who’s actually a friend of mine… he’s a journalist now blogging… with a friend of mind and myself he had? a list of predictions : #5 was, quote “a surplus of bloggers and shortage of bloggees” how can we direct the nat’l attention to lbogs that are consistent, acfurate, thoughtful, and useful? audience is probably a big issue, not so much for the #s, but in terms of impct; especially in terms of social and political, and the activism question comes into it.The link is at my post, at the top of gv today. It’s a comment, but I’m linking to it as well.

Ethan: a couple interesting discussions here … let’s talk to someone from a slightly more mature blogosphere – scoble – my 5-yr birthday is coming up dec 15; prety soon. when I started blogging, b/c 1-2 guys asked me to; I strated writing to thenm; not to change the world or get my agenda across; after reading many blogs, I realized a good blog is passionat and authoritative. if you’re not authoritative on politis, or passionate about it, youre blog’s not going to be any good. I want to read people who 1) are conected to that system, and 2) care about it. That should coe from inside. that’s … that’s the motivation should come from inside. The other reason I was blogging was just to put thigns into google. I realized that – now many search entigiens – I wanted to put things into google so I could put them back out later on.l’d write about a coffee shop that wasn’t yet in google; peopel woudl email me stuff that was interesting. One thing I wish I ‘d get more emails about – I get a lot about tech issues; if there’s somethign hot happening in your community, we should hear about it, in email; someone should just email me saying hey! there’s soemthing important happening in kenya; I don’t have enough time to read blogs from across the world. I’m reading 740 rss feeds right now. Adding a nother few 100 is difficult at this point. But I do appreciate getting emails evne if I can’t respondd to them saying something is happening; sometimes it’s oimportant enough to put it on my blog and let a new community know about it.

Les blogs conference asked how we could build bridges /t these two communities; my wife’s iranian,a nd she can speak farsi; knowing that there are millions of blogs in china and iran, and don’t know what’s important hter, whether there’s a big news sstory I should care about; even if I knew… if someone was watching tehse and warkning me, I could translate those or get someont odtranslate them for me; sobut someone needs to be awtching for me, to build a birdge… adn say hey, there’s something important happening in shanghai or beijing… and I should be doing the same, right? watching english blogs pertaining to warning the system, hey there ’s something here that chinese bloggesrs hould know about. I really love this conerence; it’s preobably the best hour oive spent in the lst two weeks touring around europe;’ I want to compliment you guys for that and now I know there is a central place for that to get global voices…and there’s an implicit offer here which is pretty amazing – that when you have some intersting news in your country, you can poteentially reach out to mor people throug him. Scoble – one of the things is, I work for a [global company] — for microsoft… and I can write on one mailing list to 20k people (within msft) ,if there’s something going on in the world where you need that resource, by writing me I can contact everyone at msft to let them know what’s going on to say there’s something going on out there, send money and people over. and they all have connectpors inside companies with the same kind of pwower; google has them, apple has them, gm has them; if you find that person who works at a big company, they can et your issue global-scale very quickly with one email.

Ethan: this is a particular linteresting idea; for peope who have ben blogging re: dosasters I know dina was talking before about the tsunami blogs. As we started expanding our coprorate audience to include people whoc an mobilize resources within their companies, thatis’ interesting.

My name is sharon koury? a friend of hossein and… I want to say something about self-expression and the sense of agency just entioned;
it’s very importanct from some of the feedback we got from some of the audience — is it supposed to be political? humanitarian? one of th emost empowering aspects of weblogs : re every blogosphere. is thta tehre are blogospheres within every blogosphree, sharing life experiences; there are 10s of thousands, 100s of thousands; and one fo the most iportant htings about farsi weblogs is they share lots of life stories. Lots of conversations going on like that; translating some of these would uncover a lot of things about how people live in iran; and the way… we’re always caught up in the political stories and elite politcics and power politicsl the storeis written by iranian homosexuals, e.g., not disguising but writing with a pseudonym… I thin it is incumben t on those of us who speak a 2d language more or less fluently : I’m a little bothered by the political underotne that has dominagted the conf so far; and humanitarian was mentioned but there are very true life experiencs out there, waiting to be translated; and thta should be a major focus here.

[applause]

Ethan: – certainly that is a big issue here; and one of the thing we’re going to talk about later is literally translation; I’m also going toamplify a comment that beth said in my ear, and straight into the mic…

Beth: I’ll say it – I want to urge us all to share out rools and tips and materials; if you’ve already invented a wheel, for instance a tl to put the blogrooll oas a sidelink, if you ‘ve already created code for that, if I can ust cut and paste and translate into kamai, that would be great…

Ethan: maybe that’s where this discussion goes, to talk about how this discussoin would work; and hwo we could [share such content] cecile – I wonder if microsoft is beter than FOSS software; isn’t ms helping keep people off the web, instead of helping them to blog, except for your blog?

[asked directly at scoble]

Robert Scoble – we’re a for-profit corporation, and we sell a product, and we have competitors; there’s a free competitor on his computer right there…

Ethan:- steering back to a conv aout how we iprove local blogospheres… [on-screen, firefox dies... on windows...with notes trapped unsaved on the wiki...- at WSIS, we werre talking about ICANN, but when the real people who control the net are these big companies; google, msft, ibm... and there was no real discussion about that. for instance, msn was not really censoring people's blogs, but not letting people use their blogs to post about democracy, human reights, etfc; and yahoo and google are equally responsible for doing that;
we were talking last night whether it's good to have these companies in these countries, or whteher we should be putting pressure on them. also - the most interesting blogs are when the political becomes personal; which is what makes it interesting.

