Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

As the internet becomes more accessible to more people, including mobile phone users, the so-called digital divide seems to be narrowing. In its place, however, we see a participation gap in which the vast majority of blogs, podcasts, and online video are being produced in middle-class neighborhoods in major cities around the world.

Rising Voices aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities in the developing world. Please visit our current list of grantees for project examples.

The sky is the limit, but unfortunately funding is not. Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $2,000 to $5,000. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets.

Successful projects will be prominently featured on Global Voices. Grantees are expected to host regular workshops to train participants how to start and maintain a weblog, upload and share digital photographs, and produce basic videos. Grantees are also required to post regular project evaluations and updates to the Rising Voices website.

Completed applications will be accepted no later than Sunday, January 18. Please submit your completed application on the Rising Voices apply page.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments section below or by sending an email to outreach@globalvoicesonline.org.

As she details in a two-part project evaluation, Azimi intended for Iran Inside Out to become a full-time venture to spread awareness about and raise the profile of young Iranian filmmakers by introducing their works to an international audience. The project has encountered several obstacles, but it has also made important progress over the past six months, including an attractive and interactive website.

Iran Inside Out has also managed to publish two videos by filmmakers Hossein Rasti and Hamid Najafirad which exemplify the power of film to convey human emotion. Najafirad's "Silent Screech" offers an insider's view of Tehran's underground heavy metal scene.

Recent comments by US President Elect Barack Obama about Iran make Hossein Rasti's intimate meditation on the future for his young nephew, Parsa, all the more relevant. Will Parsa's generation see an era of prevailing peace or increasing conflict?

Looking toward the future, Azimi says another video will be posted to Iran Inside Out shortly. She also hopes to form partnerships with the online film festival "Culture Unplugged" and with journalism, communication, and film departments at local Iranian universities. Keep your eyes on Iran Inside Out for more great content.

The End of Commercial Media

Several months ago I watched Roger Alton, the new editor of the Britain daily, The Independent, get absolutely skewered by Stephen Sackur on the BBC evening talk show, Hard Talk. Their 30 minute discussion boiled down to 15 minutes of Sackur asking how The Independent planned to stop losing money and 15 minutes of Alton stuttering and stammering. The unavoidable conclusion, once again? Big media, whether in the US or UK, has no idea how to stop losing money.

Despite Roger Alton's cozy relationship with Tony Blair and complete lack of journalistic skepticism in the run-up to the Iraq War, I found myself actually feeling sorry for the guy. His job, as editor of a major print daily with a terrible website, is that of kamikaze pilot. But why the stuttering and the constant reaching for an empty glass of water? Why not direct Sackur's questions right back at the him? After all, the BBC is also in the same money-losing industry, right?

There is a good reason why Alton didn't question the BBC's business model. Most of the British Broadcasting Corporation's revenue doesn't depend on advertising or classified ads like The Independent, but rather, selling television sets. The 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act established an annual license - that is, a "TV tax" - on all households with television sets. The current annual cost for a color television in the UK is around $300. Households with only black and white televisions pay roughly $100. (The license fee is per household, not per television. If you are over 75 you don't have to pay and if you are blind, as logic would dictate, you get 50% off.)

Britain's total annual revenue from television licensing is roughly $3 billion, which funds BBC's wide ranging domestic coverage on radio, television, and the internet. BBC's World Service is funded by a grant from the Foreign Office.

Television licenses are not unique to Britain. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, two-thirds of European countries and half of the countries in Asia and Africa use television licenses to fund public programming.

The United States, of course, also has public programming, in the form of the Public Broadcasting Service, which hosts this blog, and National Public Radio. But whereas most British households pay $300 per year for their color television, annual funding for public television in the United States is about $2 per capita, roughly the same cost as a medium cup of coffee. In fact, the United States never adopted television or radio licenses because, unlike most countries, privately owned commercial radio stations, historically, were able to make easy profits through advertising. The majority of non-commercial radio stations in the first half of the of the 20th century were owned by local or state governments and charitable organizations. In fact, a federal body to regulate and coordinate public broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), did not emerge until 1967.

In comparison to Britain's annual revenue from television licenses of $3 billion, the annual budget of the CPB for 2005 was $390 million, which is scheduled to be halved next year. Whereas nearly all of the money from Britain's TV tax is funneled to a single media organization, the BBC, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting distributes about 90% of its budget to public broadcasters across the country, including both local and national organizations. This is part of its genius. Rather than putting all its chips in the same place, the CPB encourages a competitive marketplace of public broadcasters who are able to focus on local content. Ideally, CPB funding is awarded to those broadcasters who produce the best and most innovative journalism.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, however, is saddled with two major flaws in the context of the current US media ecology. First, it is severely underfunded. The second flaw has to do with how the CPB decides who is eligible for funding. Most of these requirements make sense. For example, it is a good thing that eligible applicants must hold open meetings, open financial records, and a community advisory board. But it makes far less sense, today, for the federal government to fund a "corporation" for public broadcasting when we've steadily been moving beyond broadcast for the last decade. We need a federal body in charge of supporting the nation's journalism, communication, and information needs. That is, in charge of supporting quality online content and mash-ups.

Imagining an America without Science

Nuclear energy, mapping the human genome, developing the internet, finding solutions to global warming: the United States has been at the forefront of all of these discoveries thanks in large part to the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Today the NSF, a federally funded organization of 1,700 employees, has an annual budget of around $6 billion and funds approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research at American universities. Despite squabbles over issues like stem cell research, the NSF enjoys strong bi-partisan support from both Democrats and Republicans who have, in the words of Wikipedia, "generally embraced the notion that government-funded basic research is essential for the nation's economic health and global competitiveness."

That stands in stark contrast, however, to general sentiment pre-World War II, when academic research in science and engineering was not considered a responsibility of the government. It was in 1945 when Vannevar Bush, then head of the government's wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, issued a report to President Truman titled "Science - The Endless Frontier," which made the case for federal funding of scientific research by arguing that the nation would reap rich dividends in the form of better health care, a more vigorous economy, and a stronger national defense. The report proposed creating the "National Research Foundation" to administer this effort.

Five years later, after much debate, negotiation, and imperfect compromise, President Truman signs Public Law 507, creating the National Science Foundation on May 10.

National Science Board Members, July 1951. Credit: NSF Collection

Vannevar Bush and President Truman had the foresight to recognize the importance that research and technology would play in the transition from the industrial era to the knowledge economy. Today we need an equally prescient voice - or, more likely, a collection of voices - to convince the incoming Obama administration to create a National Journalism Foundation to fund this country's failing journalism industry and, in Obama's own words, to "preserve the multiplicity of voices on the internet."

The National Journalism Foundation would essentially serve as a re-invented Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Annual funding should increase from $200 million to $3 billion. (One percent of the total cost of the Iraq War; four percent of the federal bank bailout.) Similar to the NSF, the National Journalism Foundation would regularly award grants to individuals, organizations, and institutions that propose projects which serve to better inform the American public about their communities, government, nation, and the rest of the world. PBS and NPR would, of course, continue to receive funding, but other organizations and projects like EveryBlock and FiveThirtyEight.com, which provide important information to the public but don't attract advertising revenue, would also be considered for funding.

A Reason to Hope

The nature of our media itself is changing so rapidly that the most important thing that we can probably do is to preserve the diversity that is emerging through the internet. The internet is not yet the major source of news for most people, but it is increasingly becoming the major source of news ... There is still a multiplicity of voices on the internet and so the question is how do we preserve that as bigger companies want to start getting into that space.

