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.

Written with attitude, humor and at times a sense of horror at the mess we humans can make, the site provides one stop shopping for those who enjoy everything from Beyonce to Barack, from the serious to the celebrity.

On any given day, Williams will post an item and links on subjects ranging from an historical overview of the racially awkward comments made by Sen. Joe Biden to the fact that Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps listens to rapper Lil Wayne before he competes.

Some of the most interesting posts are triggered by breaking news, such as after the acquittal of the police officers who shot an unarmed groom on the eve his wedding. That afternoon Williams posted a link to the University of Chicago's Stereotyping and Prejudice Research Laboratory that where you can assess whom you would shoot and how quickly you would shoot them according to their race.

Below Lauren Williams describes her work in her own words.

How would you describe your blog?

Stereohyped is a black-interest blog where visitors can get politics, current events, entertainment, and celebrity gossip all in one place. Depending on a news cycle, some days it will look like a gossip blog and some days it will look like a political blog, but I generally try to stay in the center on the Barack and Beyonce spectrum.

Who is your audience?

When Stereohyped started, I thought the audience would be made up of 20- or 30-something black professional women. I was right, for the most part, but I never could have guessed that beyond the core demographic, Stereohyped would attract so many different readers of all ages, ethnicities, races, and nationalities. The audience is definitely a mixing bowl, and I love that there is a wide variety of perspectives in the comment section.

What are your goals?

Stereohyped is still relatively young in the blog world, and my goals are simple. I would like to see the site continue to grow, attract more readers, and maybe inform a few people and change a few minds along the way.

What are you proudest of?

Before Stereohyped launched, I was very worried that my voice, my style, and the topics that interested me were not going to appeal to a significant number of readers. I was pretty sure that I would eventually have to compromise my vision in some way in order to increase readership and make myself more appealing to a wide range of readers. That hasn't happened. I'm proud that I've been able to remain true to myself and build a steady, loyal readership at the same time.

What is your background?

I have a Masters degree in Magazine, Newspaper, and Online Journalism from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, and I began my career as a newspaper reporter at the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. After a year on the education beat, I decided that traditional journalism wasn't for me and began a switch to the online world that would eventually lead me to Stereohyped.

Do you think of yourself as a journalist?

Yes. Is what I do for a living journalism? Sometimes. For better or worse, bloggers are not governed by the same stringent ethical guidelines as traditional journalists, and there is a much higher premium placed on entertaining readers. This results in a lot of bad information floating through the blogosphere -- bad information that mainstream journalists sometimes pick up! Having a journalism background helps me to wade through this, and if I'm knowingly posting an unsubstantiated rumor I'll label it as such. But just like a columnist at a daily, I'm in the information gathering and delivery business, with a dose of personal opinion thrown in. My methods are different -- although I do some traditional reporting for the blog occasionally -- but the general objective is the same.

Where do you see the future of journalism?

Online, all the way. Sadly, I don't think that traditional print journalism will be able to stay afloat as people turn to the internet for their information more and more. And even though a lot of traditional journalists hate blogs and bloggers, I think the two warring groups have begun to forge a symbiotic relationship that will continue to grow. At this point, the younger generation of journalists probably read -- and get their enterprise ideas -- from blogs just as much as bloggers read and get their ideas from newspapers and magazines.

What blogs do you read?

Too many to list! For the fluff, I read all of the major black (and "mainstream," for that matter) gossip blogs. For the substance, I like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, as well was black political blogs like Jack & Jill Politics. There is a proliferation of style blogs out there that are geared toward blacks that I find pretty addictive, like Shake Your Beauty (full disclosure: my sister writes it), Afrobella, and The Fashion Bomb. Really, I could go on for hours. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of hundreds of blogs covering all different topics. I'm definitely a blog junkie.

How do you get your news?

I get my news from a variety of sources, but the big three are tips from readers, online newspapers and news magazines, and other blogs. I write about 14-15 posts a day, and when I'm not actually writing, I'm scouring the web for news stories and inspiration for original features.

What do you think about the power of the black blogosphere?

It can't be denied! A hallmark moment happened last year with the Jena Six. Before most newspapers even made mention that anything was going on, entire blogs were devoted to this particular cause. The mainstream media would have never taken notice if it weren't for the serious coverage the case was getting on black blogs. The black blogosphere was instrumental in calling attention to the issue and effecting change in the case.

