New Wiki Page: Ways to Improve Global Voices

[David Sasaki]

Dear All,

This is the first time I have written an email to all four projects that make up Global Voices: 1.) the main editorial website, 2.) Lingua, 3.) Rising Voices, and 4.) Advox.

I'm sure there is quite a bit of overlap, but if you add up the members of all four mailing lists, it equals 646 subscribers. In other words, our community has sure grown a lot since December 2004 when 30 or so bloggers from around the world all gathered in a small conference room at Harvard's law school to draft the Global Voices manifesto.

Beginning with Rebecca MacKinnon's leadership during the first couple years of the project and continuing with the leadership of Ivan Sigal today, Global Voices has always been a project that has prized and valued the input of the larger community. After all, that is what Global Voices is - a large community that values freedom of expression, communication, and multiple perspectives.

However, we still haven't come up with a great system to gather ideas about how Global Voices should grow from all members of the community, determine where there is consensus, create action plans, and delegate those tasks to volunteers who have the time to enact them (or to find funding to pay people to do them).

For example, Miguel Esquirol, a Bolivian blogger and writer of short stories who also volunteers his time translating Global Voices articles into Spanish, wrote a thoughtful post earlier this week offering some constructive criticism about how Global Voices can be improved. I have translated his post into English on my own blog.

I have also added a page to our wiki titled "Ways to Improve Global Voices". Everyone is able to edit and add to the page. Just click the light blue tab that says "Edit" and add your own thoughts. It is far from a perfect solution, but at least we will have one central place to collect everyone's thoughts. There is also a wiki page specifically for ideas related to the new translation exchange project.

Quite a few of the core staff members of Global Voices will be in Amsterdam for the Open Translation Tools conference where I am sure we will be strategizing about GV's future. It is a shame that we are not able to fly in every single member of all four of Global Voices' projects, but we would needs hundreds of thousands of dollars ... and we'd have to plant a whole lot of trees. :)

But hopefully the new wiki page will at least open up a space for wider participation in contributing to Global Voices' future.

Best,

David

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David Sasaki | outr...@globalvoicesonline.org

Director of Rising Voices

http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org

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