Barack Obama, speaking during his presidential campaign

There is good news: Barack Obama is clearly on the side of internet enthusiasts and advocates of net neutrality. The bad news is that today, more than any other time in the last 50 years, the federal government is going to have a difficult time selling new federal agencies to the American public.

Taxing Internet Service Providers' Profits: The Least Worst Solution

In order to fund the National Journalism Foundation (NJF) and stave off the inevitable decline of quality journalism in the United States, the Obama administration will need to come up with a new source of revenue to finance it. Given this country's history of anti-tax hysteria, that is no easy feat. But thanks to Obama's political capital and the prolonged crisis in the field of journalism, the incoming administration could follow the lead of French president Nicolas Sarkozy and push through a tax on internet service providers to fund the creation of a National Journalism Foundation.

The biggest obstacle to doing so is the 1998 Internet Tax Freedom Act, which last year was extended until 2014, and bans any state or federal tax on internet access and online commerce. Supporters of the ban point out that taxes levied against internet service providers (ISP's) are handed down to consumers, which makes the world's greatest source of information, the internet, unattainable for more people, especially the poor.

One possible solution would be to tax only the profits made by telecommunications giants as they install internet connections in more homes and businesses across the country. Earlier this year Comcast, for example, reported a 54 percent jump in fourth-quarter 2007 profits, including $1.7 billion of revenue gain from new high-speed internet customers alone. AT&T, benefiting from its exclusive contract as wireless provider for Apple's iPhone, racked up huge profits as wireless data sales increased more than 57 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of 2007.

While the profits of telecommunications companies soar, the quality of online journalism is increasingly at-risk. Nearly all blogs which sustain themselves with advertising revenue are heavily focused on technology and celebrity news. Major news websites that have been lauded for online innovation and high-quality content, like the New York Times, continue to report declining revenue as advertisers pull out.

A Hard Sell, But an Important One

Last month the New York Sun announced that a three-week search for new financial backers had failed and that it would shut down immediately. The paper is hardly alone. These days Jim Romanesko's daily column hosted by Poynter Online reads more like an obituary page than a source of media insider news. At least once a week a paper folds or tries to put a bright spin on announcing non-profit status and a "streamlined newsroom".

Despite a rise in media-related philanthropy, foundations alone aren't able to replace the billions of dollars in lost advertising and millions of dollars in reduced federal funding that threaten the journalism industry today. New tools, cheaper computers, and wider internet access offer a deep reservoir of potential for a more informed citizenry and more meaningful civic participation. Just as President Truman recognized the importance of creating a National Science Foundation to ensure America's leadership in scientific innovation and engineering in the second half of the 20th century, President-Elect Obama could create a National Journalism Foundation to bring about a more informed and more participative American public than has ever existed before.

Like for so many others, I found Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic piece to be a refreshing affirmation of why it is that bloggers do what we do: share our words with, potentially, the rest of the internet, today and forever in the future. But the excerpt I found especially resonant was this:

A blog bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is - more than any writer of the past - a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the trackbacks that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

Much of Sullivan's emphasis focuses on the blog not as a source of information, but rather, a mouthpiece of conversation.

For the past three and a half years I have worked for a website that aims to measure the pulse of this constant conversation on a global scale. "The world is talking. Are you listening?" asks Global Voices' tagline. With the exception of a few truly global events over the past five years (the Southeast Asian Tsunami, for example), there have been surprisingly few occasions during which the entire world came together to weigh in on a single topic. In fact, our notion of the blogosphere as a single sphere of what Sullivan refers to as "nodes among nodes" has transformed into a collection of loosely connected globs defined by language, nationality, ideology, and interest. On Tuesday those globs will drift tantalizingly close, even overlap, for a day of agreement, debate, discouragement, and celebration.

Keep refreshing Voices without Votes to see what the rest of the world has to say about the most-talked-about election of all time. For more background information on the project, I highly recommend Jose Antonio Vargas' WaPo piece, "The election that has the whole world blogging."

Which group is most affected by today's digital divide? The poor? Those who live in rural communities? The so-called Global South? Women?

To a greater or lesser degree, they have all tended to benefit less from the advantages and opportunities afforded by the internet than, say, young men living in urban North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. But there is another demographic whose online exclusion trumps all others: the aged.

According to a study by Jonathan Gardner and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, "almost three in five of the 18 to 24 age group use the internet compared with less than one in 20 of the over 65's (despite the alternative stereotype of the e-granny in the library). Among those who do use the internet, the very youngest also spend more time logged on - an average of 4.1 hours, which is twice as long on average as pensioners do. The digital divide between pensioners and the rest is, in fact, a gulf. These differences persist even when other factors are taken into account."

Similarly, according to a 2004 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, only 22% of Americans age 65 and older go online.

Even as more "wired seniors" are taking to the internet in fully developed countries, this trend does not stay true in the developing world where there are less computer training programs for retirees. Furthermore, while young internet users - armed with weblogs, video cameras, and audio editing software - are shaping the internet as a commons for sharing and advocacy, older users are much more likely to approach the internet as consumers rather than consumer-creators.

Of course, in much of the world elders have been traditionally given respect and reverence for their accumulated wisdom and historical perspective. For millenia elders held the role of transmitting knowledge, history, and culture through their oral and written storytelling. However, storytelling today requires more than just a compelling narrative; storytellers must also learn the new tools of literacy: blogs, digital photography, and online video.

The United Nations Recognizes the Needs and Achievements of Elders

The good news is that just as our parents tended to live longer lives than their parents, we will also live longer lives than our own. In fact, average life expectancy has increased worldwide by twenty years since 1950 and is expected to increase another 10 years by 2050. This "revolution in longevity" also presents grave challenges as older persons tend to require costly health care and are less able to compete with young adults for jobs which require technical skills and/or manual labor. Today 600 million people are over the age of 60, and by 2025 this figure is expected to double. Over 100 million elders today are living on less than US$1 a day and their role as family caretakers and custodians of culture is being undermined and undervalued.

In 2002 at the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing more than 160 governments committed to include ageing in all social and economic development policies, and to halve old-age poverty by 2015, in line with Millennium Development Goals. A five year review of the plan of action in February noted some advances such as increased pensions in the Caribbean and specialized geriatric care centers in Western Asia, but shortcomings and lack of engagement by most member countries are repeated throughout the report.

HelpAge International, a U.K.-based NGO which advocates the rights of older persons, began the Age Demands Action campaign to commemorate the United Nationals Day of Older People (October 1) by promoting the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing and demanding recognition and support for the vital contribution of elders to society.

This year committees from 37 different countries will all take part in the Age Demands Action campaign, including the Muthande Society for the Aged based in Durban, South Africa. The Muthande Society, founded in 1983, cares for thousands of elder residents throughout the Durban area, with a special emphasis on older people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS.

This year, rather than sending out a standard press release to local newspapers and community leaders, HelpAge International asked Rising Voices to train members of the Muthande Society for the Aged how to use blogs to give a personal and intimate look into what it is like to work with elders and advocate for their rights. Here is a brief video of the training workshop:

You can read and subscribe to the five blogs created by Muthande Society employees:

• http://durbanphindi.wordpress.com/
• http://muthande.wordpress.com/
• http://lizmkame.wordpress.com/
• http://hthembekile.wordpress.com/
• http://abadala.wordpress.com/

The Muthande Blog laments the lack of funding and recognition given to NGO's despite the enormous amount of important work that they do. The blog titled Aged is worried about the myth that raping elders and toddlers can cure AIDS. Phindimdlalose, writing a more personal post, shares her family's dream of owning a larger house. Liz Mkame, one of Muthande's co-founders, reminds us that "The younger people can learn a lot from the aged especially about culture and UBUNTU." Thembekile Hlub, another of Muthande's co-founders, gives us an introduction to the organization and its activities.