Robert Scoble: on the china issue, where even rebecca took issue with me... it was the chinese employees who made the decision; not an american group; to block th ewords on the title... you could psost wordes in the body, but just blocked it out of the titles. I'm very conlfieted by it. I took their position; theyr'e in a loca larea, they know the laws and what they can do in terms of theri local ethics; what is it to me as an american to orce them to shut down th egroup and be unemploeyd, baically, b/c I didn't like the way they had to negotiate with their gov't to do busines? we had lot sof debates within msft on that one; even on american sites, we block obscene text in the titles.

Rebecca: we're in danger of getting so off-toipc. after the conf, we can have a big debate about this. and I certainly hvae strong opinions.
this hour is meant to talk about specific thing we're trying to accomplish...

Ethan: how we as a group could collaborate on tools to ehlp us see wht's going on in local spaces.

[Robert Scoble is inviting us to dinner...]

Sj: how can we reach out to elementary schools, elderly, handicapped, different segments of society?

[a comment about gardeing..from a pro journalist on how blogosphers can become vibrant and grow - there' s anumbe rof things which appeal to ojurnalists; one of those is as I said, high profile people who deicded to start blogs; that always attract[s] journalist attention, always loking for ascoop. also tying in to the debate about politics; and journalism. to me a blog is … not political at all. it’s like asking why not everyone witha pencil is writing about politics… so I think you’ve got to provide people with the tools to use blgsthen theyll use them for whatever they want… i had an email from soeone last weke, who said “what’s this new workd you invented, “blog” ? and I had to explain to them what a blog was; there are lots of people out there who don’t know what they are; how about just talking about tools ew can be using to communicate?]

Ethan: – blasphemer!

Ory: – a lot of poeple like reuters, bbc… sth that riased the prifiel of kenyan bloggers during the elction? debate — about what the aftrican comuinty as saying. it got really popular; oe way for africans to take part in a debat where they’re not usually heard; unless they’re a tlaking head. so if you’re a journo doing a piece and want a sense of what’s going on, try to get a quitote froma blogger, or link to a post that they’[ve done around an event; and really there was a lot of debate; and it was great; and it was done very well. in addition to what gv is already doing... somethign else : I'm for the first time blogging from kenya' I used to do it from cambrdige. it's a lot harder for me. iunles sI'm doing it from work. it's a chanllencge - I have to go to a cybercafe; bythe time I get onto worpdpress (which is pretyt good, flickr is also great) -- a lot of programs are really slow; by the time I get onto rss, it's really a pain to do. so a lot of thigns by mobile, sms, etc; flock si a new browser that is really neat; tools like flock - I know about it b/c I was at potech - if someon could do a piece on gv bout flock, etc, that are integrated; so I'm not logging onto all these things; more integrating tools, especially if you're blogging outside the us.

Ethan: a great idea that came up in passing on that is the idea of talking about tools on gv; which is really not something we've ever done.
Something we talked about a lot a year ago 0- wudl we be designing tools, woudl we build tools ourselves we'vefound that a lot fo communitie are customizing tools for their local needs; and we have the call out form beth to shrae tools; mabye we should be writing aout 'here s the right way to get on when you have 15 minutes, etc'

[Question: - how do you take this offsite, on the ground? I know in india we do very very very little of it. I think that hsa a huge role to play with it]

Ethan: thst’s a great question… I’d love to hear people’s ideas for how we can carry this out.

d: I don’t know what you think about this; I’m coming from englis-language.. if you rotate the editors to diff regions, what kinds of efect that might have; the blogosphere has more than just regions blogosphers; I have some thing her e: pososbile commont hemes could emerge; and learning; if you rotated these editors to diff reagions; and they would have to read differnt blogs…

Rebecca: can I ask for a clarification? do you mean rotating so now haitham is doing moideast, and maybe we switch and he does americaS? or are you saying, within middleeast, ech month a different person is rotated into that slot.

d – yes, that’s just the brainstorming… I iniially meant editors rotating…

Rebecca: just to give you — an explanation for why we were sort of inclined not to do that initially, or why we chose the editors we did : we felt it was important for the editor on a region to be really familirar with, and from, the blogosphere they’re covering; so they know when a particular blogger is writing about egyptian politivcs for instance; when to smell a rat; when it sounds like this person isn’t who they claim, or that it might be difficult… I’d feel relaly uncomforttable if I had to do the african roundups; I’d feel I should seek the dvice of an african bloger to make sure I really got it right. It’s a really intersting idea. and to hear what other people are thinking about; and rotation within a particular region is also intersting.

Ethan: three more people to get in; then we’ll run over a little bit…

Greg: live near dc; there rea tons of people who speak amharic (and ting?) so I hear it every day… there’s actually a pretty big community of people.. there’s a latent blogosphere ther.e what do I do? do I walk up to people in the coffee place and say’do you know what a blog is?’ that’s the core rpoblem… has anyone done that? ethan – an interesting respone to that — I will walk up to 10 people in a coffeeshop, sepaking a language I don’t know,, and tell them about blogging… only if 100 other people do it.

sj – there’s actually a [spraak??] social org in nl: which goes to poeple’s houses to speak dutch to them… marwen …was in tunisia; we were speaking to epopelwe know, and sometimes people we don’t konw; and one of them actually does go up to people in cafes and talk to them and ask if they know about blogs or not we do things like that [marwen is from tunisia, btw] that’s why we have a tunisian blogger aggregator, we have runisian blogger metepgs; to encourage eachother to keep going on. at the next metup we’re thinking of doing something outsdide the capital; most are inside the capital. we’re doing that, and will tahc them how to blog, so they can learn about blogging, how to, what about, wht the idea is. so it’s possible if we really want to make it [so]