Even though its 2008, it is still a struggle to get "black" topics -- ranging from criminal justice to entertainment -- covered with any sort of regularity or depth in the media. The black blogosphere not only balances that out, it also serves as a constant reminder to journalists that these things are happening in the black community, and people are hungry for consistent information. I'm not talking about the occasional, lazily-reported piece, for which the reporter camped outside of the local black church and area beauty parlors and barber shops for quotes. These annoy me to no end. Do you know why? I don't go to church, and I do my own hair. For that matter, I don't have an absentee father, I don't know anyone who is in jail, and I went to college and graduate school. Most of the people I know are like me. There's a larger community out there than is portrayed on cable news, in the papers, and even on television and in movies. I like to think that the black blogosphere is a microcosm of that larger community.

The difference came when you looked at how those stories were covered on the web compared to the "traditional mainstream" media. In the end, that was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the controversies because it was illustrative of the pros and cons of both forms of media.

While some in the "mainstream" media struggled with how to characterize Jesse Jackson's off-camera and ill-advised remarks to a fellow panelist during a taping at the Fox News Channel, bloggers and members of listservs immediately began debating whether the remarks signaled, or should signal, a generational shift.

To its credit, The New York Times did tackle the issue of the shifting political landscape in the African American community. Yet, in a move that called into question the piece's credibility, the reporter chose not to quote any African American sources on the subject, opting instead to rely on the expertise of failed presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale's presidential campaign manager and a white professor from Emory University.

The last assured us that harsh words from Jesse Jackson would in no way cause the African American community to turn its back on Obama and then went on to recount an anecdote that left you wondering what it had to do with the Jackson-Obama flap.
"He recalled being in a restaurant in Georgia that was giving away tickets to an Obama event recently; 50 people, most of them African-American, were still standing in line even though the tickets were all gone," The Times told us.

Over on the web, the response, if you knew where to look, gave much greater insight into what people in the African American community were actually thinking. " The 32-year-old blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this on his blog:

My Dad is gonna kill me. But here's Jesse -- on Fox News no less -- telling some other dude that he'd like to cut Obama's nuts out. Nice. I'm not even sure this hurts Obama in anyway. Even Jesse's own son condemned him. There is a certain strain of the civil-rights era that really just needs to have a Jack and Coke and call it a day. It's not that we aren't grateful. We so really are. But this is getting embarrassing...

Both accounts agree that Obama was not hurt by Jackson's remarks. However, it struck me that reading the mainstream media was sometimes like eavesdropping on a conversation strangers were having about you while reading the web was very much like having an important conversation that you are fairly certain no one else is bothering to listen to.

Neither provides the public with the entirety of the information it needs to understand what's at stake and to make informed decisions. And both remind you of how disengaged we can be from each other in this country.

It was that disconnect that the New Yorker got caught up in when it attempted to take on some of the erroneous ideas people have about the Obamas. The problem, as many pointed out, is that it's very difficult to satirize a community you don't have much contact with.

With newspaper and broadcast staffs still between 75 and 85 percent white and the country's population a little over 30 percent people of color, it's not a surprise that there is a disconnect between the journalists and those they cover. Nor is it a surprise that people of color are using the web to create a more robust and nuanced conversation. The trick is going to be in finding a way to bring our separate conversations together, no matter the medium.

Alyssa decided to try something to counter what she felt was the toxic cultural impact of the "See Something, Say Something" campaign. She recognized that she couldn't eliminate that campaign entirely, because people do want to be vigilant against possible acts of terrorism. But they could also understand strength and security in their communities a different way--as a matter of people taking care of each other, even as strangers. She decided to invite people to start looking for acts of heroism, generosity and civic engagement, however small or fleeting they might seem.

Her "Hero Reports" project (http://heroreports.org) has since won the attention of John Hockenberry's "The Takeaway" morning public radio program, and may be replicated in other cities. Here is how it works: anyone can go to her website or text message her in order to fill out a very brief form citing an act of courage, selflessness or special courtesy they have witnessed or experienced. It can be "challenging a racist stereotype, providing a stranger's bus fare, helping a disabled person across the street, assisting someone in difficulty," Alyssa says. She counts even small "acts of community" as heroic. The forms collect information about the date, time, place and description of the hero report. She is gleaning some of them from first-person accounts, and some from news media accounts. She hopes to collect at least 1,944 reports to match the number of suspicion reports under the See Something, Say Something MTA campaign.

At the end of the summer, Alyssa will present a collection of her Hero Reports to the New York MTA. She also is mapping the reports on her website, so that New Yorkers can see their security in a new way, as a series of places where acts of civic heroism--rather than crimes, which are so often plotted on these news maps--have taken place.

