Global Voices: The world is talking
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Larsen, Solana
Social media is becoming increasingly influential in coverage of international news events and political uprisings, as we’ve seen in the Middle East and North Africa in recent months. One group that has pioneered this form of news coverage and international dialogue between bloggers, journalists, and activists is Global Voices Online. It is a dynamic online community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world that curate and highlight the most fascinating conversations and uses of citizen media with special emphasis on the developing world and anywhere freedom of expression is limited. In this talk, meet Solana Larsen (managing editor) who describes how Global Voices works, what they have learned in the past six years of following blogs in places people rarely hear about, and how you can get involved as a reader, volunteer writer, or translator.
 Hello. Hi. This is a picture of the revolution in Egypt, which you've probably all heard about. And the reason I start with this is because it's a global news story that everyone in the world knows about. And you could easily follow it, like he said, you could easily follow it just through mainstream news, through television, through newspapers, or you could also be following it online. The website that I help manage is called Global Voices. And ironically, sometimes I feel it's more known in places like Egypt or around Africa, in places where the internet is less free and less ubiquitous than it is in places like Germany or in Denmark, where I'm from. And I'd like to just give you an idea of what Global Voices is, the kind of universe that we work in. It's a website, but more than a website, it's a community of bloggers and digital activists who are working together all over the world, especially in those parts of the world that you rarely hear about in mainstream media. And throughout the program here at Republica, you have seen some of them sort of peppered around the different panels. Earlier today we saw Miral Husaini and Claire Ulrich, and tomorrow Noha Atef from Egypt, also somebody who's affiliated with Global Voices. Later this afternoon there's Jillian New York, also someone who's been working with Global Voices. And it's because it's a community of people who do lots of things on their own, who are involved in local bloggers' fears all over the world, and who are very active and who are working together on this one shared project at the same time as they're doing lots of other things around the world. So on a day-to-day basis it's a website where we track what's happening around the world through the words of bloggers and people on Twitter. We translate into English and into other languages what they're saying so that you can follow it as an alternative or a supplement to the mainstream media news flow. And this is a photo from the Global Voices Summit in 2008, and it just helps illustrate that we're actual people who are working together and who are building friendships and working together in a virtual environment most of the time. Global Voices has no physical location. Occasionally we're able to meet at conferences or at the Global Voices Summit, but most of the time we don't really know the genders or the geographic locations of the people we're talking to, but we still manage to communicate in the shared project. This picture shows our co-founders on both sides, as Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca McKinnon, who are very well known in their own right online, and they started Global Voices about six years ago. This is our Egypt special coverage page, which Amira Alhussaini helps, she's the Middle East editor, and she's been responsible for our Middle East coverage these past many months. Our traffic has grown dramatically in this period, I think because blogs really showed their value in this period, and people were so anxious to hear news all the time that they kept checking Global Voices frequently. This kind of special coverage page is that we set up for Egypt, we also set up for so many other countries in the past months, tracking and following, trying to understand what people were living in the places where things were happening. But Global Voices does many, many different countries, you probably can't see it from there, but this is like a tag cloud that shows the different countries that we cover. And I think probably unusually for most sort of news publications, we have more coverage of Trinidad and Tobago than we do of Germany. We have more stories from China than we do from Denmark. And so our sort of interest bias is against the grain of what the rest of the media does, with the exception of breaking news coverage, where we as much as possible try and supplement what mainstream media are doing with our sort of special style of reporting. And to give you an example of this style, here's a story written by an Egyptian blogger named Tarek Amr, and it's called the KFC Revolution. And it's an example that I like a lot because it shows the revolution from a different perspective than you would ever get from any sort of mainstream media newspaper. It's a story based on what bloggers were discussing on the Internet. It's about how at the height of the protests, the mainstream media in Egypt, state national television, was broadcasting these callers, people who were calling in information from various parts of the city, or supposedly calling in information, but it was propaganda. And what they were saying were that they had evidence that the protesters had foreign agendas, that they were supported by foreign governments, and one of the reasons that they knew this was because he had seen protesters going into Kentucky Fried Chicken on Tahrir Square. And so it's this funny situation where, I mean, it's a super serious situation. People are getting beaten up on the streets and the police is attacking people, yet there's this online joke, this internal joke that starts spreading on the Internet and then even makes it onto the square itself. So from bloggers discussing the idiocy of state television saying that people have foreign agendas just because they eat fried chicken from an American restaurant chain, it turns into, you know, there's a picture of the KFC restaurant on Tahrir Square and in the window there's a sign that says we want Internet. And later on it was occupied by the protesters and turned into an impromptu medical center, which is kind of, you know, another continuation of the joke that most people would never have heard of. You know, it requires too much explanation. And here's a picture of a guy holding up a piece of bread and the piece of paper that's glued onto it says this is our KFC. So you can see how these Internet memes, they almost arise out of nowhere and then they get perpetuated and they get shared really broadly in Egyptian society. And I mention it as an example because I think you can all imagine, you know, we've all seen citizen videos of people being beaten up and, you know, army shooting at people. But this kind of subtle humor, this kind of inside joke that is shared between a population that is very far away from here and, you know, Arabs in the West, there's this terrible stereotype that Muslims or Arabs have no sense of humor, you know. For me, stories like this challenge so many of the preconceptions we have about how people think in different parts of the world about what makes them tick, about the language, the culture, the, you know, the feel of what is happening in a place that's far away. And here's, I think this one is really funny. This is Tarik, this is from Tarik's personal blog. He made his own foreign agenda. It's an agenda and it says foreign agenda on it. But people are constantly playing with these tools and much of it never really gets translated so that the rest of us can be in on the joke. It stays in those local spheres. And part of what Global