Ethan: a really encouraging note – just as I walk around the room I want to daw out a couple big ideas I saw come out of this.part of the good news is that all of the ideas thta came out of this are now up on the wiki, b/c rebecca has done a great job of taking notes…
1) creative outreach. jiran?.com…in tunisia, going to youth hostels…

also: wide range of strageties… things that have worked in one way or another success with a central list; providing an instruction set; particularly if it’s difficult in a language[/region]

one q : can we become a centerpiece, a distributor of some of this info for how to do this? start a project where we go out to witness about blogs… and find pepole to go to and say ‘have you become a blogger yet?] it would be nice if we had the tools to use… it also sounds like we got a big reminder : when we figure out whether it’s a vibrant dynamic blogosphere; it’s not just politica.l. personal stories may also be a bit of it ,some of the metrics we use, some of the links, the traffic… may not be appropriate.

(Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

How can Global Voices and potential partners in professional and citizens’ media work to build a more democratic, equitable Global Conversation – a conversation in which all people who want to speak not only have a safe and accessible way to do so, but also a chance of being heard? To what extent are the solutions technical (software, etc.) and to what extent is it a question of human efforts, methods and organization? By popular demand, the second half of this session will focus heavily on translation issues.Led by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, with input from Ahmed (Saudi Arabia), Haitham Sabbah (Middle East/North Africa Editor), Farid Pouya (Iran), Kevin Wen (China), Jordan Seidel (Polblog), Pat Hall (Blogamundo), and Chris Ahearn (Reuters)

Introduction to Chris Ahearn from Reuters.. Unfortuately during the beginning of his speech the sound went out as well as the transcription…

… on the one hand, the people in this room can give talkback about what’s going on in the most important news; or that these people might become virtual stringers [for Reuters, etc] these are some of the possible interesting things that we might do in the future.

Rebecca MacKinnon – one of the reasons we were quite excited when Reuters started talking to us; a lot of our friends don’t understand the extent to which other organizations couldn’t function without Reuters; cnn couldn’t function with out it. some for every paper on earth, practically. If Reuters has its finger on the pulse of the blogosphere; that is a tremendous opportunity for all of you … and for citizen media to be heard in a new way.

Ethan Zuckerman – the goal of this session is to talk about where we could go in the future. Part of our afternoon of getting down to brass tacks. In the last session we talked about evangelism; how we might learn from each other. Now we want to talk about what is in some ways the hardest problem for us –the tower of babel. Ultimately, there’s a lot of languages around the world. At the moment, we’re an English-language service. Right now we have a lot of people going out and finding content an bringing it into English for our readers. But not a lot of content going in the other direction. What would it mean if there were a global voices in Spanish, or in Arabic? what would it mean if that were the case? And while we have a lot of bi/trilingual polytglot people around the room; everyone knows that it takes a long time to translate; it’s hard to do. You can sometimes get friends to /write/ stories for you, but it’s hard to get them to translate for you. How could we make this more multilingual; and strategies to get going with this. I’m going to ask pat, first to talk about this; b/c he’s been thinking about a lot of ideas; and he’s even starting to put some to code. So if he would come up a bit…

Pat Hall – Hi, ok. so… the first amazing piece of news is that the third third of blogamundo just arrived from sao Paulo. Thanks to a phone call with Rebecca… what I want to talk about today is what blogamundo can do for Global Voices. I have a simple…ideally, as Ethan mentioned, some day we’d have a dropdown menu in the upper-right Global Voices, and you could pick your language. That’s the dream. [a dream] well, it’s not going to happen…

Ethan Zuckerman – it’s a dream you’re working on.

Pat Hall – well, sort of. The question is, is that the goal, to have that sort of content? This is our development log…This is the first time we’ve met in person. we’ve… there’s jonas? you can wave… behind it. he’s the plumber as he likes to call himself. we’ve been working on this for several months now (brothers?) the problem is as we’ve seen very concretely that distance becomes a non-issue; political boundaries disappear, but languages become more of a boundary. In ways they are /the main/ boundary. You come to Global Voices and read a great roundup (happened to me the other day in turkish), there as an interesting post in English; I followed the post, read the post, at the bottom there was a comment with photographs that were clearly related to that post, with more information; and it was in Turkish. At that point, what I wanted was some way to say there has got to be someone out there who is bilingual and Turkish who’d be willing to translate that. Maybe if they knew the demand was there, they might do it. We want to be there in that situation. We want people to know we’re a place where they can go and have them done; or just do them myself. Ok, here’s my basic idea. Here’s a simple post I’ve spidered off of the site; a typical Global Voices post. It’s in English, links to some posts in Chinese, some in English. My suggestion, and this is what we’ve been working on building is for a post like this, someone comes and reads this and translates it into Arabic or Chinese; what we’re building is a system – the formatting is up to Boris — to get the idea across, we think we can build something like this. You can see what this is? There are language tags (at the bottom) and there would be a page on blogamundo with links to translations in whatever people happen to be us[ing] [trying to reload... some tech trouble] [murphy is blamed.. and directory-moving] What I’d like to hear from you guys is, when you’ve had similar experiences hitting that language barrier. Most of all, what you guys want from translation, for Global Voices. There’s something about the words “globalvoices” and “blogamundo” that have certain dna…?