Alyssa's challenge was to design, build and operate the interfaces, website and database. She wanted it to look like the MTA's advertisements. Anyone who wants to contribute a report should do so soon--and if anyone wants to give feedback to Alyssa about the project, she is at apw217@mit.edu

The participants of Media Mobilizing Project and Juntos's Immigrant and Low-Wage worker video project have finished their first batch of videos. The videos tell a wide array of stories focusing on health in the community, discrimination against immigrants, the role of unions in protecting immigrant workers and community outreach.

As a reminder, the project is threefold. Through Our City Our Voices we: 1) offer video and web workshops to immigrants, 2) we teamed with the city of Philadelphia to get participants both computers as well as Internet access and 3) we are in the process of creating an online portal (drupal based) which is a home setting for these learners to post their videos but also to discuss their life experiences.

Please check out the first video Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers. To see the rest of the videos go to our provisional website.
We are having a screening of the first 6 videos this weekend and our excited as we begin to see this process unfold.

While we have completed two series of workshops thus far, this summer we have two workshops planned, one for Spanish speaking youth and another for English speaking youth and two more courses planned for the fall.

Several things about that process convinced me that the tide has turned, both for our organization and for online news:

• I've been explicit with our candidates about the risks involved. We're a start-up, and it's possible that our grant funding will go away within a year. More than one candidate has told me that, given the state of our industry, he considers working for us LESS risky than taking a job with a daily newspaper.

• More than half of the applicants for this position were journalists of color. This absolutely stunned me, but I suppose it makes sense. Given our business model, and the massive network of citizen journalists that we're building, it's clear that we're a different kind of news organization that's open to new stories and new voices.

• We're attracting applicants that are shockingly qualified. Yesterday, I had the somewhat embarrassing task of running a former New York Times editor through a tryout on our desk. Frankly, I'd consider myself lucky to take dictation for some of these candidates, let alone supervise them.

The fact that we're attracting this caliber of applicant is great for us, but should be concerning to editors at newspapers. As papers shed jobs and stumble forward with little in the way of mission or business plan, the brightest talent will migrate to the online competition.

The current problem of massive layoffs in the newspaper industry is a repeat of a similar issue over twenty years ago. But this time, the outrage is louder since it is affecting journalists themselves, and not the press operators. The last time, increased press automation and computer layout tools starting in the late 70's rendered the jobs of many press operators obsolete. Deaf people no longer work in the news industry in any real numbers. This crisis also affected their publication activities. Most Deaf newspapers have long since folded. Silent News managed to limp along until 2001.

The traditional separation of reporters from society could not be more starkly illustrated in the gap between these two classes in the newsroom and the pressroom. Reporters were highly educated, socially connected and 'elite'. In contrast, the working-class pressroom was largely staffed by a group of non-speaking Deaf who were given the very un-politically correct term 'dumb'. Such disparagement reveals both their lack of standing in society, and the gap between the two groups.

Despite this label, the press operators worked hard as the backbone of the news industry and attempted to apply their news knowledge to their own community. This division can be seen as a stark model of how isolated the journalism industry was to the community at large. For despite being one of the groups closest to the newsroom, Deaf people never really gained the full benefits of that knowledge.

Rebooting the connection

With Internet media, the activity of psychical publishing is no longer required. So the Deaf are now pretty much starting from scratch, trying to gain a foothold in this world despite being part of the so-called 'digital divide'. Groups that have been marginalized before now have opportunities to share in the creation of news as never before. Yet we still face new and different challenges in eliminating barriers.

A similar attempt to provide barrier-eliminating opportunities, but on a global scale, can be seen in the Rising Voices project. I am looking at many similar issues as the ones David Sasaki noted in his excellent post Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation. The aims and points are similar but instead of looking at the level of exclusion on a global scale, I am looking at exclusion that is happening even in the 'first world'. How do we aim to include a marginalized group like the Deaf?

The answers to this are primarily similar to most marginalized groups. The overall methods that Rising Voices uses will be useful even in the 'first world'. But each type of group is different and has different needs. Deaf people are just a little more unusual than most.

What divides Deaf people from the rest of society is of course communication and language. The Deaf have two distinct issues related to communication that are different from other linguistic groups. Many linguistic groups in the United States do have publications in their own language. This provides a level of comfort and unity for these groups. But even so they eventually learn English and are assimilated into the majority English-speaking society. But Deaf people don't hear the language. This barrier prevents assimilation, and prevents many from feeling completely comfortable using spoken and written English. Its important to note that written English is still a subset of a spoken language, so the barrier still exists even when printed. This means the use of their primary language becomes even more important as a tool to communicate. But their primary language, American Sign Language, is a visual language with no written equivalent.