New bloggers from the Muthande Society for the Aged.

What can you do?

You can help support the rights of elders today.

• Read the goals of the Age Demands Action campaign.
• Sign HelpAge's global petition and forward it to friends.
• Watch the Age Demands Action film and forward it on.
• Write a blog post about the United Nations Day of Older People and the Age Demands Action campaign or post a link to the site from your Facebook page.
• Train elders in your own community how to use the social web to make their voices heard.

As far as development work goes, the Millennium Villages project based at Columbia University's Earth Institute has something of the celebrity status of say Angelina Jolie or Bono, both of whom in fact have become public faces for the project, which provides a holistic aid package to 12 rural villages in 10 African countries. Other well-groomed and well-known supporters of the project include George Soros, Brad Pitt, Madonna, and the founder of the initiative, celebrity economist, Jeffrey Sachs.

In fact, scanning the Millennium Villages' news archive, it can seem as though just about everyone who is anyone has something to say about the experimental initiative in holistic development aid. Except, that is, the residents of the 12 targeted villages.

The success of the Millennium Villages project, like most development work, depends largely on who you're willing to trust. Jeffrey Sachs is steadfast in his portrayal of the Millennium Villages as an unprecedented success in development aid. In a May 2007 article in Harper's magazine, however, Victoria Schlesinger says that villages like Sauri, Kenya have in fact been receiving foreign aid for more than 15 years and that the Millennium Villages project comes down to re-branding a longtime effort that has little to show for itself. Sam Rich, a development consultant writing in the Wilson Quarterly, is much more measured in both his support and criticism of the project: "if Sauri is to become a useful model for development on a bigger scale, and not just another development expert's white elephant, Sachs and others working on the project must acknowledge that they are still learning about Africa. Sauri is not yet a success."

So who do we believe? Is the Millennium Villages project the answer to solving world poverty or, as Schlesinger asserts, just another example of 'continuing poverty'?

The difficulty of finding unbiased voices about development and philanthropic projects is hardly limited to the Millennium Villages. NGO's and non-profits - relying on continued support from donors, governments and philanthropies - are eager to cast their work in the most positive light possible. Likewise, donors want to know and to show that their investments are efficiently bringing about positive change.

This natural double bias has brought about an entire industry of independent evaluation consultants, almost all of whom are based in the United States and Western Europe. While an outside consultant can give us a less biased view of development projects, they still don't have the historical and cultural context of the local community that is supposed to be benefiting from the investment.

Philanthropies and donors should stop spending so much money on costly consultants and start funding participatory media training workshops so that the target communities themselves are ultimately responsible for judging the success of development and philanthropic projects.

The Millennium Villages website frequently mentions the importance of local ownership to ensuring success, but local ownership does not come about unless locals are involved in the communication and evaluation process. Thanks to the increased accessibility of blogging, anyone with an internet connection or mobile phone is now able to participate in the international debate about any topic. Writing on the Communication Initiative Network, James Deane notes that the focus of next week's major development aid conference in Ghana will be on getting local citizens, rather than national governments, to shape development policy. Similarly, former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told a crowd at TED Global 2007 that development aid in Africa will only be a catalyst for change if individual Africans are the ones to collectively shape the priorities.

Africa's ever-growing blogosphere has already taken on development policy, most notably in last year's "trade versus aid" debate. But for those discussions to be truly relevant, they need to take place among local voices at the local level; for example, among residents of the millennium village of Sauri, Kenya.

Imagine you have just started working for a philanthropic foundation that is about to request proposals that aim to strengthen community journalism. Just like in the old days, the communications department drafts and distributes a press release with a catchy headline and bulleted points for journalists to copy and paste into their articles. But unlike a decade ago, when the press release was rehashed in a dozen or so newspapers, today it is immediately sucked into an entire universe of mailing lists, forums, blogs, and websites. And, yes, twitter.

Whereas you, the new employee at the imagined foundation, expected to review around 200 proposals, instead here are more than 3,000 proposals from groups you've likely never heard of, most of which are based in countries you've never been to. How do you select the 15 most deserving projects?

Just reading 3,000 proposals is daunting enough, but a responsible review process also implies researching every individual, organization, and claim listed in each proposal. While hiring more expert reviewers is an option, this takes away from the money available to the projects themselves.

Foundations are discovering the difficulties involved in scaling up the review process from a few hundred proposals to a few thousand. In their efforts to stay afloat, new models have emerged which "crowdsource" the review process to gain insights from the collective expertise of individuals and organizations which are potentially more familiar with the region of the applicant and the issues which affect the project (s)he is proposing.

Changemakers: Open Sourcing Social Solutions

A leader in the field of crowdsourced philanthropy is Changemakers, an initiative of the Ashoka Foundation, which aims to "open source social solutions." Like most philanthropies, Changemakers regularly makes "requests for proposals" in hopes of finding innovative projects focused on particular themes. Rather than reviewing these proposals behind closed doors, however, they are all submitted online and made available for anyone with an internet connection to read and comment on. That's not to say that the final funding decisions are left to the general public. Each grant competition has its own committee of judges - the so-called experts. But unlike most grant review committees, all of the reviewers of Changemakers grant competitions each have their own profile page where you review the comments they've made and, once logged in, send them private messages.

Recent grant competitions have focused on ending global slavery and using banking services to fight poverty. Between April and August of 2008 over 230 proposals from nearly 50 countries were submitted in the grant competition to end global slavery. In total they received 1,300 discussion comments and no single proposal received greater than 87 comments (though the great majority of the proposals did not receive any comments). As you might guess, most comments come from personal and professional acquaintances of the applicant and mostly serve as brief "comments of recommendation." But what is fascinating is how much more informative those recommendations are than the feedback from the judges. For example, in the case of Vimukti Trust's proposal to lobby the Indian government against bonded labor, many of the commenters with NGO experience in India emphasize that putting an end to the bonded labor in India is only possible with stronger state and federal government support. That is much more insightful and useful than any of the boilerplate commentary that came from the expert judges. In the end we learn that Vimukti Trust's proposal was chosen as a finalist, but did not receive funding.

Idea Blob: Users Choose What is Funded

While Changemakers leaves the decision-making process to a small committee of experts, Idea Blob decides which new idea will receive its monthly $10,000 prize based solely on the number of votes the idea receives from the community. Idea Blob is a philanthropic initiative of Advanta, a small business lender which got its start in 1951 when a Philadelphia schoolteacher started giving small loans to fellow teachers. Last month's $10,000 prize went to Elizabeth Dehart of West Jordan, Utah who is trying to start a small business which will stock vending machines with organic food options. Her proposal received 53 comments, most of which were along the lines of Teebee's comment: "that's rockin. do it." But others were more constructive in their feedback and criticism of Dehart's business plan. Jeffrey Hollender, for example, writes: "Local school districts can be a hard market to crack. You might be better off starting at the college level, or seeking appointments with companies that practice sustainability. Start with local businesses, a hometown advantage can be a big plus."

