Roughly a year ago we launched the first round of internal innovation grants, where we asked members of the GV community to submit proposals for projects or tools that enhance Global Voices’ work or mission.
As you’ll recall, project proposals by Tomomi, Bernardo, Juan and Claire were selected, by popular vote, to receive US$5,000 in funding from GV. In the end Claire decided not to go forward with her project so did not accept the grant funds. Claire would be happy to share the information she gathered as part of her preparations for “GV Goes Mobile” with anyone who’s interested in using or building upon it.
This e-mail is to update you on the current status of the three innovation grant projects and to let you know that we’ll be launching the 2013 round of innovation grants on March 1st. So now’s a good time to start mulling over ideas for projects you might want to propose.
Stay tuned for more information on the launch, and enjoy reading the project updates below!
—–
Cojiro, a cross-lingual curation tool (Tomomi Sasaki)
Project Description:
Our group is working on an open-source tool, “Cojiro”, designed to enable people with complementary skill sets to identify, group and convey stories in one language to a broader audience in another language. The tool is based on the idea that in order to effectively bridge language barriers, content should only be translated if there is an audience who will actually read it. To do this, Cojiro appeals to two key user groups to narrow the focus of translation: domain experts in the source language, whose knowledge of local contexts and specific areas is essential to uncovering and grouping interesting conversations, and readers in the target language, who can evaluate which of these conversations would be of interest to foreign audiences. Closing the feedback loop between these groups would make cross-lingual sharing and collaboration a much more seamless process — and, we believe, a much more interesting and exciting one. Prototype: http://beta.cojiro.jp/ (UN/PW: guest/brain) Software codebase: https://github.com/netalab/cojiro
Progress report:
Since we received the grant we’ve spent a lot of our energy on re-defining the challenges, distilling the service concept, and translating it into an intuitive web interface. The biggest challenge has been in figuring out how to balance the specific needs of the Global Voices community versus building a multilingual platform that is valuable in other contexts. Surveying digital projects with crosslingual components and exchanging opinions with other people working on multilingual projects has been exciting and informative.
At the same time, we’ve been building on the wide variety of technical skills required to build Cojiro. The prototype was great as a proof-of-concept, but being able to launch, maintain and actively develop a robust service is a whole new ballgame. Unfortunately, our most experienced developer left the project for personal reasons and this has slowed progress. We’re still a few months away from being able to test run the service with a closed group, so this is the next big goal!
I guess that in Cojiro’s case, the completion of work would be a public launch… we’re not quite there yet. It’s been uber difficult to find someone that has a) the domain knowledge and interest b) the technical skills and c) the free time, so a second round of funds might allow us to simply hire another developer outright for a few weeks/months.
Challenges/suggestions for future grant cycles:
The application and voting process was clear and fair. It might be fun to try video applications? Have people talk it out, rather than try to string together words to capture nebulous ideas. And the GV community is so big, it would be nice to put a face to a project. Also, it might be interesting to lay out specific challenges that advance GV’s mission and have people propose a hypothesis. Some of those challenges would be to nudge the GV publishing platform itself to be innovated upon. Chris and I would really like to see other tool-based projects, and that seems like one way to open up the discussion…!
I’m not sure how the other teams fared but we fell behind on our proposed schedule fairly quickly… it would have been okay to have a few project mandated milestones to report to the community. (‘Okay’, in the sense that reporting is usually a pain but it might have helped us be more disciplined.) We were a bit sad not to get any official feedback from the Summit for Cojiro or any of the other projects, after scrambling to put together a video. In hindsight, that may have influenced our communication volume.
See more Cojiro project updates at http://innovation.globalvoicesonline.org/category/grants/cojiro/.
—
GV Multimedia Publishing (Bernardo Parrella)
Project Description:
The main idea is to create a small, online, independent publishing platform by taking advantage of GV huge archive and its future production. We could select, re-package and disseminate our multimedia content according to topics, regions, issues, languages, media, etc. This platform could produce electronic books, dossier and specific publications in a variety of formats (pdf, html, odt, epub, mobipocket, etc.), containing a collection of the best posts/material, preceded by an ad hoc introduction or short essay(s) to provide the proper context. For example, we could create right away a “Global Voices 2011″ or an “Arab Spring Voices” ebooks including best posts on these topics already published on GV in several languages, enriching and adapting them accordingly. In time we can build a unique catalog focused on citizen and social media material to be distributed (under CC) on many occasions and in many venues — while also attracting new people interested in sharing their multimedia content (videos, pics, audio, etc.), on our platform.