This raises a number of issues. Considering that the primary method of Internet communication is through writing, many of the basic publication tools become unacceptable to use. The rise of Internet video is now presenting the perfect opportunity for sign language communication. A large part of what I wish to do is to look at how to effectively use such video for this purpose. How do you effectively create such video in a grassroots manner as the sole basis of community news? Thats not a quick thing to answer, so I'll be exploring more of that in future posts.

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.

'We want you to become the CNN for the Base of the Pyramid,' is what we say.

They start to share stories about how their own local papers only cover road accidents and photo ops of politicians. They come up with their own questions that the local media should answer but fails to (who is responsible for the lack of electricity in their area? Have the politicians fulfilled their election promises from last year?) They get out rulers and measure the column width given to the different 'beats'--how much space does health coverage get, compared to celebrity coverage. As training progresses, they will start each day by analyzing today's paper. In this way, the Community Video Producers begin their transformation into media activists.

The Community Producers, at the moment, produce exclusively for a local audience--100-400 people a night who gather in the center of the village to watch the film and discuss what they will do about the issue. But their political perspective--on the politics and economics of the global media--is national. And they just had a small victory.

They are going to be producing for CNN IBN, one of the three leading English language 24 hour news stations in India.

For the next three Saturdays, at 9pm, the Community Producers will have a short segment in a half-hour show called 'Citizens Journalist.' The first story will be a general report on our work. The next two stories will be on garbage and sexual harrassment. Each CNN IBN segment that we do will revisit an issue the Community Video Unit has already made a film about, and will give another demand to the authorities to do something about the problem.

I learned a few things, both about our model of community video, and about the mainstream media, in working out this deal:

Sustainability: CNN IBN is going to pay us Rs. 5,000 for each story ($125). If we can work very efficiently, this can be a break even project for the Community Video Unit ('CVU.') That's a first goal -- to be efficient and break even on new projects they undertake. We talk about a 'media industry at the base of the pyramid' as our big goal. Obviously it needs to be sustainable. but the question is how? I guess not making a loss is a first step, but we need help getting to the next level. How do the CVUs make a profit, so they can expand their number of Producers, raise salaries, get new equipment, serve more people?
A 'Social Media Network' for the base of the pyramid: we designed our model of Community Video with the idea of reaching scale. We aim to partner with 30 NGOs in five years, to train more than 200 Producers, and thereby create a media-producing 'Network' that is at least as large (in terms of number of full-time videojournalists employed) as a single Indian national news Network. Our 'Network' of NGOs and Community Producers is tentatively called 'Channel 19' (see www.ch19.org, though we may need a new name soon.) We were thrilled that CNN IBN has agreed to describe the Producers as part of the Channel 19 Network, and also that our NGO partners have agreed to this experiment in collective identity. For us, this is a chance to test out a hypothesis we have: the TV media has hardly any stories about the poor, that show the situation from their point of view. But yet, there is a lot of social documentary material and social issue content out there. Maybe the solution is this: producers of pro-poor media content need to be networked together, to increase their visibility and lobbying power. CNN IBN is giving us a chance to test out that idea
The poor as Producers as content, not just victimized subjects: over the past two years, we've approached maybe a dozen TV stations asking for collaboration. All of them would say, 'we'd love to do a story ON the Community Producers, but we can't air a story BY them. What quality will the story have? What does our audience care about a bunch of villagers? Who wants to hear more stories about poverty and human rights problems?' CNN IBN was the first one to agree that the Producers could MAKE the program. I think this may be one of the first times (in India at least) where the poor have been paid to produce for a leading television station.

CNN IBN is giving us our first step in becoming the "CNN of the base of the pyramid."

This blog, in particular, would be a great place to address the question of, 'the poor as producers and not just subjects of the news." For me and my colleagues, WHO produces the news, is as important as what is being said. So, as long as leaders in the field of democratizing the media remain exclusively English-speaking, Western (or Westernized), middle class and urban, how much change can we really make?

Here is a video on Channel 19 on garbage in Mumbai slums. This is a five minute version of a half hour film made by the Community Video Unit at Yuva, and it's the first story that is going to be redone for CNN IBN.