(Someone else is speaking but I don’t know who)- as a language teacher – teaching Persian at u.manchester — not until doing this did I realize the cultural gaps in translation. What I wanted to say is : I don’t think that e.g., translating from en to that language is so difficult, you often have trouble with synonyms that are appropriate; this experience, with hrw and af ew other … the committee for the protection of bloggers have been experiencing this. The challenge is the other way around; e.g. there’s this concept that radical Islamist webloggers use that they are immersed in the personality of the supreme leader. Tt sounds ridiculous perhaps for someone who speaks English; it sounds like they have been melted in his body if you want to translated. The challenge comes when you want to translate complicated concepts; there you get into problems of lost in translation, perhaps; or you might get lost yourself. Either way – I wanted to suggest (if it could be developed) a module; with 3-4 people who could back each other up; if you could diversify the number of translation experts depending on the type of text you’re dealing with… political, diplomatic, domestic, environmental… literature.

Pat Hall – we have some plans for collaboration and suggestions for terminology where people will be able to collaborate on particular terminology that’s difficult…

Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Ethan Zuckerman – I’d love it if we could get Kevin Wen who does a huge amount of work in Chinese/English blogosphere; what are the sorts of tools that would make it possible for the Chinese and English blogospheres to interact better?

Kevin Wen – Finally I can talk about the chinese blogosphere again! From the numbers of bloggers, there are now ~10M blogs, not bloggers. One created every second. Back at UT Austin, we created the first web blog-hosting service in china; now I’m working on boke — form the Chinese blogosphere, a lot of guys get news from the newswire talking about Chinese bloggers; especially female Chinese bloggers. On the 24th there was an article in New York Times magazine, about a party? blogger, and back to 2003 there was a famous cemal blogger, mu zimei, sharing sexual experience on the blogs and becoming really popular. So the NYT was really enjoying talking about the female bloggers…But there were also some impact… all the things happening in the Chinese blogosphere right now aren’t really well-communicated because the language gao is pretty big over there. There’s also limited options for Chinese blog posts to communicate with outside blogosphere? On the English site, there are blog-[engines?] like technorati, but they don’t quite have that in china right now. Chinese blogs: very big impact on main stream media…very interesting: china has 3 very big parts : xinha? shouhu? web66? These 3 major players opened portals in china right now. They all were enabled to provide blog services this year, and tv services right now cover lots of stories and blog things… with the podcsters and one of the local tv stations in shanghai are using podcaster content to put in their programs…Also bloggers right now cover a lot of local events…[disaster events are being] covered by bloggers right now… with some guide to help people to rescued people from coal mines…

Ethan Zuckerman – I actually went and looked at some sites about the coal mine disasters, but I don’t read mandarin. What are the solutions? For people who don’t read mandarin… what would help for ‘are Chinese bloggers interested enough?

Kevin Wen – we were talking today about how to break the language scapes; English-speaking and mandarin-speaking [contributors] not a lot of people in china read English blogs. .though I was talking with isaac (mao) who joined the Global Voices meeting last time, and is one of the most active bloggers in china. one of the ways to figure out, ok, we just created a Chinese version of Global Voices, a local version; in which we have some volunteers cover… summarize the blog event and activities every day or week… then we could invite some people with translation ability to help with the local Chinese version. Having people blog directly into English might not work; people don’ t want to.. maybe (?) of typing in English, or about grammar.

Pat Hall – do you think if you had a project like that; where you tried to organize people to translate all of the roundups, that it would happen?

Kevin Wen – absolutely it would. Have you heard about endgadget.com ? They have a Chinese version…

Pat Hall – but they hired translators to do that?

Kevin Wen – actually for my source, Chinese bloggers; they sent email to Jason; saying can I do the job to have endgadget.com for a Chinese version? So he invited them to do that.

Ethan Zuckerman – there’s a really interesting idea that’s part of this – that a Chinese Global Voices might not just be translations of what’s on the English Global Voices, but also news and tools and discussions specific to the chinese blogosphere.

Nick Moraitis – Global Voices is not the first website to come upon this challenge; I’ve personally been involved with Taking ITglobal.org quite a mature website now. after 2 years, when it started getting the in of traffic Global Voices is getting now, we really started getting into translation; the group of people involved — now the success story is that it’s in 8 languages, the latest in Chinese, that’s built on the contributions of 300 or more volunteers who continually translate the site; and a sophisticated backend which helps them translate phrases and it’s very important to engage with young people who are university students who are studying translation; We did this in Chinese 10x as much as in French; we found this amazing person who mobilized his entire university in shanghai b/t august and September, and it all happened; translating 20k phrases. It is possible, an I think there should be hope.

Ethan Zuckerman – this is tremendously optimistic, to think there might be a lot of people who might want to do this.

Pat Hall – I want you to come back to what you were talking about. You showed us Global Voices as we know and love it. Allowing me to click on it and getting it translated into welsh. The heart of the application, will in beta, is :An infrastructure for doing the translation in the browser, easier than doing it without our software; we want to show it but it’s still young and full of features. (‘features’ and no bugs) the basic idea we have is that it’s impossible to force people to translate everything; what you do instead is you have a link that says “translate this” right under very post. And if you click that link, you’re in our software which helps you translate more efficiently not machine translation, but tools; vocabulary tools, etc. they’re still in development, but it’s the way professional translators work.