Voices does is translate those things so that they can be more readily enjoyed. I mean, it's almost like being able to share a joke with someone is just the most basic thing of human relations. And when it comes to the revolutions themselves, I think also, you know, being able to make fun of a very serious situation or being able to make fun of a terrible dictator is one of those things that helps people build courage. Not just in this revolutionary moment, but in many throughout history, humor is something which is really important. So when Gaddafi is speaking and he says that he's going to go, he's going to get people to go door to door and murder everybody and kill everybody. And you watch on the one hand this terrifying speech, and then on the other hand, you watch the banter on Twitter. You watch people on the same hashtag discussing and making fun of him and making jokes all throughout the Arab world. It really adds such a human understanding to what it is that's happening. And then, you know, people start uploading photos of their shoes to Twitter, you know, as a sign against Gaddafi, or, you know, they remix his speech into YouTube videos, or they make ringtones from the worst parts of the speech. And I mean, those kind of behaviors, those are things that are kind of humorous but serious. And something that we do all over the world. I mean, that is how we use the internet. And one thing that I think reminds us always of our shared humanity is, you know, the silly things we do as well. We all do this, no matter where we're from or how repressed we are. So citizen media has grown a lot in importance. And, you know, it's not just Global Voices realizes this or news consumers but also news makers themselves. So for the first time, I think on a massive scale, we've seen mainstream media news organizations follow blogs, follow Twitter, use citizen media to an extent that we've never seen before. And again, I think, you know, with mainstream media going more and more into this field and realizing the importance, I think where Global Voices is different because we have less resources, we have mostly only volunteer writers, but where we're different is that the people who are writing these stories are part of the communities that they're describing. They speak the local language. They're there. They can filter the things that are happening in a way that an outsider has a lot of difficulty doing. And another thing which is really important about the way that our coverage feels is that we do these stories all year round. I mean, there's a revolution now and there's been a lot of attention, but we've been covering Egypt for years, even when mainstream media doesn't care. And we cover stories over a long period and build relationships with people. And we let the bloggers themselves tell us which stories we should be interested in. So as an editor of a global newsroom, I have surprisingly little control over what gets published on the site. I would never turn down a story because I thought it wasn't newsworthy or it didn't fit a news agenda. The way our newsroom work is inverted. I don't speak Chinese, so I need the Chinese bloggers to tell me what is big, what is happening where you are, what is the story you feel needs to be told to the world. And that sort of shift in perspective, I think, well, you can feel it on the site. And so we have, I mean, we do have some pretty strange stories. We had a story the other day about songs about Facebook in Cambodia. There's all these new popular music songs about Facebook. Or it could be, you know, what are people using, saying on Twitter for the Peruvian elections? Or, you know, it really is so broad and so global that it requires, I think, for readers to really see and really sort of peak their curiosity levels. You have to be curious about what's happening in different parts of the world to really be curious and interested in reading global voices. This is our Tunisia special coverage page. And, you know, at this point I was making about how we're covering things for longer. Because we have Tunisian bloggers who are part of our community, and we were covering the story, I think, a full month before mainstream media was. And you had bloggers who were saying, when is the mainstream media going to come? When is Al Jazeera going to come? When is the BBC going to come? And it was like nobody could see that this thing was happening until he had already, you know, until Ben Ali had already left the building. And the experience with Egypt was very different. But I thought this was really an example where if we hadn't been covering this, I feel like an important moment in history almost wouldn't have been documented in as many languages as it was. Right now, Cote d'Ivoire is probably our main story. This is also a story that we've been covering for months and just watching it grow uglier and uglier. And again, wondering when is the world going to notice? How can we get this story from the bloggers who are desperate to tell the story, who are desperate to explain what's happening in their country? How can we get journalists to care, activists to care? How can we get this kind of energy around the story that means that there will be a bigger sense of responsibility felt by audiences and other people who can help? And Cote d'Ivoire is kind of a different sort of example. You know, the story I told from Egypt is a humorous, light-hearted, quirky things that you wouldn't have known about the revolution. In the case of Cote d'Ivoire, one of the things that stood out or stands out the most for me is the hatred, the raw hatred that you see on the Internet. Here's a quote from a post from several weeks ago that says, we're on the brink of a genocidal drift. People were describing what was happening in their streets in very, very strong terms with a lot of fear for what was about to happen. This is an example of one of the many, many horrible things that we've seen on Facebook and in other citizen media forums where in this case it's a video, a music video that derides one ethnic group. And they compare these people to mosquitoes and they talk about how they're going to repel them with mosquito repellent and beat them down. And you see the people in the comments cheering on, cheering on killings, cheering on violence to a really horrific level. And we've also seen videos of people being stoned alive for being of the wrong ethnicity. Really atrocious things that sometimes if nobody else is telling the story, if the mainstream media isn't listening, somehow we've wound up in a situation where we feel responsible to at least help some of this stuff get out and to present it in a way that explains it in context. These stories are so complicated and it's not a case of good and bad or black versus white as it's often presented in the mainstream media. It needs more of a local, localized explanation and we do try. And at the end of the day our focus is to try and tell as positive stories as possible, to try and focus on uses of the internet and citizen media that help a situation rather than make things worse. In this case, this is also from Kottirwa. It's an example of how some bloggers noticed that the main hashtag for the unrest in Kottirwa was becoming full of hatred and negativity. And so they decided to make a new hashtag which would be solely focused on aid, helping people, asking for help. And there were people who pledged to watch it and to do what they could to assist people who use this hashtag for important information. It's one example. Another story right now which is unfolding and which our team of Francophone authors has been following is Gabon. For months and months and in this photo that they're holding up from February, it's people holding up a sign that saying, in Tunisia Ben Ali is gone, when is it going to be our turn? And there have been protests for weeks and a very interesting political situation. But again, most people don't even know where Gabon is. They