There are a couple of great opportunities coming up where we'll be able to present the Freedom Fone concept to others and get feedback about development and implementation. In September we will be attending the International Media Support conference in Copenhagen. The theme of this gathering is New Media and Networked Communications Environments: Opportunities and Threats for Press Freedom and Democratization. Closer to home, in October, hopefully we'll be participating in the MobileActive workshop in Johannesburg. It's all thanks to the MobileActive gathering in Toronto in 2005 that the idea of Freedom Fone came to be.

In the meantime in the midst of being involved in spectacularly weird elections, an economy in nose dive and visits to fellow human rights defenders illegally detained, we're still very excited about progressing Freedom Fone. Life in a failed state certainly isn't boring.

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.

As part of the Next Newsroom Project, I've been exploring several core questions about the structure of news organizations, both physical and operational. One of those central questions is this: What is the ideal relationship between a newsroom and its community?

One of the exciting things about the era we're entering is that there are much wider range of options to consider when addressing this question. We're moving away from the traditional broadcast model where information flowed in one direction from the newsroom to the community. It's clear that the community should be placed at the center of a news operation, rather than at the edges. The important question now: How?

This past weekend, as part of my day job at the San Jose Mercury News, we took a stab at that question by holding our first CopyCamp. What is CopyCamp? You can get the full background here from the idea's author, David Cohn, who now has his hands full with his Knight project, Spot.Us.

But here's the concept in a nutshell: Invite members of the community into the newsroom for an unconference to have a conversation about our news coverage. In our case, we decided to focus this particular CopyCamp on issues related to our coverage of race and demographics, one of the core stories at the Mercury News (the other being technology, of course).

Dave brought this concept to us last fall and it immediately struck us as a good idea. After postponing once, we set this past weekend as the date. Dave created a wiki for folks to register. I recruited a bunch of folks from the newsroom to participate. And together, we spent several weeks inviting sources and members of the community.

When the day finally rolled around, the timing probably couldn't have been worse. Management surprised us a few days before by announcing another round of layoffs. For those keeping score, it's the seventh round of layoffs or buyouts at the Merc since 2001. Newsroom tally is now down from 420 at the peak to 155.

Despite the gloom, the newsroom folks (reporters, editors, designers, columnists) were still eager for the event to go forward. I think it's important to note that while I hear a lot of criticism outside our walls about journalists being stodgy and unwilling to embrace change, that's not my experience at the Merc. What I see is a lot of folks looking for answers, and willing to try just about anything.

In that spirit, we had 10 folks from the newsroom attend last Saturday (unpaid) for the five-hour session. We had 28 folks from the community come, representing a diverse range of communities and ethnic backgrounds.

We kicked off the day with Dave and I explaining the format: People there would be proposing topics for discussion. Several folks did, and we broke into three groups for hour-long discussions. We ate lunch, and then reconvened in a circle to get reports from each group. And then I tried to lead a discussion on next steps we could take together, both the community and the newsroom.

Dave has a great post here about What worked and What Could Be Improved. And I agree with his overall analysis.

The good: Community members were clearly happy to be asked to be there. They were enthusiastic and passionate. Despite everything that's happened in recent years, it seems clear we still matter in their lives. Reporters listened and engaged in a mostly constructive back and forth.

What could be better: Me. Or rather, the moderator. There were times when the conversations got stuck, or repetitive. There's the tempation for folks outside the Merc to talk about all the things we don't do, or that they wished we would do. And it's easy for newsroom folks to want to explain why we don't do those things, or how hard it is.

Both are true. Most reporters wouldn't dispute that. The thing is, even when we had 420 people in the newsroom, we felt there were a lot of things we were missing. It's more the case now. The problem is endemic, no matter the size of the newsroom.

Still, Dave was right: It would have really helped to have a professional moderator to help move those conversations toward the underlying question: How do we change this dynamic?

I don't think we solved that. But our afternoon session generated some substantive ideas, including creating a network of community representatives to contribute information and hold continued copycamp-style meetings out in the community with readers. Most important: community members were eager to remain engaged in the conversation as long as the Merc was willing to take their ideas seriously.

What's next: I'll meet next week with newsroom folks to go over the idea list, and then take them to management to figure out what the paper will commit to doing. Having the community behind us will help make the case (I hope).

My takeaway: CopyCamp is a great concept. Too often, when newsrooms think about how to redefine their relationship with their community, they default to some online product or digital gimmick. There's certainly a wealth of opportunities to do that. But in the end, nothing beats sitting in a room with those people, building bonds, and having an open-ended conversation about how to re-imagine the relationship between the newsroom and the community.