Ethan Zuckerman – as I start reading Global Voices, my Spanish is decent; I think gee, it would be great to have this in Spanish; I click it, I would have an online dictionary, thesaurus, various things I can use to translate this…

Pat Hall – this could change; if you’re not certain about a certain phrase you could mark that and have someone else come along and look at it later…So Beth could have come along an translated that post into khmar a year from now, when you’re fluent it’s the same ethos as blogging — the same point o view [I mean If people want to do it, you enable them to. but you can't force them to...in this situation the first stage would be having this stuff hosted on blogamundo. at a later date, with tech stuff worked out with Boris, we could have that hosted right there on the site; in the mean time that would be our... [process]

Rebecca MacKinnon – I want to distill out some of the approaches to this. In the future we can continue to discuss this…See where the community wants to go. one is that we have this distributed method where you have whatever posts, people can decide on a volunteer basis whether individual ones are getting translated into what language; hosted either on blogamundo or Global Voices, but no separate Chinese Global Voices, or Spanish Global Voices…just a site that links you through to translations of posts in particular languages. The other model is of different lang-versions of Global Voices, and the potential for a Chinese voices, or Spanish voices, or Arabic…or whatever it is… and whether there’s a demand for that, people would do it… who would be responsible for it. it seems it would make sense for a community to use the model and initiate it themselves and officiate it rather than being all under the Global Voices hosted site. It becomes probably the ecosystem… one thing to emphasize with what we’re doing – I’ not super familiar with takingitglobal – I take it the content’s all produced and hosted on your site…we don’t have that much content actually; it’s all linking out. The idea is not bringing everything onto our server and site; but having a cross-linkage, across languages, across communities & the web, of people who share our goal and are working with us… but there are different way to et at that; whether it’s this loosely distributed post-by-post method, or lang-by-lang and site-by-site…

Pat Hall – one quick thing, I think… was it David mentioning posts being translated form es to zh? That’s really awesome. If Global Voices can enable a situation where you have something… the other thing is: machine translation isn’t going to do that. Machine translation is a huge piece of software; es to zh? It’s not going to happen. If you’re waiting, you’ll be waiting for a long time.

Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Iria Puyosa – I’ve been working on project to promote the idea of having a Spanish-speaking kind of Global Voices, more on building the community of Spanish speaking brothers.. I was thinking of connecting that community to Global Voices something with translation, interviews, and polls…giving people … more efficient translation, better distribution; shared resources, building community, having personal relationships

Ethan Zuckerman – I want to say something re: how we take on projects. Pat approached us and said, ‘we’d like to do this blogamundo idea!’ and we said ‘hey, go for it’ this is how we’d like to develop collaborations around Global Voices. b/c Global Voices has 0 full-time staff, and is likely to have in the near future maybe 1 full-time staff, there’s unlikely ever to be a Global Voices program manager to take this thing forward.. Whether it’s the dream of a translation service that works within it, or a Global Voices espanyol; the weight is on your shoulders. we can find ways to collaborate, to cooperate, to give feedback. It’s also an invitation from everybody here to use this as a platform. We’ve go to some exciting things going on; great content, a great community; really this means we have a great opportunity for people to build on top of it. With that in mind I want Farid to talk about an idea he’s been playing with…and to think about different ideas we might try to do with the framework we already have.

Farid – I had an idea a few weeks back… bloglogue; a bridge b/t blogger and non-bloggers. What we do with Global Voices is fascinating; we go after other blogs, and bringing in information and translate that, provide that. What about on the demand side, people reading, participating actively I know people, communications professors, who are not blogging; but really want to participate through emails and writing them. we can create a reservoir of information, from journalists, citizenries, academics, everyone and on the other side let some cliches that people have about each other, neighbors, cultures, etc, start to debate these questions… the whole idea.

Ethan Zuckerman- one thing I think is so exciting about farid’s idea, is something that is said to me just as we took a break b/t sessions – bogs blogs blogs blogs, why do we just talk about blogs? When we started talking about Global Voices, we were talking about communication and interaction in a much more global sense. It just so happens that the first thing we did well was round up blogs form around the world. It had some great success.. but no matter how much of an advocate we are, some of the people we reach out to are not going to become bloggers; you can think of elderly relatives, people in your community who have a great deal of insight, who aren’t going to set up blogs even if you hook them up with typepad; the idea that you can open a bloglog to members of the media, whether its=’s tape recording them, copying an email with them, etc; I want to open this conversation up to other things people here are dreaming, thinking about, talking about.

Becky Hogge – I’d like to talk about something that came up with opendemocracy started using CC licenses…We wanted to really look at translation in terms of remix, so, wanting a translation-only license, a place where Global Voices could be active is, if this came about, thinking about using that kind of license. This notion of cc in a way that enables translation is something that opendemocracy could be behind…other idea, big ideas?

Tim Morley- active in the Esperanto movement the past 4 years. When I came cross Global Voices and their manifesto… bonds, conversations across boundaries half of my mind thought, yeah, that’s what I’m used to seeing, all the boxes ticked.. but then I realized, no, that’s not an Esperanto organization It seems to be a whole group of esperantists who haven’t discovered Esperanto yet! And on the Esperanto wiki there’s already a longish list of blogs where people write in Esperanto I’m not one of them but I do read some of them… thinking long-term, if we’re talking about citizen participation, ordinary people starting blogs; if we want those to be available for real global communication, expecting it to happen in English is wildly unrealistic. The more blogs you have, if we’re going to rely on translators, the more translators you need. There has a valuable place; but there’s also a place for writing. it’s much easier to pick up and get to a good communicative level than any other language you’ve tried to study; I promise you; from learning it and teaching it. It’s spreading the load a bit; not expecting people to blog in my language to read; they’ve got to put in to some effort to learn the language; I’ve got to put in effort to read the language; we meet in the middle in wiki it’s currently 16th in # of articles… for a language that half the room hasn’t heard of, above a large # of articles; that’s quite an achievement and pledgebank.com also has an Esperanto version as of 10 days ago. So, like pledgebank, you don’t need to be afraid of being the only person to speak this language or start blogging in this language. See the globalvoices wiki… and I have some articles here about international communication. and I have some teach-yourself cds

Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman- thanks for the pitch-

(Someone new speaking, but I don’t know who)the trick is so far, in listing blogs from around the world, we’ve listed by country the big question has been how else to proceed…? as a person who writes mostly about Turkmenistan, I can guarantee there’s not much of a community writing about it… maybe 1 person writing in English. The thing I try to do with my blog… mostly I translate Russian language materials. Frankly it’s not speaking about the language exchanges between bloggers we’ve been discussing so far. What I’d find useful, especially in the former ussr, is a Russian English exchange; there’d be a lot of call for a forum, not so much for translating blogs, as for an informal structure parallel to what bbc monitoring does, for example; when you look into the type of next available for Turkmenistan; What I think would be useful : creating a forum for people in central Asia, blogging either in Russian or their own language ,now wish to branch out into blogging in English think of creating an informal monitoring structure for underreported countries [turkmenistan, nkorea, etc]

Ethan Zuckerman – so there are countries where not only are there not bloggers, but if there were they would be in mortal peril…

Sharon – I want to share quickly, before I get my neck cut off. I’ve been involved with a lot of offline paper[s] a lexicon project…I wanted to share 3 quick point on it. and I have a thought/process of building on the Global Voices platform. A starting point: an int’l meeting leading group to preparing for the ‘95 women’s conference. I was listening to simultaneous Chinese/English but then I was alarmed b/c I hard the English speaker say “counter-hegemonic …. reification” and I said “oh my god — what was that in chinese?” there was this moment of shock, when I looked across the room at some of my federation colleagues and said ‘huh?’ so then I picked up my headphones and started listening to the translation and I started thinking — oh my gosh; we all thinks it is an exchange. but in fact it was bizarro stuff…so I started thinking we should of a Chinese-women lexicon on internet? and law and he didn’t have funding… so we’d bootstrap. and I’d say to the women: do you speak to foreigners? have you been somewhere where they speak English? After a year I had 375 or so terms which didn’t seem to make sense when translated: gender, sexuality, family, violence, violence, homophobia…what we thought was, we’d translate some of these – so it took another year coordinating a team of 20 or so women across disciplines in china and here; all online; we were spread out without funding. I was editing/gatekeeping this whole process. I’d say – ok, one week time, ny/beijing time, sending draft suggestions for definition of gender what are Chinese translations? what don’t you like about them? In the end with as a lexicon. here are the diff translations for gender they all don’t work for the purposes of empowering b/c they’re biological… they’re weird – they don’t’ show the social contractedness of sex, which is weird, so you change it; we would keep some terms as chinglish, not really Chinese sounding terms; to carry the foreign baggage…not to masquerade as what it wasn’t we only had 175 terms; we had a split and cut date, so we decided to publish. UNSECO came in to help? Publish then there was a horrible censorship story at the end, which was pretty hilarious, in retrospect; that’s published in the journal (Chinese lexicon? dreams — rock and roll??) It’s about the ineffability of [translation]… the same questions as the discussions this morning; on validity, accuracy, reliability; is it accurate? What are we saying to each other? We want everyone involve; so it’s inclusive, but still subject to the same standards of accuracy. So then I thought, here’s an idea for access. one of the things I thought after, for the pound of flesh we paid online, etc; it wasn’t important to have the lexicon product; but we argued for a year about fundamental things; across language, discipline, culture; hk chinese, mainlinad, northern, cantonese chinese… I want to suggest one of the ideas Global Voices could do around this translation effort is to think about these key words/terms. democracy is one; really contested. use the translation process itself as a way that’s the bridge; rather than thinking its” Spanish to Chinese” “Romanian to Chinese” “Chinese to English” – the process of learning what we don’t know about contest, meaning, using that and setting up …. whatever it is technically, so we all learn a lot about each other by even the basic ‘what do you mean when you say?’ So you around the Chinese proverb of “tong chuang yi? wong?” – sleeping in the same bed, dreaming different dreams

Rebecca MacKinnon – maybe you could have translation son a wiki; so you could link to a big wiki page where you’d translate it, discuss it, argue it, about their methods and terminology…which leads to some tool making; isn’t it about time to start making some blog/wiki hybrid thing?

Ethan Zuckerman- which is a *really* long discussion. What I think the most exciting underlying point is, that we tend to think of end-result and one thing we’re sort of patting ourselves on the pack for is, the end result we’ve had over the year here; but we’ve also had process and some of them have been really hard; as we expand further, looking at the bottom line, and how many people come to the site. We should maybe think about process: how do we translate, cover one region or another, expand, do outreach? The remainder that we learn a lot form the process is a great one and I’m grateful for it.

Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

John West – everyone’s talking about how you can get people to write article but not translate…I’m not really in the blogosphere, just interested in it. I’m not sure everyone in this room knows just what waves you’re making outside the blogposphere. But in my world, no-profit development, everyone’s starting to get interested in it. If you start thinking about key languages like mandarin, you’ve got massively key resources; the question is how much it cost to hire 2-3 part time, 12 full time [people] from foundations, all kinds of foundations, those resources are really there. So firstly I’d really encourage people to think about that; you don’t need tremendous amounts of money, and it really is there to help ease some resource bottlenecks some of you might feel an issue with using pro translation; that’s a choice you can control, but you might consider that possibility. The second thing is, in terms of how easy things are to translate, writing in one way or a different way; l one of the beautiful things is … if people are interested in their blog being a bridge blog, they might chose to write in a different way that makes them much more translatable. That’s a choice, not appropriate for all contexts; but that’s part of meeting in the middle to pull the translation through. My last point: I don’t fully understand blogamundo not being machine translation;…plug for wikipedia….[sharon wants to talk more about wiki translation ]

Becky Hogge – of course since I joined the queue I’ve had lots of stuff to respond to. He would have mentioned pledgebank is now in Esperanto b/c matthew somerville has built a backend translation/segmentation kit which I think blogamundo would be interested in. I can give you contacts for that, if you don’t know already. On the 2d point, to do wit us getting what paper is.,.. someone just asked me for a sheet of paper; that made my day. More interestingly, I found your idea of it being a two-way process, and encouraging hooking up… to be a process that if online would reflect what people have been doing offline with languages for a longtime. Finally, responding to sharon… we all know wp and the wiki environment; and I find the wiki environment a great one for translation [and that kind of collaboration] as an employee of the world news service, which has been providing news in 43 languages…it was originally a translation service employing translators to translate en to other languages; now we employ journalist in their own languages all over the world…. My question is, how much do you really need to translate? One of the things we do do , b/c there are so many different services is have people whose job it is – maybe you could have a series of interns who would love to do this — who scan constantly for things they would love to translate so you don’t have to translate everything, that would be a really really tall order. There would be some things that would be passionate that would highlight themselves and secondly there are alots of translation students all over the world who would jump at joining you for a few months. Finally, re: the difficulty of translation: I was listening to a women who had been at wsis, from Tonga. When I asked her what the conf was like, she broke out with a diplomatic nonstatement by saying “there was a young woman from Iran, speaking about press freedom and what was going on there, but it was clear the Tunisian translators were not telling the audience what this woman said “so there are all sorts of complications with this issue.

Ethan Zuckerman – I actually think Rebecca and I ran the session with that translation issue. We’ve got about 20 minutes left; I’d like to encourage people to broaden beyond translation… and about some other projects we want to get help with; thinking about; inspired about… and the whole idea behind this is, We’re doing this f2f so we know each other and keep working on them… when we all go home and are working virtually.

Rebecca MacKinnon – to jump in real quick, Chris, if you have thoughts form your perspective, please jump in with that also.

(nart—not sure who this is) – I’ve been thinking about building a feature not just to translate but request translation the more they come up the more volunteers might be wiling to do those. I find myself reading a lot of sites with babelfish; I can endure that; you could even suggest “translate paragraph 4″ I can get the general sense from babbelfish, but might want to cite that paragraph… that might even be good.

Ethan Zuckerman – my wife and I do that wit on e another with french/spanish – the problems with [explaining blogs] are many; while people might suggest blogger/wordpress is easy; you have to get into a whole long explanation about what a blog is. I think it’s very worrying especially with blogging outreach. So often discusson about blogging get too technical and alienate people who want to have a conversation shouldn’t it be extremely accessible? Even to people for whom blog and static html pages are not very [preexistent] which goes back to fareed’s point about blogs not necessarily being very interesting? General broadening of the discussion. I think of the very important things to consider is how to produce many different views…when you say to people ‘we want you to be a voice,’ don’t tell them what to blog; just tell them we want them to write and we’ll help them to write. In the same way, I think we can give readers different opportunities for how to read things. Let people choose. If they only want to read a small paragraph…this is the easiest if you have time, consider rewriting it for another audience…I think this is the fastest way to do outreach by increasing the number of people who read for us. To me, people say – why the hell do people sit in front of their computers all day long? And I say, well it’s a social activity – -but you’re right, that can be really [intimidating] but when you see it as a social act, the tech issues fadaway. I was talking to Ethan about something — when I ask you to do something for me, I need to give something back. What I want to do is: I’ve given several of you my contact details. If you want help with skype orpodcasting or audiocasting, feel free to get in touch; we can bring you in on skype and better (this is from the bbc) and I’ll make it easy for you to do skype or skypecasting, etc. We run up against the same issues you guys do; perhaps together we con solve some of the problems you’re having.

Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)

Ethan Zuckerman – I’ll let Mary pitch her project; and let Haitham talk about some of his projects. I’m going to impose a totally unfair rule after Mary; then, totally unfair rule: you must be a blogger to speak!

Mary (Joyce or Page?) – I want to talk about my project, the open democracy project.. I just want to talk about what I saw that inspired me, and what other people might see in Global Voices. I ‘m creating a site about democracy using a series of blog posts from people talking about their [views of] democracy…also I kind of see Global Voices as a source for future activists; I’m creating a set of guidebooks…do you want to write an activism guide? have contacts in an association? I see Global Voices as a contact with people not just as bloggers but also as activists.

Haitham Sabbah –2 minutes? forget it. We had a great day of discussing a lot of topics related to blogging; there are still two main issues we did not touch. To give you a hint, I want to talk bout defining a blogosphere… what makes a successful blogosphere. Nobody asked what makes a successful one. Why aren’t there blogospheres everywhere? we know of 3 or 4 different blogosphere types these days…maybe you’re talking about 1 or 2 bloggers, who might not be active; also a 1-sided blogosphere, where all are anti-this or pro-that. The third is both-sided; you have both-this and that. It would make life easier as Global Voices; and the fourth one, the cocktail type of blogosphere; out of the UAE where you have numerous nationalities, everyone is talking about everything[ but /not/ everything] in some countries you know there are threats; some people were detained and killed… the NGOs and sponsors – how can they support this? There is a big gap still b/t the NGOs, who have to this point failed to sell themselves to the bloggers. So hardly anyone knows what article 19 of the human rights / freedom of speech is so actually I was talking to someone yesterday; they’re working on something. In each Northern African country… people can participate and give them more ideas. The 2d thing in the Mideast and North Africa : the media if you compare it to the rest of the world, nobody in the media know what blogging is. I can hardly name 1-2 journalists in the Mideast or North Africa who have blogs. They hear about them, but don’t know what they’re doing or trying to get. I believe then international media has to , maybe Reuters, talking to john [west] — the sources of these media have to have some influence in the local media.