don't know that they should care about it. Even in French language media, it's very difficult to get these stories out. So why should you care? I think if you're at a conference like this one, you know what the possibilities are of the Internet. And you know how much content is being uploaded and downloaded around the world. But you also know how easy it is to get stuck in your online reading habits. And that in spite of all the content that exists on the Internet, you probably only check a couple of websites on a daily basis. And probably most of them are newspapers that you could read offline anyways. So, you know, the idealistic promise of the worldwide web, you know, where all these citizens would be connected to one another, where we would be communicating and there would be greater dialogue and understanding between people. I think it's, you know, some of it has been realized. But the dream that bloggers in one country would read bloggers in another country and that they would, you know, be more frequently in touch, I think that still has to be realized. It's very rare that even bloggers who report foreign news issues regularly, that they, you know, as a matter of principle, would say, okay, well, here's this big story about Russia or Japan. Let me go see what bloggers there are talking about. Most of the time we're just relaying second-hand information, not really using the web, I think, for what it was intended in the most idealistic sense. So, at Global Voices, we're trying to encourage different behavior, trying to stop that and try and get people to talk to one another, trying to get journalists to understand better how they can use blogs efficiently in their reporting, trying to encourage audiences to be curious, trying to make the world feel like it's a smaller place, where people understand each other better. And we also, I think, as a community believe in this transformative and revolutionary power of citizen media in countries where there's either little or no freedom of expression. And I think if you believe in that and if you support people's right to communicate, then I think you also need to feel a kind of sense of responsibility to listen to what people are saying. Because if people are risking their freedom in China or in Iran to speak about injustice, then what does it matter unless people like you and me are listening? It has no effect. So, that's kind of the motivation behind Global Voices and the thing that gets, you know, three, four hundred people around the world to go to the website first thing in the morning to contribute their time and effort. I want to walk you through just a couple of our projects and it's not intended to be a kind of ad for Global Voices or whatever. What I'm hoping is that it will inspire you either to connect with the community, the kind of things that we're doing, or that it might be, you know, something that would inspire you to think about what you can do with the internet to try and make the world feel like a smaller place. The idea with our stories, I mean, it's not people here that we're a bunch of bloggers in different countries and they sometimes assume that we're doing first hand reporting from different parts of the world. But actually, it's more, it's one step removed. So, we're reporting on what bloggers are doing. So, our stories, like this one you see on the homepage from this morning, this is Japanese bloggers who are discussing the nuclear situation since the earthquake. So, our translations are directly from the Japanese blogs. And when Global Voices started, initially the goal was to try and find people in different parts of the world who were talking in English. And there weren't that many bloggers in the world, so you would have one in Madagascar, one in China, one here and there, and then they would be writing about what bloggers were saying in English. Now, as the bloggers spheres have expanded all over the world, even those places where the internet is scarce, you also have a growth in different regional language bloggers spheres. So, you now have a very big French blog sphere and Chinese and Arabic. So, in the six years that Global Voices has existed, we've now evolved to have translation really be at the heart of what we do, because that is really one of the biggest barriers to understanding around the world. So, these stories that you see on the English website, they'll maybe be written by a Japanese blogger translating to English. But then, we also have Global Voices in Chinese, where volunteer translators in Taiwan primarily, but also in other parts of the world, are translating into Chinese what has been written by colleagues in other countries. Here's Global Voices in Arabic. You can see it's reversed. And here's Global Voices in German. And we actually have Global Voices websites in about 20 different languages now, almost 20. And some are more active than others, but each is bridging out in their own community. So, we have the Italian Global Voices working with Italian media. We have the French Global Voices, which has a very large translator community, and is working with French media and drawing in more bloggers from Francophone Africa, who wouldn't necessarily be able to participate in the same way on the English website. And so, we're spreading almost like rings in the water, trying to encourage this kind of behavior where people work together online for a common cause. This project is called Rising Voices, and we set it up a few years ago to try and address some of the issues of digital divide that you have in a lot of countries. So, we give small microgrants, grants of about $3,000, $4,000 to new blogging projects in either countries or communities that you rarely hear from. We just gave another five grants, I think last week we announced them. We had Guinea-Bissau, Brazil, India, and Mali, and also a project in Greece, where we hope to start a project with blind bloggers at a school in Greece. This Rising Voices community has had some successes as well. One project that we started in Madagascar, a group of youth bloggers, there ended up becoming a very, very important voice in covering uprisings in Madagascar a couple of years ago. It just shows how in these places where you have very few people doing this kind of thing, even a little bit makes a really big difference. I mean, from having a small blogger project and then all of a sudden having a group of ten people all of a sudden quoted in CNN, BBC, New York Times, all over the world media, just shows how little information we have coming in and out of these countries. So, very small effort can have very large transformative effect in areas where you have almost no communication coming up. Rising Voices also helped support this project, which is the Technology for Transparency Network. A lot of the energy in digital activism right now is focused on communication projects that track, for instance, corruption. It's citizen information projects to hold local government accountable, to get citizens involved in fulfilling tasks that could be the role of government or civil society. And we've tracked a whole bunch of projects in many different parts of the world in different languages. And it's one of the ways that we've begun to use Global Voices as a resource. The community is so big that we can find out what's happening in so many different parts of the world. And the truth is that we're one of the few people who are actively asking what is happening in Africa or Latin America on these issues. A lot of the times in the West, I think there's an assumption that there isn't a whole bunch of stuff going on that we could learn from. And increasingly, I think that's changing. A lot of the innovation we're seeing in these fields is happening in the places where it's most necessary, you know, where the incentive is as high as possible and where there is so much work to be done. This project uses the same software as the other one. It's called Threat and Voices. And