This year’s 2010 Global Voices Summit will take place on May 6 and 7 in Santiago, Chile. If you would like to attend you can register here. Solana, Georgia, Ivan and I have been so busy working on the fundraising, agenda, and logistics that we haven’t done a very good job promoting the conference itself or the topics that we’ll be discussing. We realize that the best discussions tend to arise organically (a lesson which was reinforced this weekend at Transparency Camp, which had no agenda at all but was one of the best events I’ve been to in a while), and so we’ve left a considerable portion of the two-day agenda open for anyone to organize workshops and open discussions. But we also hope to facilitate a few specific discussions.
Over the past five years of Global Voices we have heard over and over again that “citizen media is just a fad,” that “blogging will surely come to an end.” We tried not to enter the debate. We kept our heads down and worked hard. But to be honest, we weren’t sure if we’d be around for another year or not. At our last Global Voices Summit in Budapest, Hungary we hired Ivan Sigal as our executive director. We have grown considerably since then, launching several new projects including RuNet Echo, Threatened Voices, the Translation Exchange research project, the Breaking Borders Award, and the Technology for Transparency Network. We have developed new revenue sources and our content partnerships with organizations like La Stampa, the BBC, Reuters, and the New York Times have helped secure our influence on the coverage of mainstream media.
There is no longer a question of whether or not Global Voices will be around in two or three years. Rather the question is, How does Global Voices add value in a constantly evolving media ecosystem? Nor is there longer any doubt whether an increasing number of citizens will continue to contribute their observations, opinions, and reflections to the real-time web. But how do we measure the impact of those contributions? How can we replicate the strategies of successful projects, learn from the failures of others, safeguard the openness of the web, and continue to build bridges over the various crevasses that separate us online?
Here we are, nearing the middle of 2010, and we are less concerned now with how citizen media will develop than how it will sustain and what lasting impact it will have on our global society. We are preparing the following discussions with the help of some outstanding speakers:
I am going to try a bit of an experiment. We have five weeks leading up to the Global Voices Summit and I’m hoping that each of those five weeks we can organize a blog-based discussion about one of the above topics. If you would like to start the discussion yourself then just select one of the topics, write your thoughts, and tag five other people who you’d like to see continue the discussion. I’ll try this myself with a separate post about measuring and evaluating the impact of citizen media.
Before signing off I should mention that I’m making this whole GV Summit business sound awfully serious when it’s really anything but:
The real point is to have fun. Our volunteer authors and translators certainly deserve it after years of such hard work to make Global Voices what it is today. But between the drinking, dancing, and exploring Santiago, we’re sure to also have some very interesting discussions.
David Sasaki is the Director of Rising Voices, a global citizen media outreach initiative of Global Voices Online.
He manages a portfolio of small-scale projects around the developing world that use citizen media to effect social change.
Prior to his current focus on outreach, he served as Global Voices’
Latin America Regional Editor, monitoring the Latin American blogosphere, highlighting key content and translating select posts from Spanish to English.
Sasaki transitioned into online journalism after working as a freelance
web developer and English instructor in Monterrey, Mexico. He now splits his time and residence between North and Latin America and writes frequently at Rising Voices, Online. He manages a portfolio of small-scale projects around the developing world that use citizen media to effect social change.
Prior to his current focus on outreach, he served as Global Voices’
Latin America Regional Editor, monitoring the Latin American blogosphere, highlighting key content and translating select posts from Spanish to English.
