Wow. Global Voices Online, our daylong international bloggers' workshop held as part of the Berkman Center's Internet & Society conference, was a stunning success. Special thanks to my brilliant colleague Ethan Zuckerman and the collective brilliance of the assembled bloggers and technologists from all over the world. I didn't have time to blog the sessions as they went along, but plenty of others did. They included David Weinberger, "j", Jeff Jarvis, Jeff Ooi, Isaac Mao (in Chinese), Alex Steffen, John Lebkowsky (participating remotely via IRC), Matt of "Blackfive", Tim Oren and many others... according to Technorati and Feedster.
"Global Voices" is now the name of a new movement. As Ethan says in his summary of our next steps: "We’re all in this together, and something big is happening."
This is a movement of global cyber-citizens. We are developing a manifesto, which includes the following core beliefs and goals:
1) we believe in free speech – and act to defend it and extend it
2) we believe in direct connection between people in ways which allow us to consider ourselves part of a bigger here and wider us – and we act to bring flows of tools, money and attention to bear on creating channels for those connections to develop
3) we believe in planetary citizenship along international norms – and we act to empower campaigns to make the world fairer, freer, more prosperous and more sustainable.
Saturday's meeting included people from a broad political spectrum. I hope the Global Voices movement will remain broad and inclusive. Occasionally there were disagreements. But one thing was very clear: neither left nor right has a monopoly on the desire for free speech and a more open, global citizens' dialogue. As Ethan says, we're all in this together.
So if these values speak to you and if you think you'd have something to contribute, check out the Global Voices blog for more details.