similarly, it's a mapping project where we crowdsource information on threats and arrests of bloggers. Because as these online communities are growing stronger and more influential, they're also unfortunately becoming more and more targeted. So we see so much harassment, so many, so many threats. This project is a sort of an arm, a side project of Global Voices Advocacy, which is run by my colleague, Sami Ben-Garbia, from Tunisia. And here we follow these digital free speech issues more broadly. And you can see here last week in Egyptian, by this week, this week an Egyptian blogger was sentenced to three years in prison for insulting the military. So you can see that there's lots of work to be done. And as much as we celebrate what's happening, I think our community knows more than anyone how much work there still is left to be done, which is why we're still following these issues and covering it while many others may have moved on to other stories. So this is a photo from the Global Voices Summit in Chile last year, exactly a year ago actually. And I think, you know, I finish with this one because I think one of our main achievements has been to build friendships between all these many people. I think there's no doubt that the connections that we've made between these activists have inspired and encouraged new projects. And I think overall it's also raised the level of ambition for what's possible, what you can do with this kind of technology. And I think citizen media use around the Middle East revolutions is definitely, you know, indicative of this. But I think there's just, there's nothing obvious about a Russian blogger talking to an African blogger in Kenya. You know, unless you make a conscious effort for these connections to be made between people, it just won't necessarily happen on its own. Chinese bloggers aren't always talking to Tunisian bloggers unless there is a shared forum for these conversations to take place. And at the same time, while we need these people to talk to one another, it's also enormously important that there is an audience for the type of work that they're doing. That there are people who are at their computers who are curious enough to click on a link, either from Global Voices or anywhere else, to just visit that blog or talk to that person or leave a comment and acknowledge how people are risking their lives to get this information out. Who are trying to make the world feel smaller, like I said. And who are trying to reach out to people far, far away. So, thanks for listening. Thank you, Solana. That was interesting. Do we have any questions? I don't see anyone standing at the microphone. Someone wants to wave a hand. No questions? Come on. Oh, there we have one. Okay. If someone's too far from the microphone, I can just throw it over. All right. I'm Thomas Wiegelt. I'm a blogger and also a journalist by training. One of the Reddit help such an artist from Thomas Kniever always mentioned. I'm wondering, so because I'm a professional journalist by training, I'm wondering if there are any safeguards you are using because I have no idea what which Chinese blogger might be the one to trust or isn't. And if state security in some country is using this form of media to influence the rest of the world. So what's the way to use safeguards? Well, I think this is the point where it becomes super important to have a trusted network of individuals, you know, not random people, but individuals who you know from their own blogs, from their own writing, who are explaining the situation as a whole. I rely on our caucuses editor to tell me who he thinks is or isn't being funded by the Armenian government in the blogs. I know that our Russian bloggers are keenly aware of what people's political affiliations are. These are things that it's very difficult to see as an outsider and it's very difficult to parachute in to a blogosphere and get an overview of who is who and how people are connected to each other. That's the kind of thing that you need people monitoring over time. You need to know who the players are and you need to know who's worth listening to. And you know, I think on the one hand you could be duped by some people and on the other hand, just like in any other medium, you can, you run the risk of looking too narrowly. One example that I use is, you know, with all the Iranian protests. There was so much mainstream media coverage of Iranian blogs in the aftermath after the election and the protests there. And you would think from reading Western media coverage that all Iranian bloggers support, you know, freedom of speech, that they all want to get rid of the government, that they all hate Ahmadinejad. And the truth is actually that there's an enormous blogosphere in Iran of people writing in Persian who support the government, who support, you know, hard line Islam, who want the president to be in power. Just the other day we had a story where there was one blogger who was against the protesters who wrote a very, you know, colorful post about how he went out to beat up protesters. And how he prayed for the security forces to come and help beat up the protesters and they came. And, you know, it's another, it's another side of what we usually hear. So I think sometimes when you're looking from the outside, you can either mistake people for having one opinion or another, or you can only look to one side, one version of the story, not look beyond a closed circle of people who are having a conversation. So, I mean, it's just like with any other kind of journalism, you have to be thoughtful about how you approach a story. You know, if you go and interview a person on the street for an ordinary article, that, you know, you can't just trust that person's face value. And in line at least, you know, there's a trail. You can follow what people have been saying over time. But I think, you know, the same journalistic principles need to be upheld. You need to be careful. You need to check your sources. And hopefully you should know what you're talking about. Any more questions? I don't see anybody. So, Solana, maybe for the people, for the first time heard of Global Voices, is there one single article where you would say, okay, and you be, should start with this. And Danny catches fire on Global Voices. I think the way I would start is probably not by a single article, maybe by a single country. You know, there, it's usually, the first thing people do is, there's one of the slides I showed earlier has the, if I can get back to it, has the, has the country tag cloud. Yeah. So when you come to the homepage, if you click the green, the green tab at the top, then the sting drops down, and it has all the different countries that we've covered. And what most Europeans do, which is kind of annoying, is that they go look for their own country. They'll click on Germany or Denmark or whatever, and we'll never have any stories from there, because we tend to almost ignore Europe. But maybe there's another country that you follow politically that you're interested in, or maybe somewhere you're going on holiday, or something like that, to pick a country and then read a few stories from there, and not just read the stories, but click on links. And then just go see what it feels like. I mean, it's almost like people are shy sometimes, but see what it feels like to read, you know, if you're going on, on holiday to Greece, you know, check out what some Greek bloggers are talking about. Find out what the flavor of the political conversation is right now. And, you know, if you're compelled by something you read, you know, send the person an email, ask to visit them. And most of the people here are people who are digitally interested or inclined, and you can have things in common with people, even though they live far away. I think what we want to encourage is this kind of sense of solidarity between bloggers and people who are doing interesting things with technology around the world, and that extends to here. And it's not just about getting Africans to talk to Chinese people, to talk to Latin American people. I think, you know, we in the West need to be part of that global conversation as well. Solana, thank you so much. That was so interesting. A round of applause for Solana Larsen, please. Thank you.