Ethan Zuckerman – two things to take out of this, to put a positive spin on it. As we think about things to do; one is to figure out how to reach NGOs…

Hoder – the bloggers are presenting at least the middle class in some countries.. What we’ve been focusing on in Global Voices is informing; the ‘what’ in these countries; not so much on contextualizing, the ‘why’ question we should try to contextualize much more tan we’re doing now. Also, b/c the Global Voices blog isn’t interesting to me, recently… it’s full of reporting, regional reporting they’re important, but not interesting to read. I’d suggest moving this kind of regular reporting to another part; not the main part of the page; and only have interesting writing, posts on the page that would be great. I’m also worried about the sources of funding that Global Voices will get in the future. I’d be worried if any right-wing foundation would be interested; Global Voices still ironically is based in America; and the us isn’t in a very global position right now it would be worrying to see that thing happening, so please keep us informed and transparent about [financial] sources the only thing that could get political re: higher quality would be, commissioning the writers.

Ethan Zuckerman – I really appreciate getting a critical voice there; I can offer you a personal promise on financial transparency; that’s important to us as well.

[dan g gets on the q]

Catspaw – another topic being raised on chat here: angelo [who's been doing cool irc -> to blog cleaned up and improved transcripts] having a virtual news room; mobile blogging going with that…next point: people going out and doing and publishing bridge writing, maybe that could be a fundraisser; and running with that next: something former soviet bloggers did to reach out to media b/c of the difficulty in getting net access, we’ve found we had to make it more attractive for people to want to blog; promoting it as something beneficial in your cv, that opens up your writing to new audiences…I know it takes away from the purity of blogging to write; when people have to connect at 56k maybe, sitting in a net cafe; you have to make it worth it to them. We found that we’ve been very successful in reaching out to them and that they end up blogging for blogging’s sake. I don’t know if that can help out in other regions.

Dan Gillmore – Take money from right-wingers provided that you pursue the transparency you’re talking about… I don’t see the problem there; if it’s visible, if it’s disclosed… let people make their own decisions. I don’t agree with them on much, but let’s hear what they want to say.

Ethan Zuckerman – in approaching funds, we’ve largely approaching [essentially] globalist organizations but there’s a huge question that will come up. It’s hard to put 90 people in an irc chat room and vote on whether we take money from someone or not. I think the best thing we can do is let Hossein say don’t and let you say do, and agree to argue it out and let this continue on irc and blogs; I hope this is one of many conversations that continue form the floor here. It’s 6pm; we need to get out of here, which is tragic; let’s give Chris the last word, then matt wants the last word here. But one of the most important things to say is : this isn’t the last word the key thing to bring away was making connections face to face so we can continue this afterwards. chris:?

Chris Ahearn – I would encourage everyone there to remember that right and left is always someone’s perspective; the more perspective you have, the better conclusion you can come to. The second thing I find really interesting is the tools and capabilities everyone is talking about are the same ones the main stream media are grappling with. The tools you’re using day in and day out to do publishing are, in many respects, superior, to main stream media – both photo and text journalists – dealing with the richness with which you can tell a story constantly amazes me. Three last quick comments. Thanks for coming to Reuters for this event; we were delighted to have everyone! I think very highly /strongly of what everyone in the room is trying to do. 2 – the mobile newsroom is important; the reason we’re involved and why we’ll supply funds to Global Voices is to expand the idea of what a newsroom is, it’s nothing other than taking a sense of what is happening around the world. Lastlty, a comment was made not long ago about regional interests v. interesting writing; sometihng worth grapping with. Something not interesting to people regionally can be extraordinarily interesting to others. How does it grow, how does it touch financial markets…like it or not, that’s very much related to how this will grow, and continue to share etc. discussions. Thanks again.

[all: thanks! applause]

Rebecca MacKinnon- procedure thing as well – the mechanics of continuing this discussion forward; I have all your emails through that google groups. I’ll transfer all of you not on the Global Voices listserv onto it, unless you tell me you don’t want on it and I’m hoping those of you who have issue and want to push them forward and get feedback. In addition to the list, we should be using the wiki to post new ideas; I’m starting a discussion about this on the wiki, please go there and add your thoughts. also irc; we’ve started to see from time to time people scheduling times on our irc channel.,..then we can have regular meetings there. I really hope those of you with initiatives to get traction on, feedback on; schedule time in the irc and have virtual meetings about this. And post the transcripts! And we’ll continue to use these tools. This is only the beginning. As many said, we could go on for days…fortunately b/c we have the online tools, we can go on forever; let’s continue.

Ethan Zuckerman – Matt, who were are ever so grateful for keeping us running today; we’ll give him the last work on closing the facility…

Matt – these are really more a housekeeping statement; I can only echo hat Chris has said; we thank you very much on coming on behalf of Reuters. We’re very used to working with the b2b environment, and we’re taking away a lot of lessons on irc…

This ends the transcription of the London 2005 Global Voices Summitt. Thank you for reading!

Tagged: gv2005, globalvoices)