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Photo by Neha Viswanathan

I have finally stopped dreaming about the Global Voices Summit. Every night my mind was filled with images of the people I spent the day with, probably mostly spurred by the pressures of keeping things running smoothly. They weren’t unpleasant dreams, but it’s really nice to have my brain to myself again.

This year’s Summit was actually three meetings in one.

There was a closed meeting for human rights activists and bloggers convened by our Advocacy arm; two public days that mostly resembled a conference of 200 people; and two closed days of meeting for Global Voices authors, editors, and translators. That’s five days for everyone who was there from beginning to end.

We started planning the Summit exactly one year ago, when I had just begun working at Global Voices. I was still so amazed by the way my new colleagues ran the whole project virtually and full of trust. I’d never been to a Global Voices Summit before, and didn’t quite know what to expect.

Step by step, we came closer to day, but even with the program in front of me, I still couldn’t imagine what it would be like.

Now that’s it’s over, I’m still struggling to find a good way to describe what I think is happening in this super cool movement (Ethan charmingly compares it to dancing with friends in the middle of the street). Rezwan has a great roundup of what other bloggers have been saying. And David lays out the challenges ahead.

Some amazing activists were there from more countries than anyone bothered to count. They were extremely practical, very brave and largely working in small online networks (connected to larger international ones). They were young, old, male, female, professional, or students, and extremely modest and friendly people. A number of participants had never been on an airplane before, while others have lived in at least a half a dozen different countries.

It’s a brand new field of global activism, and it feels like we are just beginning to map out the possibilities and bring it up to scale. For this group, there’s no real mention of ideology or party politics. They are for informed debate and freedom of expression, and they seem quite critical and suspicious of all authority. Most seemed to be there representing themselves as individuals as opposed to an organization or publication.

Operating largely in a framework of censorship makes it a different playing field than for most online activists in the US or Europe, but the lessons of their experiences are universal. In the session I moderated on citizen media and elections, Daudi Were from Kenya said something about the “Obamafication” of web politics after Kenyan politicians saw how much money Obama was raising online, but otherwise no one seemed to be looking to the United States for ideas on web activism.

I am sure some people will be surprised to hear the US is not regarded as a leader by this community (although many live and/or have worked there). I asked an Iranian activist, Hamid Tehrani, who was also on the election panel about it, and he even seemed to think the question was strange. The tools are global. Their application is locally informed. Luis Carlos Diaz joked that he had re-written the entire Venezuelan constitution on Twitter.

The Global Voices website is like a permanent infrastructure citizen media activists can use when really important stories break. Like when Burmese bloggers need to communicate with the world, or someone gets arrested for making a Facebook profile impersonating a prince. The news media know to come to us for more information. But the effect of the things we do day to day are more subtle. It’s about increasing dialogue and understanding between different people. Joi Ito calls it a solution to the “caring problem”.

And then he took a lot of pictures of everyone.

Oh, Global Voices

Rebecca starts her post-Summit reflections with an anecdote about a blogger at the Summit who was so moved he said, “Nationalism is dead for me now.” I still think the majority of volunteers with Global Voices are motivated by putting their native or adoptive country, language, or region on the map, but it’s true: extreme positions make less sense once you begin to listen openly to other points of view.

Here’s the first question she asks:

As this article that I wrote jointly with Ethan Zuckerman back in 2006 tries to explain, GV arose as an attempt to address badly skewed global information flows in which the voices of people from North America and Western Europe are disproportionately amplified in the global media. But now here’s the problem: the skewed flows aren’t just happening on a global scale, there are imbalances within countries, regions, and communities. So the question is: what is the best way to achieve a global media environment where everybody has the ability to speak and be heard? And is there also a way for people to find authenticity, relevance, and quality amidst the cacophony of cat-blogging and hidden agendas?

In our internal meetings it was pretty cool to hear developing world bloggers defend the idea of representing marginalized voices in the United States and Europe on Global Voices (we tend not to cover these regions). We are trying in so many different simultaneous way to create change through communication. We sometimes struggle to define regions and coverage areas on Global Voices.

Rebecca then asks:

Can GV come up with an innovative and equitable way to organize a global citizen media website without using the nation-state as its organizing principle?

(head spins)

I think this question is more narrow (and difficult to answer) than the ultimate question she asks at the end of her post, which is whether Global Voices will remain open and decentralized enough to enable people to keep changing things as we go along (more like Wikipedia; less like CNN). How can we make sure that Global Voices continues to serve the community as a springboard for innovation?

One of the major outcomes of the internal meeting was a decision to begin working together more across regions, and bring in bloggers from different backgrounds to discuss political, social, and cultural issues online and in real life. The number of bloggers is increasing everywhere, but they are still mostly not communicating with people from other countries. How do we build more bridges between more people? There are lots of topics were open dialogue is possible.

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of this.

We also talked about making it easier to contribute to Global Voices in any language. Our community favors translating from other languages into English as well as the other way around.

There were many other ideas and reflections. What I drew from our conversations is that we need to be light on our feet, and allow ourselves to change quickly enough to do what make sense in each particular situation. Are we too set in our ways? Are we enabling enough new ideas to surface? What is a lowly managing editor to do?

I don’t think we’re anywhere near irrelevant yet (!) but I do wonder as we grow bigger, what it will take for us to keep doing things as energetically and decentralized as we do. Global Voices is not just a website. Or a thing. But more like an experience, a community, and source of inspiration. One of the wonderful things about being involved, is that it really feels like the world is listening. We’ve already established that they are talking. Mainstream media definitely treats us a bit like an exotic laboratory that enables them to gaze into a future where the world is smaller, and more voices are heard. I think one of our proudest accomplishments is that we have become an incubator for these types of dreams.