Progress report:
After the launch of our dedicated website on May 30, GV Books (formerly known as GV Multimedia Publishing) published its first english ebook, “EU in crisis”, at the end of July, in three different formats (PDF, Mobipocket, ePub).
It was soon followed by Italian, Arabic, and Spanish editions, with Portuguese and French versions on their way — each of them in those three formats. “EU in Crisis” was a compilation of the 13 best posts from Spring 2011 to Summer 2012, selected from our special coverage on “Europe in
Crisis”, preceded by a general introduction.
In late December we published our second ebook, “African Voices of Hope and Change”. From a total of about 800 posts produced over the year about the Sub-Saharan Africa region, we hand-picked the 13 best posts and crafted a broader introduction. Given the larger scope of GV African coverage and issues, we decided to devote a specific ebook to the MENA region (scheduled for the end of January).
While I’m finding out how many times these files has actually been downloaded, our GV Books website received a total of almost 500 visits and plenty of positive feedback — even if currently we are not promoting this project beyond GVers and their extended social circles.
My plan is to push for more visibility and explore outside opportunities after we’ll have a few more original English titles, probably starting with the Internet Archive and similar non-profit venues.
A slower approach is also needed because the actual production process is more time-consuming and complicated than expected, given that our titles are not just plain text like most e-books around but require greater technical and editing attention (due to many links, pictures, language-specific issues, etc.).
The overall interest and involvement of many GVers at various level is very strong and we are definitely on the right path toward the creation of a broader e-catalog based on citizen media content.
GV Books Timeline:
– Award announcement on March 1st
– Agreement signed on March 28
– 1st installment ($ 2,500) received on May 15
– MailingList launch: April 15 (now 65 members)
– Website launch: May 30
– Ebook “EU in crisis” in english: Jul 24
> italian: Oct 24
> arabic: Nov 25
> spanish: Dec 13
> portuguese: final editing
> french: in translation
– Ebook “African voices…” in english: Dec. 19
> italian: in translation
> portuguese: in translation
See more project updates at http://innovation.globalvoicesonline.org/category/grants/multimedia-publishing/ and http://books.globalvoicesonline.org/.
—
Filming Our Posts (Juan Arellano)
Project Description:
The main idea is to create a small, online, independent publishing platform by taking advantage of GV huge archive and its future production. We could select, re-package and disseminate our multimedia content according to topics, regions, issues, languages, media, etc. This platform could produce electronic books, dossier and specific publications in a variety of formats (pdf, html, odt, epub, mobipocket, etc.), containing a collection of the best posts/material, preceded by an ad hoc introduction or short essay(s) to provide the proper context. For example, we could create right away a “Global Voices 2011″ or an “Arab Spring Voices” ebooks including best posts on these topics already published on GV in several languages, enriching and adapting them accordingly. In time we can build a unique catalog focused on citizen and social media material to be distributed (under CC) on many occasions and in many venues — while also attracting new people interested in sharing their multimedia content (videos, pics, audio, etc.), on our platform.
Progress report:
Due to some internal problems the project has had a low progress in 2012. Although we had the first video finished in july (for Summit) it was just in october that we could pay the video producer and upload the video in our own account.
A little update here: http://innovation.globalvoicesonline.org/2012/11/update-on-the-video-project/
We are now coordinating with various video producers. Some of of this coordinations come from december 2012.
Perú – A video on Lima city activists working on the historical heritage of the city. In production (The video producer is with a medical leave until this weekend, he had a surgery last days of december)
Bolivia – One video about Tipnis march in production
México – A video with Article19 on how to work on the dangers activits are because of the violence.(script on drafts)
Ecuador – We are waiting for the script to approve it. The subject will be the impact of #loxaesmas as a civic project.
Paraguay – Waiting response from one suggested producer. Also coordinating with others producers from Ecuador, and México.
A coordination session with Cati Restrepo to see the launch of the contest has been scheduled.
Challenges:
– (Internal challenge) The budget approval and other little administrative details took a bit more than expected and resulted in a delay in the start of the project.
– To find video independent producers has proved more complicated than expected. We found small enterprises engaged in video production and they were interested in the project but our established production budget was not enough for them.
– Captioning the videos didn’t went as fast as planned, but with the subtitlers community growing, we hope this delay will not recur again.
– The budget did not consider the banking cost of sending money to the producers, this will have to be coordinated with the administration.
Goals for the rest of the project:
– We have to work at becoming better known as project to attract more people engaged in the video production.
– Making any of the videos skip to mainstream media.
– Work with some ot he producers with the objective that some of the videos be done under a transmedia storytelling perspective.
See more project updates at http://innovation.globalvoicesonline.org/category/grants/filming-our-posts/