 Hello.  Hi.  This is a picture of the revolution in Egypt, which you've probably all heard about.  And the reason I start with this is because it's a global news story that everyone in the world knows about.  And you could easily follow it, like he said, you could easily follow it just through mainstream news, through television, through newspapers,  or you could also be following it online.  The website that I help manage is called Global Voices.  And ironically, sometimes I feel it's more known in places like Egypt or around Africa,  in places where the internet is less free and less ubiquitous than it is in places like Germany or in Denmark, where I'm from.  And I'd like to just give you an idea of what Global Voices is, the kind of universe that we work in.  It's a website, but more than a website, it's a community of bloggers and digital activists who are working together all over the world,  especially in those parts of the world that you rarely hear about in mainstream media.  And throughout the program here at Republica, you have seen some of them sort of peppered around the different panels.  Earlier today we saw Miral Husaini and Claire Ulrich, and tomorrow Noha Atef from Egypt, also somebody who's affiliated with Global Voices.  Later this afternoon there's Jillian New York, also someone who's been working with Global Voices.  And it's because it's a community of people who do lots of things on their own, who are involved in local bloggers' fears all over the world,  and who are very active and who are working together on this one shared project at the same time as they're doing lots of other things around the world.  So on a day-to-day basis it's a website where we track what's happening around the world through the words of bloggers and people on Twitter.  We translate into English and into other languages what they're saying so that you can follow it as an alternative or a supplement to the mainstream media news flow.  And this is a photo from the Global Voices Summit in 2008, and it just helps illustrate that we're actual people who are working together  and who are building friendships and working together in a virtual environment most of the time.  Global Voices has no physical location. Occasionally we're able to meet at conferences or at the Global Voices Summit,  but most of the time we don't really know the genders or the geographic locations of the people we're talking to,  but we still manage to communicate in the shared project.  This picture shows our co-founders on both sides, as Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca McKinnon, who are very well known in their own right online,  and they started Global Voices about six years ago.  This is our Egypt special coverage page, which Amira Alhussaini helps, she's the Middle East editor,  and she's been responsible for our Middle East coverage these past many months.  Our traffic has grown dramatically in this period, I think because blogs really showed their value in this period,  and people were so anxious to hear news all the time that they kept checking Global Voices frequently.  This kind of special coverage page is that we set up for Egypt, we also set up for so many other countries in the past months,  tracking and following, trying to understand what people were living in the places where things were happening.  But Global Voices does many, many different countries, you probably can't see it from there,  but this is like a tag cloud that shows the different countries that we cover.  And I think probably unusually for most sort of news publications, we have more coverage of Trinidad and Tobago than we do of Germany.  We have more stories from China than we do from Denmark.  And so our sort of interest bias is against the grain of what the rest of the media does,  with the exception of breaking news coverage, where we as much as possible try and supplement what mainstream media are doing  with our sort of special style of reporting.  And to give you an example of this style, here's a story written by an Egyptian blogger named Tarek Amr,  and it's called the KFC Revolution.  And it's an example that I like a lot because it shows the revolution from a different perspective  than you would ever get from any sort of mainstream media newspaper.  It's a story based on what bloggers were discussing on the Internet.  It's about how at the height of the protests, the mainstream media in Egypt, state national television,  was broadcasting these callers, people who were calling in information from various parts of the city,  or supposedly calling in information, but it was propaganda.  And what they were saying were that they had evidence that the protesters had foreign agendas,  that they were supported by foreign governments, and one of the reasons that they knew this was because  he had seen protesters going into Kentucky Fried Chicken on Tahrir Square.  And so it's this funny situation where, I mean, it's a super serious situation.  People are getting beaten up on the streets and the police is attacking people,  yet there's this online joke, this internal joke that starts spreading on the Internet  and then even makes it onto the square itself.  So from bloggers discussing the idiocy of state television saying that people have foreign agendas  just because they eat fried chicken from an American restaurant chain,  it turns into, you know, there's a picture of the KFC restaurant on Tahrir Square  and in the window there's a sign that says we want Internet.  And later on it was occupied by the protesters and turned into an impromptu medical center,  which is kind of, you know, another continuation of the joke that most people would never have heard of.  You know, it requires too much explanation.  And here's a picture of a guy holding up a piece of bread  and the piece of paper that's glued onto it says this is our KFC.  So you can see how these Internet memes, they almost arise out of nowhere  and then they get perpetuated and they get shared really broadly in Egyptian society.  And I mention it as an example because I think you can all imagine, you know,  we've all seen citizen videos of people being beaten up and, you know, army shooting at people.  But this kind of subtle humor, this kind of inside joke that is shared between a population  that is very far away from here and, you know, Arabs in the West,  there's this terrible stereotype that Muslims or Arabs have no sense of humor, you know.  For me, stories like this challenge so many of the preconceptions we have about how people think  in different parts of the world about what makes them tick,  about the language, the culture, the, you know, the feel of what is happening in a place that's far away.  And here's, I think this one is really funny.  This is Tarik, this is from Tarik's personal blog.  He made his own foreign agenda.  It's an agenda and it says foreign agenda on it.  But people are constantly playing with these tools and much of it never really gets translated  so that the rest of us can be in on the joke.  It stays in those local spheres.  And part of what Global Voices does is translate those things so that they can be more readily enjoyed.  I mean, it's almost like being able to share a joke with someone is just the most basic thing of human relations.  And when it comes to the revolutions themselves, I think also, you know,  being able to make fun of a very serious situation or being able to make fun of a terrible dictator  is one of those things that helps people build courage.  Not just in this revolutionary moment, but in many throughout history, humor is something which is really important.  