News Challenge Garage: Connecting Mentors and Applicants

The Knight News Challenge Garage is a new initiative of the Knight Foundation, which funds all of the projects regularly featured here as grantees of the annual News Challenge (including the project I direct, Rising Voices). The Garage aims to provide a "place for prospective applicants to share their ideas and receive comments from peers, as well as coaching from program mentors (past winners and current screeners), before submitting applications." The site matches new applicants with experienced mentors in the hope of improving the quality and foresight of proposals before they are reviewed. Applications aren't officially open for the News Challenge until September 2, but some projects have already begun posting parts of their proposals. One applicant is asking for $15,000 to translate and publish content in local, indigenous Malawian languages and then encourage online discussion about that content. It strikes me as a wonderful idea -” a major obstacle to digital inclusion is a lack of content in indigenous languages. However, I am also aware that the applicant is not framing his/her proposal in language that is accessible and appealing from the perspective of the Knight Foundation. I also know that (s)he will score extra points by mentioning specific open source software solutions like Drupal, which the Knight Foundation has already invested heavily in. I hope that my mentoring will help the applicant's project planning and chances of getting funded.

Changemakers, Idea Blob, and the News Challenge Garage are just three examples of participatory philanthropy. Other noteworthy examples include Social Actions, which aggregates opportunities for do-gooders to do good; Have Money Will Vlog, which (similar to Spot.us) encourages community funding of video-blogging projects; and the annual NetSquared conference, which awards prizes to the most innovative projects that use social software for social change based on the voting and discussion of the NetSquared community.

At the very least, participatory philanthropy offers more transparency into the process of how and why grantees are selected by foundations. If a foundation were to provide funding to an undeserving recipient, there would be immediate outcry. But participatory philanthropy also offers an advantage to the foundations themselves as they are able to take advantage of the knowledge and insight of volunteer 'consultants'. This is all still at a very experimental phase, of course, and it remains to be seen to what degree the general public should play in deciding which proposals receive funding.

In February I wrote a post here explaining the tremendous expansion of the BarCamp movement to Argentina, Thailand, Ukraine, Latvia, South Africa, and Kenya. In the past six months, that expansion has only accelerated.

A glance at Barcamp.org shows that this weekend alone will see major barcamps take place in Uganda, Thailand, Mumbai, Peru, Azerbaijan, Munich, Amsterdam, Bolivia, and Ukraine. All at the same time. All around the world.

With so many geek meetups in so many places around the world it is easy to take for granted 1.) the amount of work that goes into organizing a barcamp and 2.) the importance of bringing together local open source programmers and open content bloggers, especially in developing countries. To gain a better appreciation, let's a take a closer look at two specific barcamps: this weekend's Barcamp Bolivia taking place in El Alto and La Paz on August 29 and 30 and BarCamp Madagascar, which will be held on October 4 in Antananarivo.

Barcamp Bolivia

The two-day "unconference" will take place in high-altitude El Alto the first day and then down the hill in the capital, La Paz. Voces Bolivianas, a grantee project of Rising Voices, is organizing the event which will include sessions on the current state of Web 2.0 tools in Bolivia and allow participants to present their own blogs and their web projects to all gathered. To insure inclusivity, Voces Bolivianas has offered travel scholarships to Bolivian bloggers from "from underrepresented groups and regions."

The organizers have also invited David de Ugarte, a renowned Spanish blogger and author of "The Power of Networks: An Illustrated Manual for Cyberactivists", as this year's "international speaker." The event will serve as an opportunity for Bolivia's ever-expanding community of bloggers and programmers to converge and debate how Web 2.0 and open source technologies can be best applied and adapted to a Bolivian context. New applications and projects might also emerge from the meeting.

Barcamp Madagascar

Madagascar's first ever barcamp will take place on October 4 at Hotel Ivotel Ambohidahy in the capital, Antananarivo. According to the English-language version of the website:

BarCamp Madagascar will be the first BarCamp event in Madagascar. The full-day event is free of charge for all participants and will include presentations, lightning talks, and meetups on various topics of interest to the Malagasy technology community. Coffee, lunch, and a commemorative T-shirt included with your $0 entrance fee (thanks to our sponsors!). This is a collectively-owned community event. Every attendee is expected to participate in some way, however small, and help make it happen. BarCamp Madagascar can be the tech event you always dreamt of, if you make it that way!

The Barcamp should provide an excellent opportunity for Malagasy programmers and bloggers to learn about each other's projects. Pierre Maury, for example, will discuss the first Malagasy digital library while others will try to get a sense for the current state of open source software development in Madagascar.

From Firefox to OpenOffice to WordPress, most of the open source software we've come to take for granted was first developed in the United States. However, with open source programmers and bloggers creating stronger communities in places like Madagascar and Bolivia, it is only a matter of time until the next great open source project comes from Dakar, not San Francisco. It could be speech recognition software from India, a breakthrough mobile application from Nairobi, or quite likely, an application that no one else had thought of from a country that many have barely heard of.

Last week one of the most emailed stories on the New York Times website was about a medical doctor who traded in his profession for a more lucrative one: blogging. No, Arnold Kim M.D. does not blog about kidney diagnosis, his specialty, but rather, rumors about future Apple products. His blog, MacRumors.com is listed as the second most valuable blog ($85 million) on the internet right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, according to 24/7 Wall St., a financial news blog.

But what if Arnold Kim M.D. did decide to blog about medical tablets rather than speculation of an Apple tablet? What rules and ethics would govern Kim's blogging? Should he offer medical advice on his blog? Is it ethical to describe the conditions of actual patients? Would it be better that he blog anonymously or that he use his real name? Should he be forthright about the problems facing his profession and the hospital where he works?

Those same difficult questions were asked by Tara Lagu, Elinore Kaufman, David Asch, and Katrina Armstrong in "Content of Weblogs Written by Health Professionals," an academic paper funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine last week. The cost of the article if published from JGIM is $32, however, the entire article has been made available on the web by Pharmalot. The objective of the study, in its own words, is to "examine the scope and content of medical blogs and approximate how often blog authors commented about patients, violated patient privacy, or displayed a lack of professionalism."

The authors of the study take for granted that the influence of medical blogs will continue to grow:

Medical blogs are now part of the literature and media of medicine. These media include professional and scientific publication and presentation, medical stories and medical dramatizations in books, movies, theater, radio, and on television. Although medical blogs are a new addition to this list, the rapid increase in the use of the Internet suggests that their importance will
grow.

But they are also cautious about the unique unmediated nature of the medium:

Other forms of medical communication, such as presentations at medical conferences or articles in the lay press, adhere to specific standards of content and decorum. In contrast, medical blogs are public documents written in a diary style typically used for private thoughts. The authors of some medical blogs censor their thoughts and comments less than we expect they would in traditional public settings.

The Flea Malpractice Controversy

Without explicitly saying so, the study was seemingly inspired by the controversial case of 'Flea', a pseudonymous blogging doctor who revealed the details of a patient's death after a malpractice case was brought against him. Incredibly, 'Flea', now publicly known as Robert P. Lindeman, blogged his way to a costly out-of-court settlement after publishing posts which ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the lawyer, and accused members of the jury of dozing. It was, according to the Boston Globe's Jonathan Saltzman, "a Perry Mason moment updated for the Internet age."

Lindeman's blogging as a court defendant, much like his blogging as a pediatrician, offered insight into malpractice cases which is not widely known among the general public. According to the Boston Globe article:

In April, before the trial began, [Lindeman] wrote about meeting with an expert on juries who advised him how to act when he was cross- examined. Flea was instructed to angle his chair slightly toward the jury, keep his hands folded in his lap, and face the jury when answering questions, slowly. "Answers should be kept to no more than three sentences," he wrote.

The consultant told him juries in medical malpractice cases base verdicts almost entirely on their view of a doctor's character.

"We've said it before, and we'll say it again: If the basis of this case is that Flea is an arrogant, uncaring jerk who maliciously neglected a patient, resulting in his death, the plaintiff will not win, period," Flea wrote.

