On my way to the Global Voices Delhi Summit

Two years ago this week, with the help of the Berkman Center and a little bit of funding, Ethan Zuckerman and I convened a small gathering of bloggers from around the world in a Harvard Law School classroom.  From it emerged the Global Voices Manifesto. Here it is in full:

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak -- and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we want to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak -- and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication. Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world.

We want to build bridges across the gulfs of culture and language that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We want to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.

We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond between individuals from different worlds is personal, political and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable - for all citizens of this planet.

While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also want to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one other.

We are Global Voices.

By the following summer, the blog that we had originally created as a discussion place for conference attendees had morphed into the Global Voices Online website: an edited aggregator of weblogs from all over the world except North America and Western Europe (the idea being that voices and views from N.America and W.Europe get disproportionate attention not only in the International media but on the global web).  The blogs we link to on the site are curated, contextualized and in some cases translated by our amazing group of regional editors and translators. Roughly one hundred volunteers from all over the world provide in-depth coverage of the discussions taking place in their own countries' blogospheres. Enough people seem to find it useful that we now have over one million visitors per month, and we recently won the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism.

At last year's summit in London, it was clear that Global Voices is much more than a citizens' media website or international bloggers' network. It is a community. And it is a movement of people who are united by the values of free speech, tolerance, dialogue, and inclusiveness articulated in the manifesto.

At this year's Delhi summit, we look forward to celebrating our accomplishments. Our closed meeting for editors and contributors on Sunday will get down to brass tacks on how to make the website better. Most of our public meeting on Saturday, however, will be devoted to a disscussion of the challenges our community wants to tackle in the coming years or two: How do we bring more people, not just wired elites, into the global discourse that is facilitated by the Internet? What kinds of technical tools need to be used, adapted or developed in order to bring the less-wealthy into the global conversation? How do we help people speak when their governments or other powerful groups don't want them to? How do we overcome language barriers? 

In order to tackle these challenges, Global Voices will need to become much more than a citizens' media organization. Over the coming year we hope to build teams devoted to outreach and free speech activism.  The Delhi meeting will be an important time to discuss how we want to focus our new outreach and activism efforts.

In 2007 we are hoping to raise sufficient funds to establish ourselves as an independent non-profit - which means that by 2008 if all goes as planned we will no longer be hosted by Harvard's Berkman Center and we will most likely not be "headquartered" in the U.S. (to the extent that we are headquartered anywhere as a virtual organization). In 2007 Ethan and I, as co-founders, also hope to step onto the sidelines as much as possible. It is not appropriate for the two of us to be leading Global Voices in the long term. It is time for others - people from the communities that Global Voices has sought to amplify - to step forward and take the lead in deciding the future of Global Voices.

(If you're not able to join us in person, Saturday's discussion will have a live audio webcast and we will also have real-time online chat so that you can share your ideas or ask questions. More information on how to join is here and here.)

Comments

[nicole]

Rebecca is a self-rightous woman. She acts like a martyr for her cause. She never really understands the essence of Chinese culture although she may speak good Chinese. I hope she can cut back on her American former bureau chief mannerism, acts more humble and really listens and learns from the people that she may think less smarter than she is.