So when Gaddafi is speaking and he says that he's going to go, he's going to get people to go door to door  and murder everybody and kill everybody.  And you watch on the one hand this terrifying speech, and then on the other hand, you watch the banter on Twitter.  You watch people on the same hashtag discussing and making fun of him and making jokes all throughout the Arab world.  It really adds such a human understanding to what it is that's happening.  And then, you know, people start uploading photos of their shoes to Twitter, you know, as a sign against Gaddafi,  or, you know, they remix his speech into YouTube videos, or they make ringtones from the worst parts of the speech.  And I mean, those kind of behaviors, those are things that are kind of humorous but serious.  And something that we do all over the world.  I mean, that is how we use the internet.  And one thing that I think reminds us always of our shared humanity is, you know, the silly things we do as well.  We all do this, no matter where we're from or how repressed we are.  So citizen media has grown a lot in importance.  And, you know, it's not just Global Voices realizes this or news consumers but also news makers themselves.  So for the first time, I think on a massive scale, we've seen mainstream media news organizations follow blogs, follow Twitter,  use citizen media to an extent that we've never seen before.  And again, I think, you know, with mainstream media going more and more into this field and realizing the importance,  I think where Global Voices is different because we have less resources, we have mostly only volunteer writers,  but where we're different is that the people who are writing these stories are part of the communities that they're describing.  They speak the local language. They're there.  They can filter the things that are happening in a way that an outsider has a lot of difficulty doing.  And another thing which is really important about the way that our coverage feels is that we do these stories all year round.  I mean, there's a revolution now and there's been a lot of attention, but we've been covering Egypt for years,  even when mainstream media doesn't care.  And we cover stories over a long period and build relationships with people.  And we let the bloggers themselves tell us which stories we should be interested in.  So as an editor of a global newsroom, I have surprisingly little control over what gets published on the site.  I would never turn down a story because I thought it wasn't newsworthy or it didn't fit a news agenda.  The way our newsroom work is inverted.  I don't speak Chinese, so I need the Chinese bloggers to tell me what is big, what is happening where you are,  what is the story you feel needs to be told to the world.  And that sort of shift in perspective, I think, well, you can feel it on the site.  And so we have, I mean, we do have some pretty strange stories.  We had a story the other day about songs about Facebook in Cambodia.  There's all these new popular music songs about Facebook.  Or it could be, you know, what are people using, saying on Twitter for the Peruvian elections?  Or, you know, it really is so broad and so global that it requires, I think, for readers to really see  and really sort of peak their curiosity levels.  You have to be curious about what's happening in different parts of the world to really be curious and interested in reading global voices.  This is our Tunisia special coverage page.  And, you know, at this point I was making about how we're covering things for longer.  Because we have Tunisian bloggers who are part of our community,  and we were covering the story, I think, a full month before mainstream media was.  And you had bloggers who were saying, when is the mainstream media going to come?  When is Al Jazeera going to come?  When is the BBC going to come?  And it was like nobody could see that this thing was happening until he had already, you know,  until Ben Ali had already left the building.  And the experience with Egypt was very different.  But I thought this was really an example where if we hadn't been covering this,  I feel like an important moment in history almost wouldn't have been documented in as many languages as it was.  Right now, Cote d'Ivoire is probably our main story.  This is also a story that we've been covering for months and just watching it grow uglier and uglier.  And again, wondering when is the world going to notice?  How can we get this story from the bloggers who are desperate to tell the story,  who are desperate to explain what's happening in their country?  How can we get journalists to care, activists to care?  How can we get this kind of energy around the story that means that there will be a bigger sense of responsibility felt  by audiences and other people who can help?  And Cote d'Ivoire is kind of a different sort of example.  You know, the story I told from Egypt is a humorous, light-hearted, quirky things that you wouldn't have known about the revolution.  In the case of Cote d'Ivoire, one of the things that stood out or stands out the most for me is the hatred,  the raw hatred that you see on the Internet.  Here's a quote from a post from several weeks ago that says,  we're on the brink of a genocidal drift.  People were describing what was happening in their streets in very, very strong terms with a lot of fear for what was about to happen.  This is an example of one of the many, many horrible things that we've seen on Facebook and in other citizen media forums  where in this case it's a video, a music video that derides one ethnic group.  And they compare these people to mosquitoes and they talk about how they're going to repel them with mosquito repellent and beat them down.  And you see the people in the comments cheering on, cheering on killings, cheering on violence to a really horrific level.  And we've also seen videos of people being stoned alive for being of the wrong ethnicity.  Really atrocious things that sometimes if nobody else is telling the story, if the mainstream media isn't listening,  somehow we've wound up in a situation where we feel responsible to at least help some of this stuff get out  and to present it in a way that explains it in context.  These stories are so complicated and it's not a case of good and bad or black versus white as it's often presented in the mainstream media.  It needs more of a local, localized explanation and we do try.  And at the end of the day our focus is to try and tell as positive stories as possible,  to try and focus on uses of the internet and citizen media that help a situation rather than make things worse.  In this case, this is also from Kottirwa.  It's an example of how some bloggers noticed that the main hashtag for the unrest in Kottirwa was becoming full of hatred and negativity.  And so they decided to make a new hashtag which would be solely focused on aid, helping people, asking for help.  And there were people who pledged to watch it and to do what they could to assist people who use this hashtag for important information.  It's one example.  Another story right now which is unfolding and which our team of Francophone authors has been following is Gabon.  For months and months and in this photo that they're holding up from February, it's people holding up a sign that saying,  in Tunisia Ben Ali is gone, when is it going to be our turn?  And there have been protests for weeks and a very interesting political situation.  But again, most people don't even know where Gabon is.  They don't know that they should care about it.  Even in French language media, it's very difficult to get these stories out.  So why should you care?  I think if you're at a conference like this one, you know what the possibilities are of the Internet.  And you know how much content is being uploaded and downloaded around the world.  But you also know how easy it is to get stuck in your online reading habits.  And that in spite of all the content that exists on the Internet, you probably only check a couple of websites on a daily basis.  