Held to Higher Standards

In total, the authors of Content of Weblogs Written by Health Professionals identified 271 medical blogs with the help of Google and three medical blog aggregators: Medlogs, Yahoo Health and Medicine Blogs and The Medical Blog Network. In each of the 271 blogs, they examined five posts from throughout 2006, but do not explain how those five posts were selected. (I certainly wouldn't want my own blog portrayed in an academic study based on just five blog posts.)

They found that over half of the bloggers provided sufficient information to reveal their identities. Individual patients were described in over 40% of the studied blogs and were portrayed positively in 16% of blogs and negatively in nearly 18%. "Of blogs that described interactions with individual patients, 45 (16.6%) included sufficient information for patients to identify their doctors or themselves. Three blogs showed recognizable photographic images of patients. Healthcare products were promoted, either by images or descriptions, in 31 (11.4%) blogs."

The authors of the study don't judge the torrent of new medical blogs to be either good or bad. Rather, they acknowledge that blogs "allow physicians and nurses to share their narratives, knowledge and
experience with the healthcare world" and "accurately portray the challenges facing our professions." However, they caution that "health professionals who share private thoughts in public settings risk revealing confidential patient information or otherwise reflecting poorly on the profession" and recommend that healthcare professionals who blog hold themselves to higher standards.

The author of Clinical Cases and Images, responding to the study, offers tips for fellow medical bloggers such as "write as if your boss and patients are reading every day", "comply with HIPAA", "use a disclaimer", and "get your blog accredited by the Heath on the Net Foundation." Kevin, M.D., one of the most popular physician bloggers, also responded to the study, agreeing that "physician blogs that write about patients do need to be held to a higher than normal blog standard", but that physician blogs should not be required to disclose conflicts of interest nor be held to the same standard as medical journals. Ed Silverman, who blogs at Pharmalot, is bemused that doctors so frequently complain about not having enough time to see patients, but do manage to find time to blog about them. Dr. R.W. Donnell, who blogs at Trusted.MD, notes that there is still little consensus on whether medical bloggers should publish anonymously or not.

Can Health Bloggers Shape Health Policy?

The study also notes that medical blogs "can accurately portray the challenges facing our professions." But can they be harnessed to help find solutions to those challenges and to shape local, national, and even global health care policy?

This is the central question of a panel discussion on Tuesday, July 29 sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation. According to the blurb:

The briefing will highlight how the traditional health policy world has embraced blogging and will feature a keynote address by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, the first cabinet officer to author an official blog, followed by a moderated discussion with a variety of health policy bloggers and a media analyst.

According to the About Page of Secretary Mike Leavitt's blog, he is:

taking time to blog as a way to foster public discussion. The blog is the result of the Secretary’s continuing desire to engage Americans in the exchange of ideas on health care and the provision of human services. It provides an opportunity for the Secretary to share his observations as well as a means for him to have an open conversation about health and the related challenges that face the nation. The blog is intended to be a dynamic online conversation and the Secretary welcomes your ideas for overcoming those challenges.

Other health bloggers on the panel include Jacob Goldstein who blogs at the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog, John McDonough a senior adviser for Senator Edward Kennedy who blogs at Commonhealth and used to blog at A Healthy Blog, Michael Cannon who is the Cato Institute's director of health policy studies and frequent blogger, as well as Kaiser Family Foundation CEO Drew Altman who has so far published at least one blog post himself.

Global Voices for Global Health?

Other health-focused philanthropic foundations are also looking toward the blogosphere as a place to stimulate debate about health care policy. Last week I was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation to help cover a conference they have organized about Global eHealth. (You can see my conference coverage here.) Rather than sticking to press releases fed to mainstream journalists, the conference organizers realized that bloggers could help reach new audiences and foster more interactive discussions around how technology can be used to improve health care in developing countries.

Similarly, the Health Media initiative of Open Society Institute's Public Health program has partnered with Rising Voices, the Knight News Challenge grantee which I direct, to train staff at six health-focused NGO's in the developing world how to use citizen media like blogs, podcasts, and online video to spread awareness about their work and the populations they work with.

We have hired Juhie Bhatia as Global Voices' public health editor to help filter and feature the content produced by these six NGO's as well as content from the greater health blogosphere worldwide. Already she has published a fascinating piece examining Indian bloggers' reactions to a controversial proposal in Maharashtra to make HIV testing compulsory before a couple is able to marry. Like so many posts on Global Voices, it is available in multiple languages including Bangla, French, Macedonian, and Hindi.

Whether a single blog can help influence health care policy in the United States or, for that matter, in Ukraine or Romania, remains to be seen. But it is undeniable that health-focused blogs have alredy become part of what the authors of the article from the Journal of General Internal Medicine refer to as "the literature and media of medicine." The ultimate goal, of course, is that more information and more discussion will eventually lead to better healthcare, better health policy, and healthier lives.

While surfing around on the Internet today, you would be entirely forgiven for assuming that the only news worth talking about is the release of Apple's 3G iPhone. Of course, there are plenty of other notable and interesting conversations taking place online (among them: the ethics of for-profit fundraisers, a Danish island's march toward energy independence, and how English is "evolving into a language we may not even understand") but most of us don't know how to find those conversations as we navigate through our personal echo chamber of bookmarked websites, subscribed RSS feeds, and the web pages they link to.

As the editorial role of media shifts from a handful of professional experts to the mass participation of millions of internet users (though we should remember that only 10% of internet users tend to actively participate), how does the transition affect the content encountered by news consumers as they themselves continue their transition from print, radio, and TV to the internet? Or, put another way, how does the content featured on user-generated sites differ from content selected by professional editors?

Websites like Digg, Newsvine, and Reddit feature links to web content based on how many votes each link receives from its community of users. The most featured posts are almost exclusively about technology, US politics, celebrities, and what might be classified as "bizarre news". Stories about how music videos are made and, you guessed it, the iPhone are routinely featured at the top of user generated news sites.

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarusian technology journalist and internet enthusiast, says he created Polymeme as a way to "stay on top of important developments in non-tech areas."

Fields like economics, design, law, environment, or literature didn't seem to have their own Digg, Techmeme or Technorati; thus, navigating through the growing non-tech blogospheres has become very difficult. As the amount of information on the Web has kept growing rapidly, it has proved quite challenging to remain a true polymath.

What does Morozov consider a polymath? Stories on Polymeme are divided into five different categories (policy, change, culture, media, and science) each with four sub-categories - topics like "social justice" and "books and poetry".

A renaissance for renaissance men ... and women

During the European Renaissance, when intellectual pursuit and rationalism stole away public appeal from Vatican dogma, the polymath was a celebrated figure. Representative polymaths include the well known, like Leone Battista Alberti, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin, but also, lesser known in the West, Ibrahim Muteferrika, Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, and Mikhail Lomonosov.

In modern times, however, celebration of the polymath has died down. In its place we find a deep reverence for both economic and intellectual specialization. The more an individual dedicates his or her cognition to a narrow field of study, the thinking goes, the further that narrow field of study will advance. In practice, however, overspecialization can lead to extinction while some of the greatest innovations happen when diverse disciplines intersect. (For example, biomimicry, traffic studies, and ecodesign.)

If you want to get into grad school, then it's probably best to start narrowing your focus, but if your goal is to help change the world, you might just want to broaden your perspective.

How it works

The stories featured on Polymeme, unlike Digg and Reddit, are not based on user votes. Rather, the site uses a custom script to monitor the content of around 25,000 RSS feeds and then suggests 'memes' - that is, clusters of articles and blog posts about the same story - to its two editors every two to three hours. Polymeme is now almost completely automated. The brunt of the work came at the beginning when Morozov had to search for the best and most relevant online sources of information related to the 20 topics that Polymeme covers. Just imagine trying to come up with a list of the best 1,000 blogs and news sites about a topic like "books and poetry" or "evolution".

