| Founded | 2004, Berkman Center for Internet & Society |
|---|---|
| Area served | Global |
| Focus | Journalism |
| Website | globalvoicesonline.org |
Global Voices Online is an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists that follow, report, and summarizes what is going on in the blogosphere in every corner of the world. It is a non-profit website/project started by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, growing out of an international bloggers' meeting in December 2004, and is founded by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon. In 2008 it became an independent non-profit incorporated in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
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Its objectives are twofold: first, to enable and empower a community of "bridgebloggers" who "can make a bridge between two languages, or two cultures."[1]
It has a team of regional editors that aggregates and selects what it thinks are the interesting conversations going on in a diversity of blogospheres, ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, with a particular focus on non-Western and underrepresented voices. One might find on its homepage, for example, Congolese bloggers discussing the 2006 elections, or Jordanian and Arab bloggers responding to the 2005 Danish cartoons controversy.
Its second objective is to develop tools and resources that make achieving the first objective more effective. A primary resource is maintaining a close working relationship with the mainstream media that is mutually beneficial: the best way to amplify underrepresented voices is to have their story picked up and covered by the mainstream media. Global Voices thus sees itself in a supplementary rather than an oppositional role to the traditional press. Reuters, for example, has given Global Voices an unrestricted grant in January 2006.[2] Furthermore, as recognition for its contribution to innovation in journalism, Global Voices was granted the prestigious 2006 Knight-Batten Grand Prize.
In 2007, a project with the aim of translating Global Voices content from English into other languages was formed, with the name Project Lingua.[3] Project Lingua seeks to amplify Global Voices in languages other than English with the help of volunteer translators. There are currently 17 active translation sites and 12 BETA translations run as autonomous but linked communities.