And probably most of them are newspapers that you could read offline anyways.  So, you know, the idealistic promise of the worldwide web, you know, where all these citizens would be connected to one another,  where we would be communicating and there would be greater dialogue and understanding between people.  I think it's, you know, some of it has been realized.  But the dream that bloggers in one country would read bloggers in another country  and that they would, you know, be more frequently in touch, I think that still has to be realized.  It's very rare that even bloggers who report foreign news issues regularly, that they, you know, as a matter of principle,  would say, okay, well, here's this big story about Russia or Japan.  Let me go see what bloggers there are talking about.  Most of the time we're just relaying second-hand information, not really using the web, I think, for what it was intended in the most idealistic sense.  So, at Global Voices, we're trying to encourage different behavior, trying to stop that and try and get people to talk to one another,  trying to get journalists to understand better how they can use blogs efficiently in their reporting,  trying to encourage audiences to be curious, trying to make the world feel like it's a smaller place,  where people understand each other better.  And we also, I think, as a community believe in this transformative and revolutionary power of citizen media in countries  where there's either little or no freedom of expression.  And I think if you believe in that and if you support people's right to communicate,  then I think you also need to feel a kind of sense of responsibility to listen to what people are saying.  Because if people are risking their freedom in China or in Iran to speak about injustice,  then what does it matter unless people like you and me are listening?  It has no effect.  So, that's kind of the motivation behind Global Voices and the thing that gets, you know,  three, four hundred people around the world to go to the website first thing in the morning to contribute their time and effort.  I want to walk you through just a couple of our projects and it's not intended to be a kind of ad for Global Voices or whatever.  What I'm hoping is that it will inspire you either to connect with the community, the kind of things that we're doing,  or that it might be, you know, something that would inspire you to think about what you can do with the internet  to try and make the world feel like a smaller place.  The idea with our stories, I mean, it's not people here that we're a bunch of bloggers in different countries  and they sometimes assume that we're doing first hand reporting from different parts of the world.  But actually, it's more, it's one step removed.  So, we're reporting on what bloggers are doing.  So, our stories, like this one you see on the homepage from this morning,  this is Japanese bloggers who are discussing the nuclear situation since the earthquake.  So, our translations are directly from the Japanese blogs.  And when Global Voices started, initially the goal was to try and find people in different parts of the world who were talking in English.  And there weren't that many bloggers in the world, so you would have one in Madagascar, one in China, one here and there,  and then they would be writing about what bloggers were saying in English.  Now, as the bloggers spheres have expanded all over the world, even those places where the internet is scarce,  you also have a growth in different regional language bloggers spheres.  So, you now have a very big French blog sphere and Chinese and Arabic.  So, in the six years that Global Voices has existed, we've now evolved to have translation really be at the heart of what we do,  because that is really one of the biggest barriers to understanding around the world.  So, these stories that you see on the English website, they'll maybe be written by a Japanese blogger translating to English.  But then, we also have Global Voices in Chinese, where volunteer translators in Taiwan primarily,  but also in other parts of the world, are translating into Chinese what has been written by colleagues in other countries.  Here's Global Voices in Arabic. You can see it's reversed.  And here's Global Voices in German.  And we actually have Global Voices websites in about 20 different languages now, almost 20.  And some are more active than others, but each is bridging out in their own community.  So, we have the Italian Global Voices working with Italian media.  We have the French Global Voices, which has a very large translator community,  and is working with French media and drawing in more bloggers from Francophone Africa,  who wouldn't necessarily be able to participate in the same way on the English website.  And so, we're spreading almost like rings in the water, trying to encourage this kind of behavior where people work together online for a common cause.  This project is called Rising Voices, and we set it up a few years ago to try and address some of the issues of digital divide  that you have in a lot of countries.  So, we give small microgrants, grants of about $3,000, $4,000 to new blogging projects in either countries or communities that you rarely hear from.  We just gave another five grants, I think last week we announced them.  We had Guinea-Bissau, Brazil, India, and Mali, and also a project in Greece,  where we hope to start a project with blind bloggers at a school in Greece.  This Rising Voices community has had some successes as well.  One project that we started in Madagascar, a group of youth bloggers,  there ended up becoming a very, very important voice in covering uprisings in Madagascar a couple of years ago.  It just shows how in these places where you have very few people doing this kind of thing,  even a little bit makes a really big difference.  I mean, from having a small blogger project and then all of a sudden having a group of ten people all of a sudden quoted in CNN, BBC,  New York Times, all over the world media, just shows how little information we have coming in and out of these countries.  So, very small effort can have very large transformative effect in areas where you have almost no communication coming up.  Rising Voices also helped support this project, which is the Technology for Transparency Network.  A lot of the energy in digital activism right now is focused on communication projects that track, for instance, corruption.  It's citizen information projects to hold local government accountable, to get citizens involved in fulfilling tasks that could be the role of government or civil society.  And we've tracked a whole bunch of projects in many different parts of the world in different languages.  And it's one of the ways that we've begun to use Global Voices as a resource. The community is so big that we can find out what's happening in so many different parts of the world.  And the truth is that we're one of the few people who are actively asking what is happening in Africa or Latin America on these issues.  A lot of the times in the West, I think there's an assumption that there isn't a whole bunch of stuff going on that we could learn from.  And increasingly, I think that's changing. A lot of the innovation we're seeing in these fields is happening in the places where it's most necessary, you know, where the incentive is as high as possible and where there is so much work to be done.  This project uses the same software as the other one. It's called Threat and Voices. And similarly, it's a mapping project where we crowdsource information on threats and arrests of bloggers.  Because as these online communities are growing stronger and more influential, they're also unfortunately becoming more and more targeted.  So we see so much harassment, so many, so many threats.  This project is a sort of an arm, a side project of Global Voices Advocacy, which is run by my colleague, Sami Ben-Garbia, from Tunisia.  