This begs two obvious questions: 1.) how are the sources of information chosen and 2.) how often will they be updated? Morozov says that the list of sources is constantly updated as he comes across new blogs and news sites. He adds that the list of sourced sites will eventually be made public and that the team will soon start assigning weights, or rankings, to each of the sources "so that an economics blog of a Nobel prize winner counts more than a trading blog from Joe Smith."

By pointing readers' attention to stories which have already generated responses from dozens of reporters, columnists, and bloggers, it can be said that Polymeme adds to the echo chamber effect. That, of course, depends on what echoes you've been hearing. If you, like me, don't want to read another article about the iPhone for the rest of the year, why not take a look at what netizens are saying about evolution and the arts?

My one critique of the site is that, while its FAQ posits the question "Why can't I find anything about iPhone or Barack Obama on your site?", Barack Obama is actually the most mentioned person on Polymeme according to its Polybuzz section. Similarly, the United States is the most alluded-to 'place', with nearly four times as many mentions as runner-up China. ("New York", meanwhile, takes fourth place.) This probably says more about the global media - both new and old - than it does Morozov's approach to highlighting content focused on more than just the United States, but it is a reminder that Global Voices' non-Western focus is still something of an online and offline rarity.

Now, imagine that community, that sphere of burning blogstars, expanding like the universe itself. Imagine that it encompasses your entire city, and keeps expanding to include every citizen of your country, and, eventually, each and every of the more than 6.5 billion human beings just like you and me.

From Twingly's blogging visualization screensaver.

What is preventing this expansion from taking place?

Time, of course. Whoever cruelly restricted us to just 24 hours in a single day, with nearly a third of them spent with our eyes closed, did not want us in direct communication with the other 6.5 billion of us scattered around the planet. Then there is Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist who coined "Dunbar's number". That is, 150, roughly the maximum number of any community before it starts to lose its cohesiveness.

But there are other obstructions to a truly representative global conversation which are not imposed by the limits of physics or human cognition, but rather the censorship of authoritarian governments, the diversity of the languages we speak, and the lack of digital inclusion in rural and low income communities. This is what was discussed in detail by over 200 bloggers, podcasters, vloggers, and anti-censorship activists from all corners of the globe at this year's Global Voices Summit.

Obstacle one: censorship

Day one of the two-day public meeting focused exclusively on the current state of online censorship around the world and what free speech activists are doing to combat the restrictions to online participation placed by authoritarian governments, often with the assistance of technology companies based in the United States and Europe. For an introduction to where censorship is taking place and where anti-censorship activists are creating tools and organizing campaigns to fight it, don't miss Sami Ben Gharbia's Access Denied Map.

Evgeny Morozov's article, "Blog standard", for the Economist is another useful introduction to the complex dynamic facing both sides of the censorship issue. He notes, for example, that authoritarian governments that block access to sites like YouTube and WordPress to silence domestic criticism of their regimes do so at the expense of harming their international reputation. Equally paradoxical, free speech activists who use the internet to spread awareness about the tools they develop to circumvent blocked access to websites, are offering tips to censors on how to stay one step ahead in the game of online cat and mouse.

The discussions throughout the day analyzed online censorship in all its various manifestations. Several speakers stressed that the anti-censorship movement is more than circumventing, for example, the block of WordPress.com in Turkey or campaigning against laws that aim to restrict free speech. The anti-censorship movement, they argue, also seeks to create a safe atmosphere where everyone around the world feels free to express themselves without reprisal. Alex Au, a Singaporean gay rights activist noted that while there was little official censorship in Singapore, almost all bloggers self-censored. That is, few bloggers are willing to criticize the government, national leaders, or major corporations in fear that it could hurt their standing in society or have a negative impact on future employment opportunities.

Another frequent lament throughout the day was the high level of apathy when it comes to issues of free speech and online activism. No matter how many bloggers around the world are sentenced to jail, most internet users still spend their online hours surfing entertainment sites. Several commenters in the audience argued that activism needs to be made fun or it won't attract popular attention and support.

Obstacle two: lack of digital inclusion

If censorship did not exist, does this mean that the whole world would all of a sudden begin sharing stories and opinions online? After all, the tag line of Global Voices is "The world is talking. Are you listening?"

But just how much of the world is talking? Which neighborhoods do they live in? What is their income level? What is their education level? As incredibly diverse as the global blogosphere is, the 'blogger demographic' tends to very homogenous. From Tanzania to Tasmania, most bloggers live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban centers, most are well educated, and most belong to the majority groups of their countries. In Venezuela this means that most bloggers will oppose Hugo Chavez, while in China you're much likelier to read about a shopping mall in Shanghai than a mosque in the mostly Muslim region of Xinjiang.

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, was established just over a year ago with the mission of making the global conversation more representative of the global population. It has so far funded ten projects which teach blogging, podcasting, and vlogging to communities that just a year ago were not seen participating online. The first session of day two of the summit presented case studies from representatives of four of those projects: Collins Dennis Odour, from repacted.org, a project in Kenya; Catalina Restrepo, from Hiperbarrio, from Medellín, Colombia; Mialy Andriamananjara, from FOKO, in Madagascar; and Cristina Quisbert, from Voces Bolivianas, from El Alto, Bolivia. All of the speakers acknowledged difficulties in their outreach trainings such as electric and internet outages, as well as slow bandwidth speeds. But technical obstacles did not prevent their impressive achievements. As Spanish journalist Rosa Jiménez Cano notes in her article for El País [English translation], FOKO Madagascar has trained over 150 new bloggers in Madagascar, Bolivian Voices has given greater representation to indigenous voices which have been marginalized by mainstream media for centuries, and HiperBarrio is sharing the history of one of Medellín's most peripheral communities from the perspective of its own young residents. A brief trailer about all ten of Rising Voices' projects is available in over 15 different languages.

Obstacle three: language

OK, so let's pretend that every single person on this planet has been trained how to blog and that none of them are censored. Finally, a truly global conversation, right?

Well, that depends how many languages you speak. Long gone are the days when the "international blogosphere" was a synonym for the English-speaking blogosphere. (In fact, according to Technorati, more bloggers write in Japanese than any other language, a fact which took Japanese bloggers by surprise.)

Machine translation sites like Google Translate have certainly improved over the years. This is largely thanks to the fact that Google scanned in 20 billion words' worth of United Nations documents (which, by default, are translated by professionals into at least six different languages).

When it comes to translating blog posts, however, Google Translate leaves a lot to be desired. The reason? United Nations documents rarely contain any slang and are written for an international audience. Bloggers, on the other hand, love to fill their blog posts with local allusions, slang, subtle ironies, street idioms, and rich metaphors. Translation, furthermore, is more than just vocabulary, it's also about conveying local context to a global scale. You will need more than Google Translate to understand why Chinese bloggers are discussing river crabs, for example.

What you will need is a committed team of volunteer translators who are willing to sit next to you at the online global dinner party and whisper in your ear whenever someone alludes to something you are not familiar with. This is where Global Voices' Lingua project comes in. Lingua volunteer translators actively translate Global Voices content into 15 other languages. Working in tandem with a team of nine different language editors, Global Voices has become the meeting post of the multilingual web.

Session four of the second day took a look at the issues and best practices encountered by Lingua volunteers in their quest to bridge the crevasses of the online language divide. Rezwan, the editor of the Bengali version of Global Voices, for example, noted that Bengali is one of the least visible major languages online despite the fact that it is the sixth most spoken language in the world.

