Session 1 (Part 1): An overview of GV’s work so far

Summary: a review of the year and a look at moves being made to take us ahead.

Ethan is now reading the manifesto. If anyone has a problem email me at jer@simianuprising.com, they’re currently looking at globalvoicesonline.org, a picture being displayed of rebecca, georgia and alice getting the knight batten award. Slide being shown of statistics of visits to GV. 9,000 views a day last year, now 36,000, Technorati rankings are 36000 views a day. Next slide shows our sponsors, reuters, macarthur, hivos, knight. We’re now thanking sponsors.

(IMAGE: GV’s co-founders, Rebecca MacKinnon & Ethan Zuckerman introducing everyone to GV Delni 2006. PHOTO CREDIT: Jeremy Clarke)

Reuters continues to be a major supporter, MacArthur too .. and we hope they support us more this year, Hivos and Knight are others. Another slide shows Stichting Global Voices incorporating under Netherlands law. a sister ngo under US law. Board of directors includes authors and editors, the main corporate body will be international – not US, within 6 months – a dutch corp – that will be GV.

The goal behind the org will be to have 2 seats on the board elected from the editors and contributors. Now talking of board of advisors, wise people all over the world. Next Slide shows board of advisors pics and names. Same info is here (link is to advisors). Now talking of changes on the site, a subtle change such as a new search box to search the global voices web. You can also see the search box at that link. Jeremy in the IRC says “mad props to google, they totally gave us personal tech support /gush”

A screen shot of aggregator that boris and jeremy have been working on, the aggregator will be a great tool about what we are sharing, moving towards more transparency. Next slide shows us fulfilling our whole mission by amplifying voices from around the world, translating voices we would not otherwise understand, building tools to let people explore global blogs, advocacy for free speech, access to online speech tools, outreach to new groups, introducing them to citizen media, finding ways to listen to each other. Those were bullets points on the slide, advocacy will be a big focus. Hivos will be funding a half-time position for advocacy, so we will be recruiting someone soon from within us. One of the other things we are starting to work on and can do lots more is outreach. Mostly we are getting elite and urban voices, voices from literate, affluent folks because thats who’s blogging in kenya and Pakistan for example. We need to help bring more people come online, how do we bring on students, journalists, activists, non-literates. the idea is OUTREACH! We want everyone here to come up with proposals on how should we be doing outreach in different communities across the world. Finally, we want to find ways to not just speak, but listen to each other. Questions are now being taken as the question & answer session has kicked off!