And here we follow these digital free speech issues more broadly. And you can see here last week in Egyptian, by this week, this week an Egyptian blogger was sentenced to three years in prison for insulting the military.  So you can see that there's lots of work to be done. And as much as we celebrate what's happening, I think our community knows more than anyone how much work there still is left to be done, which is why we're still following these issues and covering it while many others may have moved on to other stories.  So this is a photo from the Global Voices Summit in Chile last year, exactly a year ago actually.  And I think, you know, I finish with this one because I think one of our main achievements has been to build friendships between all these many people.  I think there's no doubt that the connections that we've made between these activists have inspired and encouraged new projects.  And I think overall it's also raised the level of ambition for what's possible, what you can do with this kind of technology.  And I think citizen media use around the Middle East revolutions is definitely, you know, indicative of this. But I think there's just, there's nothing obvious about a Russian blogger talking to an African blogger in Kenya.  You know, unless you make a conscious effort for these connections to be made between people, it just won't necessarily happen on its own. Chinese bloggers aren't always talking to Tunisian bloggers unless there is a shared forum for these conversations to take place.  And at the same time, while we need these people to talk to one another, it's also enormously important that there is an audience for the type of work that they're doing.  That there are people who are at their computers who are curious enough to click on a link, either from Global Voices or anywhere else, to just visit that blog or talk to that person or leave a comment and acknowledge how people are risking their lives to get this information out.  Who are trying to make the world feel smaller, like I said. And who are trying to reach out to people far, far away.  So, thanks for listening.  Thank you, Solana. That was interesting. Do we have any questions? I don't see anyone standing at the microphone. Someone wants to wave a hand. No questions? Come on.  Oh, there we have one. Okay. If someone's too far from the microphone, I can just throw it over.  All right. I'm Thomas Wiegelt. I'm a blogger and also a journalist by training. One of the Reddit help such an artist from Thomas Kniever always mentioned. I'm wondering, so because I'm a professional journalist by training, I'm wondering if there are any safeguards you are using because I have no idea what which Chinese blogger might be the one to trust or isn't.  And if state security in some country is using this form of media to influence the rest of the world. So what's the way to use safeguards?  Well, I think this is the point where it becomes super important to have a trusted network of individuals, you know, not random people, but individuals who you know from their own blogs, from their own writing, who are explaining the situation as a whole.  I rely on our caucuses editor to tell me who he thinks is or isn't being funded by the Armenian government in the blogs. I know that our Russian bloggers are keenly aware of what people's political affiliations are.  These are things that it's very difficult to see as an outsider and it's very difficult to parachute in to a blogosphere and get an overview of who is who and how people are connected to each other.  That's the kind of thing that you need people monitoring over time. You need to know who the players are and you need to know who's worth listening to.  And you know, I think on the one hand you could be duped by some people and on the other hand, just like in any other medium, you can, you run the risk of looking too narrowly.  One example that I use is, you know, with all the Iranian protests. There was so much mainstream media coverage of Iranian blogs in the aftermath after the election and the protests there.  And you would think from reading Western media coverage that all Iranian bloggers support, you know, freedom of speech, that they all want to get rid of the government, that they all hate Ahmadinejad.  And the truth is actually that there's an enormous blogosphere in Iran of people writing in Persian who support the government, who support, you know, hard line Islam, who want the president to be in power.  Just the other day we had a story where there was one blogger who was against the protesters who wrote a very, you know, colorful post about how he went out to beat up protesters.  And how he prayed for the security forces to come and help beat up the protesters and they came. And, you know, it's another, it's another side of what we usually hear.  So I think sometimes when you're looking from the outside, you can either mistake people for having one opinion or another, or you can only look to one side, one version of the story, not look beyond a closed circle of people who are having a conversation.  So, I mean, it's just like with any other kind of journalism, you have to be thoughtful about how you approach a story. You know, if you go and interview a person on the street for an ordinary article, that, you know, you can't just trust that person's face value.  And in line at least, you know, there's a trail. You can follow what people have been saying over time. But I think, you know, the same journalistic principles need to be upheld. You need to be careful. You need to check your sources.  And hopefully you should know what you're talking about.  Any more questions? I don't see anybody. So, Solana, maybe for the people, for the first time heard of Global Voices, is there one single article where you would say, okay, and you be, should start with this.  And Danny catches fire on Global Voices.  I think the way I would start is probably not by a single article, maybe by a single country. You know, there, it's usually, the first thing people do is, there's one of the slides I showed earlier has the, if I can get back to it, has the,  has the country tag cloud. Yeah.  So when you come to the homepage, if you click the green, the green tab at the top, then the sting drops down, and it has all the different countries that we've covered.  And what most Europeans do, which is kind of annoying, is that they go look for their own country. They'll click on Germany or Denmark or whatever, and we'll never have any stories from there, because we tend to almost ignore Europe.  But maybe there's another country that you follow politically that you're interested in, or maybe somewhere you're going on holiday, or something like that, to pick a country and then read a few stories from there, and not just read the stories, but click on links.  And then just go see what it feels like. I mean, it's almost like people are shy sometimes, but see what it feels like to read, you know, if you're going on, on holiday to Greece, you know, check out what some Greek bloggers are talking about.  Find out what the flavor of the political conversation is right now. And, you know, if you're compelled by something you read, you know, send the person an email, ask to visit them.  And most of the people here are people who are digitally interested or inclined, and you can have things in common with people, even though they live far away.  I think what we want to encourage is this kind of sense of solidarity between bloggers and people who are doing interesting things with technology around the world, and that extends to here.  And it's not just about getting Africans to talk to Chinese people, to talk to Latin American people. I think, you know, we in the West need to be part of that global conversation as well.  Solana, thank you so much. That was so interesting. A round of applause for Solana Larsen, please.  Thank you.
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