The achievements along the way

Censorship, translation, and outreach: the three obstacles/challenges currently preventing a global, inclusive conversation online. Obstacles aside, citizen media as matured at an incredible pace over the past year worldwide, a fact not lost on the attendees and speakers at the Global Voices Summit. Session two of the second day presented compelling case studies of how citizen media tools are being employed in emerging democracies like Kenya, Armenia, Iran, and Venezuela to promote more transparent and freer elections. The third session of the day examined the complexities of bias in both old and new media through the prism of this year's Tibetan uprising and the anti-Chinese sentiment which subsequently followed the olympic torch around the world. The discussion largely focused on the importance of opening lines of proactive discussion rather than polemic exchanges during times of heated debate. Finally, the concluding session of the summit looked at four specific events in which the world spotlight was shone on bloggers of a particular region. Preetam Rai described how Burmese bloggers risked their lives to spread news about their government's repressive reaction to protests led by Buddhist monks. Neha Viswanathan, who also played a central role in the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog, describes how a group of Indian bloggers were able to successfully challenge the rhetoric of "eve teasing" to deal more aggressively with the problem of sexual and street harassment routinely suffered by Indian women. Lova Rakotomalala's presentation showed how Malagasy bloggers were able to attract mainstream media attention to the devastation wrought by Cyclone Ivan and Juliana Rotich explained how Ushahidi bridged the international internet with Kenya's many cell phone users during the time of post-election crisis and violence.

What others say

The 2008 Global Voices Summit was covered by a number of bloggers and journalists, each adding their own observations and reflections. In openDemocracy Evgeny Morozov notes that Budapest's mayor Gábor Demszky - a communist-era dissident - was one of the first people to welcome some Global Voices bloggers. Drawing a link between the anti-censorship blogs of today and the samizdat of the Soviet era. He wonders if a dissident blogger's laptop might one day join the anti-Soviet stencils which are now housed at the Open Society archives in Budapest. Mary Joyce pointed to Egyptian netizen's use of Facebook in organizing a general strike last month as "a vibrant example of the ability of the Internet to help citizens organize for collective action." The Nyasa Times in Malawi noted the attendance of two Malawi bloggers, calling it a "promotion of the Malawian blogosphere. Chris Vallance of BBC's pods & blogs radio program interviewed several attendees, with a special focus on the anti-censorship portion of the summit. For a more comprehensive list of various forms of coverage of the 2008 Global Voices Summit, check out Deborah Dilley's compilation on the summit blog.

What would it look like if our own local and national blogospheres opened their arms to the rest of the world? For Heather Ford, writing in Tech Leader, a website of South Africa's Mail and Guardian, there's no better time to find out than now.

The Global Voices Summit ended two days ago, and I still have such a palpable sense of this great emerging, truly global community that is discovering for itself just what a special role it plays in the world. I think we South African bloggers have much to learn from them -- seeing our own community as extending much further beyond those who we know and like and meet for beers every Friday, to a community of bloggers who don't even know they're bloggers yet.

The article by Nicole Nostas is titled "Voces Bolivianas: the microphone of the forgotten Bolivianas." What follows is an excerpted translation of the original article.

For Bolivians, the internet is a communications medium which is relatively new yet powerful. We still haven't begun to explore it deeply. The small amount technological development and information increases the differences which already exist in Bolivian society. Luckily, there are projects that aim to integrate our population through this medium, but in order to do so the first step is digital literacy, which has already started to bear fruit.

The voice of the least represented

Voces Bolivianas is a non-profit which aims, as its name suggests, to give under-represented groups a voice with easy-to-use digital tools like blogs. "We show them how to use the basic tools of the Web 2.0 - how to open a blog, and that they can write in it what they want," comments Jessica Olivares, a representative of Voces Bolivianas in Santa Cruz. To speak about Voces Bolivianas, it is necessary to go back to its antecedent, a web page called Global Voices Online.

A group of young North American university students found that those who publish online were from middle-upper classes with their own computers and with internet access at home or at work, giving them the luxury of surfing the web every day. It was for this reason that they created "Global Voices Online", a web site which gathers all of the least represented voices from around the world. What this site did was give a space so that people could publish articles which were translated into seven languages. Eduardo Ávila, a young Bolivian who lives in the United States, was a volunteer for the site and summarized every week what was written in Bolivian blogs.

"I believe that those blogs did not represent the diversity of the country, which is why we saw it as necessary that other groups enter the world of blogs in order to take part in the dialogue taking place in the Bolivian blogosphere," recalls Ávila, who proposed the digital literacy project to Rising Voices, an organization which seeks the same objectives. Voces Bolivianas managed to place itself among the five selected projects worldwide to receive funding. "This project is important because the internet is a place where we are all equal, where it doesn't matter if you are a businessperson, manual laborer, politician, or housewife. We all have the same opportunity to express ourselves on a blog. It is free and easy to use; you just have to have a little bit of knowledge. Voces Bolivianas tries to spread this information in order to create a bridge between people without generalizations and stereotypes," comments Ávila. This is how, along with Mario Durán and Hugo Miranda, Ávila began to develop a workshop in the city of El Alto. They wanted to give residents of El Alto the same opportunity to describe their lives from a different point of view. In September of 2007, Bolivia had 23 new and active bloggers trained in how to use new media. According to Vania Valderram, a volunteer blogger, the participants had the positive attitude and enthusiasm which is needed to open a blog and keep it updated.

The article goes on to describe how Voces Bolivianas then expanded from El Alto to Santa Cruz where Jessica Olivares led a similar workshop series in the Plan 3000 neighborhood of Santa Cruz. You can download a PDF of Vamos magazine and read the entire article in its original Spanish from their website. You can also see the pictures of and read quotes from the diverse group of new bloggers trained by Voces Bolivianas including Pedro Velasquez, a 55-year-old professor, and Kevin Ayllón, a 13-year-old student. Even if you don't speak Spanish, you can still follow the latest featured posts by new bloggers from Voces Bolivianas on the English version of their website.

If we look at how the next phases of expansion of Plan Ceibal (OLPC in Uruguay), it is apparent that we are about to face some new challenges. The arrival of the plan to the capital, Montevideo, next year will bring a new unprecedented dimension to the project which involves the most marginalized communities in the country. For the first time, the poorest sectors will have a tool in their hands to connect to the information society. The children will bring the computers to their homes, the family will access the internet, and a new segment of the population will be online.

For the first time, those with little voice will have a medium of communication with which to describe their experiences, dreams, and needs from their own perspective, unlike the traditional means of researchers from other sectors of society speaking for them. Blogs, videos and e-mails are just some examples of ways in which this sector of society will be able to express themselves more strongly than ever before in order to show their culture, their way of thinking, their reality.

The same tool will be in the hands of both rich and poor in the country. Children, senior citizens, and the whole spectrum of society will be able to exchange mails, chats and favorite sites, in a Facebook-like manner.

Like never before, the most marginalized communities will have a powerful tool to make transactions and queries with public institutions. They may claim their rights from the government. If they are given the support, they may also use it for training, acquiring positions, and working remotely.

There will also be new means with which to communicate, to convey information of interest, culture, and new forms of entertainment.

Bringing technology to the most excluded classes is already starting in the provinces of Uruguay. Salto, the largest city in Uruguay after Montevideo, is one example. A belt of marginalized communities surround this city, which is currently being flooded by XO laptops in the hands of its children.

Residents of Salto also want to make themselves heard.

