Friends of Slide Ranch

Global Voices is a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society.

• How Global Voices Works
• Our Primary Goals
• The Global Voices Team

How Global Voices Works:

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?

Our international team of volunteer authors, regional blogger-editors and translators are your guides to the global blogosphere.

These amazing people are bloggers who live in various countries around the world. We have invited them as contributors or hired them as editors because they understand the context and relevance of information, views, and analysis being posted every day from their countries and regions on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, videoblogs - and other kinds of online citizen media. They are helping us to make sense of it all, and to highlight things that bloggers are saying which mainstream media may not be reporting.

For quick hits, check out our Links section, where each weekday our editors link to 5-10 of the most interesting blog posts from their regions. In the Weblog section, our translators, editors, and volunteer contributors post longer features, shedding light on the preoccupations of the blogging communities in their countries.

In addition to this website, Global Voices has an Advocacy program to help people speak out in places where powerful forces would prevent them from doing so. We also have an Outreach program called Rising Voices to enable more people whose voices and views are not heard to speak out online.

Global Voices is also being translated into the following languages by the Lingua project:

• Bangla
• Chinese (Traditional & Simplified)
• Farsi
• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese

(These languages are up-and-coming: German, Hindi, Japanese, Arabic, Malagasy)

Our Primary Goals:

At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, podcasts, photos, video, wikis, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our interconnected world. We aim to do the following:

1) Call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world

2) Facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves

3) Advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution

The idea for the project grew out of an international bloggers’ meeting held at Harvard in December 2004. (Here’s a written account of the meeting. To listen to an audio report, click here). Global Voices, though headquartered at Harvard Law School, is a co-operative effort of contributors from every continent and dozens of countries.

Because voices from North America and Western Europe are already over-represented in the global media, we are not focusing on those regions in our coverage at this time.

For more detailed information please read our Frequently Asked Questions.

If you’re a blogger and want to get involved, please click here.

If you’re a journalist and want more information, please click here.