Opening Session

I'm here at the Global Voices London Summit and here's my notes. 

However, Angelo Embuldeniya is doing an awesome job of liveblogging remotely, yes remotely.   He is in Turkey, reading the transcript that SJ Klein is typing in real time on the IRC and listening to the live audio stream.   He's grabbing photos from the flickr stream.   (Got that?)
 

Rebecca MacKinnon shared the history of the Global Voices project - how and why it got started and GV Manifesto.  She shared how the content and editorial structure has developed and grown over the past year, some recent honors, and the managing editor position.  A great one-liner to define Global Voices "A single place on the web where we could read a diversity of opinions."      Ethan gave the statistics of visitation and impact.
 

One tidbits from Ethan's presentation that I wasn't aware of:  Many short pieces don’t get comments, but longer pieces get comments. Some longer pieces get 100 hundreds of comments. For example, the post after the London bombing got in a huge debate. This means that people are engaging. Approximately 1800 sites that link to Global Voices.

The editorial and organizational model is distributed. Back in April/May, Rebecca and Ethan were doing all the work. Sept/Oct regional editors. Now more in the hands of contributors. It is getting bigger and bigger.   Important to get to know each face-to-face.

These numbers are important because GV has become a profound influence. A lot visitors are journalists who are researching stories. They want to know what’s going and trying to find out if we have voices in location they are working in.  We are resource for journalists – we are amplifying, we are their sources.

This little project that we started a year ago was like "Hey we should have a blog." Today, we have a huge amount influence.  Now that everyone is looking at us, now is not the time to screw up.  People are looking to us get information consistently – if we are not there, people will get frustrated. At we start stepping up, people expect us to do better.

We start stepping up and we start to become more like the media, not an alternative media. This has brought debates over what we’re covering. We are transparent and diverse, not fair and balance.  We want a spread of voices – individual people with individual opinions and we need to travel ourselves and look at what we’re linking. If we are always comfortable, we’re not linking to the right people.

Three challenges:

#1: Don’t screw up!

#2: Be diverse and transparent (great points made in the second session relating to transparency)

#3 What do we want to do next? That’s what today (subsequent discussion) is all about. Who do we want to be?

Because we’re a distributed organization, it is our decision to make!  Global Voices needs to be a platform for us to do projects.

Next, the regional editors shared their thoughts.   Here are some key themes from comments from regional editors.

More use of tagging

Translation issue - English only? Best strategy for translation

A lot of what’s going in our blogosphere is to correct perceptions of what is going on in the world

Getting people to meet from a region, helps with crossing issues

Who do we exist for? Our readers or to facilitate bloggers finding one another?

Site designer spoke about need to be better aggregator.   "I'm here to listen to what people have to say to help shape design/structure of site."

Global Voice Manifesto - will the next version appear?   

I'm still fried from the jetlag and the wifi is a little slow, but Dina Mehta is sitting next to me and she's getting through and doing awesome live blog.  Here's her post.

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