There is a new form of communication, which brings us enormous challenges. We could think of it as something dangerous. We could see it as a new opportunity. But we must address the issue seriously, because the parameters which govern public opinion could change. Ceibal is giving growth to the internet for children ... and now for the poor. It is an opportunity for social inclusion that, without the attention it thoroughly deserves, could become a new circumstance of exclusion.

Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu

That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S.E.T.) has set out to accomplish with its new citizen media initiative, Prison Diaries. S.E.T. first began in 1999 when two former prisoners created the organization to provide more educational opportunities within the Jamaican prison system so that inmates would have more job opportunities upon release, and thus lessen the rates of recidivism.

Kevin Wallen, the current director of S.E.T. first became involved in the organization after reading an inspirational book by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a former American middleweight boxer who was released from prison and pronounced not guilty after spending nearly 20 years behind bars. Wallen, then living in Canada, returned to his native Jamaica and took over the leadership of S.E.T. in June of 2000. Since Wallen's involvement in the program, over 100 prisoners have passed through the S.E.T. program and not a single one has returned to prison. That is a stark contrast to Jamaica's traditionally high rates of recidivism (50% in 1993).

Photo of Tower Street computer lab by Christina Xu

Wallen has also done an impressive job of attracting international involvement to spread awareness about S.E.T. and motivate inmates. During the January 17, 2006 inauguration of a computer laboratory at Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre, Dr. Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter urged inmates to take advantage of the opportunity and learn computer skills to improve themselves. Wallen has also attracted the support of Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, who established the Jamaica Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 1998. Thanks to Wallen's influence, the Jamaica Project has recently focused heavily on rehabilitation and restorative justice in Jamaica. You can view a video of Wallen and Professor Nesson speaking about restorative justice in Jamaica on the Berkman website. Nesson remains heavily involved in the project. Two weeks ago he was in Jamaica, where he introduced the male prisoners of Tower Street Correctional Facility to Second Life and met with the female prisoners at Fort Augusta.

In the summer of 2007 the S.E.T. project was visited by Christina Xu, a Harvard student and media activist, who documented her experience (and managed to take photographs of the Tower Street computer lab) in two comprehensive posts. Xu has also advocated that S.E.T.'s relationship with the Berkman Center at Harvard University be made more explicit. Also during the summer of 2007 Wayne Marshall, an ethnomusicologist at Brandeis University and music producer with a strong interest in the Caribbean, led three audio production workshops at Tower Street, South Camp, and Fort Augusta correctional facilities. Larisa, an Oakland-based DJ and blogger, and Oliver Day, an internet researcher, also visited the three SET groups to help teach the inmates technical skills such as editing audio files with Audacity.

Today SET remains most active at Tower Street and Fort Augusta. As you can see in the video below, the SET group at Tower Street has been able to establish a stronger online presence because they currently have better computers than than the female participants at Fort Augusta. Every Wednesday the S.E.T group at Tower Street meets to discuss the issues affecting them. They also produce a one hour radio show beginning at 11:00 a.m. EST, which focuses on a particular topic. This week the inmates discussed the origins of anger and how it can be effectively controlled. Here is a two and a half minute excerpt from the program. You can tune into FreeFM radio, the group's 24 hour online radio station produced from within the prison, using iTunes or a similar audio program.

Last week, accompanied by Global Voices managing director, Georgia Popplewell, I was able to see the Prison Diaries project first-hand. My experience was not unlike that of Christina's - entering a maximum security prison can be a daunting process. However, once we reached SET's computer lab and were able to meet the participants first hand, I was immediately overcome by their kindness and dedication. Each of the participants introduced themselves and spoke a little about what SET has done for them. The time then came to go on air for the weekly radio program. During our visit, the group discussed issues of fatherhood. As it turns out, most of the inmates who are members of SET are also fathers. Fascinating insights were made about the expectations they had of their own fathers as children and the expectations they have set for themselves as fathers who are currently incarcerated.

At each Wednesday meeting the secretary of the group takes minutes of the agenda and the items that were discussed. Those minutes will now be posted each week on the Prison Diaries project blog. We will also do our best to post at least one podcast per month featuring excerpts from Free FM Radio.

Unfortunately, as you will see in the video below, we were not able to meet with the women prisoners at Fort Augusta, but you can follow some of the blog posts they have written on the Prison Diaries blog. Coming soon, all of these separate blogs will come together at prisondiaries.org. You can learn more about the Prison Diaries project by exploring around their website and reading through their press coverage.

Is social media actually changing the electoral landscape in emerging democracies like Armenia, Kenya, and Venezuela? Has the promise of an international, barrier-free, multilingual conversation finally become reality? Most importantly, where do we go from here? How do we encourage dialog in times of heated international debate? How do we bring new voices from new communities into the universe of web 2.0? And how do we protect their rights to free speech once they begin participating?

All of these questions will be discussed, debated, and digested at the 2008 Global Voices Summit in Budapest, Hungary on June 27 and 28. During the first session of day two, five representatives from Rising Voices will present their experiences - either as trainers or trainees - in citizen media outreach projects in Colombia, Bolivia, Madagascar, and Kenya. They are all working to extend the conversation taking place online via blogs, podcasts, and video- and photo-sharing sites to communities that have traditionally been ignored by both mainstream and new media.

Catalina Restrepo, an enthusiastic new blogger from Medellín, Colombia's peripheral La Loma community, will describe how a group of young library users in her small hilltop community have commanded the respect of local leaders and attracted the attention of regional and national media outlets after establishing a name for themselves using blogs, photographs, and short video documentaries. Restrepo will also describe how the group of young bloggers decided to come together and build a new house for the subject of one of their online video documentaries. You can read a translation of a recent post by Restrepo on the HiperBarrio project blog.

Collins Dennis Oduor, co-founder of REPACTED, will describe how new media tools can be combined with participatory street theater to encourage distinct groups of a local community to come together and peacefully discuss the most pressing and controversial topics. For Oduor's hometown of Nakuru, Kenya, those topics frequently include AIDS, poverty, and ethnicity. We will also learn about REPACTED's role in promoting peace during Kenya's post-election crisis earlier this year. You can read a Rising Voices interview with Oduor's colleague, Dennis Kimambo on the REPACTED website.

Cristina Quisbert, one of the most active participants (and now a trainer) of the Voces Bolivianas project in Bolivia, will explain how, in less than one year, she has managed to create an important online resource and space of conversation for anyone interested in topics related to indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Latin America, and around the world. In addition to maintaining her prolific Spanish-language blog, Quisbert has also begun writing in English. She presented at the We Media conference in Miami about the potential of blogging as a means of inclusion for indigenous communities in Bolivia.

Mialy Andriamananjara is one of three Malagasy coordinators of the FOKO Madagascar project. She will provide an overview of how diaspora communities can use online tools to promote social change in their home countries. Using Skype, video-chats, and translated tutorials, Andriamananjara helps coordinate the training of new bloggers and vloggers in Toamasina, Majunga, and Antananarivo. Herself a published writer of fiction, Andriamananjara was born and raised in Madagascar, but now lives with her family in Washington D.C. She blogs in English and French, and recently recorded the first performance of the Vagina Monlogues in Malagasy. You can see a brief video interview on Rising Voices.

The session will be moderated by Lova Rakotomalala and aims to outline a framework of best practices for overcoming the many obstacles that stand in the way of narrowing the online participation gap around the world. Stay tuned to the Summit 2008 website to learn how to participate in the discussion via IRC chat. Or, even better, join the ranks of hundreds of bloggers from around the world, and come to Budapest to discuss in person the cutting edge issues surrounding how the global village communicates in the 21st century.