Worst case, you build some morale and solid sources. Best case: By working together, you ignite a spark of innovation that puts the newsroom on a new path.

For other takes on CopyCamp:

Follow the Twitter conversation here.

Rob Knight, who attended, writes: CopyCamp was Awesome.

And Chris Amico shared his thoughts and a video here.

Finally, if you're interested in joining an ongoing discussion about race and demographics with folks at the Mercury News, check out the Ning site we set up for the event: Majority of None.

McLarin does not base her argument on the fact that a Princeton and Harvard University graduate, married to a man with the political savvy to come from behind to be the presumptive Democratic nominee, is not likely to be guilty of such a political misstep. Nor does she argue that someone who has spent decades of her life navigating the racial fault lines is not likely to step on a cultural landmine by spewing racial epitaphs.

Her argument is more basic, at least to many African Americans.

"When the hell was the last time you heard a black person call somebody 'whitey?'" she asks, before pointing out that despite what the rumor implies, African Americans just don't have a large and widely agreed on vocabulary of names used to disparage white people. The exception, as has been pointed out, can be found in old media from the late 1960s and 1970s, such as "The Jeffersons."

Given, as I have repeatedly pointed out, we continue to live in a largely segregated society and our online habits seem to be only driving us deeper into our niches, it's not surprising that behavior seen on an old sitcom could be used to fuel a rumor meant to torpedo a current day presidential candidate.

I thought about this at the Knight News Challenge Conference a few weeks ago when Jay Rosen was talking about The Daily Me versus The Daily Us. The Daily Us would presumably give us insight into our shared problems and shared dreams. Sitting in a room so far from my neighborhood, a place where for some the only work available is filling your shopping cart up with cans and bottles fished out of the trash cans, I wondered, really wondered, if we know enough about each other to even have an idea of what our separate dreams and problems might look like, let alone be a point where we consider those dreams and problems shared.

Despite talk of the digital divide, the Internet, where it's free to post, as long as you have the time and a computer, is supposed to be the great equalizer, the place where your we can learn about each other's dreams and problems.

The difficulty is that we have to actually be curious enough to surf for those sites that will provide a glimpse into the worlds and thoughts of our neighbors. It's obvious from my posts that I don't think enough of us, including myself, take the time.

Today, instead of complaining, or hectoring, or otherwise pointing out our shared failures, I'm going to list a number of sites I enjoy. And, in the weeks to come, I will be posting interviews with the bloggers from those sites. My hope is that as I introduce you to new sites and new bloggers, you will return the favor. Because, whether we acknowledge it or not, I do believe one of our shared problems is our continued ignorance about how we live, and, clearly, about how we talk.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Stereohyped

Angry Asian Man

Too Sense, Race, Politics and Hip-Hop

Racialicious

Jack & Jill Politics

There are more, but that gives you a start.

David Cohn, who writes below about the interesting issue of whether audience-funded journalism would work better for beats or stories, explained the contours of his nascent project, while a consultant, journalists for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Fog City Journal, and yours truly pitched in with thoughts about where this whole citizen journalism business is going.

My contribution consisted of the observations that traditional newsrooms are becoming more and more disconnected from real people's lives, thanks to newspaper chain budget cuts, while people are becoming increasingly connected to each other, and to alternative news sources, thanks to the Internet and social networks. That random acts of journalism (a term I coined a few years back) need to be supplemented by sustained and deeper examples of journalism at the community level. That Digg-style crowdsourcing overly relies on mainstream media sources rather than original grassroots reporting. And that efforts like Spot.us, where citizens fund stories at the community level, are important experiments that bear watching -- and, more importantly, sustained support.

But what made the evening memorable was that these folks clearly got it. They didn't need to be convinced that corporate budget cuts were hurting journalistic coverage at the local level, or that certain kinds of stories weren't being covered because they fell outside the accepted frame of standard news conventions. They didn't need to be persuaded of the value of neighborhood storytelling. Instead, they asked tough, informed questions about the marketplace business model, mulled issues around fact-checking, editing and reputation, and suggested a revenue-sharing model to share freelance fees with the spot.us community.

Two days later, PBS's NewsHour ran a segment on the rise of independent nonprofit journalism, citing such efforts as Pro Publica ,the Center for Investigative Reporting, American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop, the Global News, with correspondents in 53 countries, and the Center for Independent Media.

Something is beginning to stir. And I think it will have lasting consequences for us as a society.