Indeed: thanks to a broader community effort, our first ebook, EU in Crisis, in now available also in Italian and in Arabic — in the usual three formats (PDF, mobipocket, ePub). The Spanish version is coming soon, while Portuguese and French translators are quickly catching up.
In early December we plan to release our second English ebook: “African voices of hope and change” — keep an eye on our dedicated GV Books website. Muchas gracias everybody for making this project flourish!
With the appropriate apologies for not updating in months on this project, let me inform you. The most striking is that our first video has already been published, with English subtitles and everything, and it was part of a post on Global Voices in Spanish: Colombia: The “Lleras Law” and Content Creation
We are also pleased to announce that we have a blog: VideoActivo, where we are starting to post on topics related to video, such as advices, tips, contests and of course, our own videos also have a place there.
Additionally, we have created a YouTube channel, a Twitter account and a Facebook page. With all these tools we hope to bring together a community of people working with video in the region. More soon!
Con las disculpas del caso por no haber actualizado en meses acerca de este proyecto, paso a informarles. Lo más saltante es que nuestro primer video ya fue publicado, con subtítulos en inglés y todo, y fue parte de un post de Global Voices en español: Colombia: La Ley Lleras y la creación de contenido.
También nos place comunicarles que ya tenemos blog: VideoActivo, donde estamos empezando a postear sobre temas relacionados al video, tales como consejos, tips, convocatorias a concursos y claro, nuestros propios videos también tienen un lugar ahí.
Adicionalmente hemos creado un canal en YouTube, una cuenta en Twitter y una página en Facebook. Con todas estas herramientas esperamos reunir una comunidad de gente que trabaje con el video en la región.
Another update to let everybody know that the Global Voices first e-book is ready (since early August 2012): EU in crisis, a collection of best material hand-picked from the on-going special coverage provided by our International team of dedicated citizen-reporters. Now you can download our ebook it in three different formats:
– PDF (3,2 MB)
– ePub (3,2 MB)
– Mobipocket (2,8 MB)
More details on our GV Books webspace, which is the final development of the initial “GV multimedia publishing project” supported by this GV Innovation Awards. See you there!
As promised, here is our e-books webspace, devoted to the GV multimedia publishing project detailed earlier. Please get involved, post comments, and subscribe to the related mailing list! The plan is to develop this collaborative space to make available our upcoming, lovely e-books as they get ready and also create a gathering place around them, with on-going discussions, new resources/links, etc. We are currently moving forward with our first two e-books: Europe in Crisis and Forgotten Conflicts in Africa — to be introduced at the Nairobi Summit. The initial production stage covers listing and selection of best articles published on those topics up to May 31, 2012 on GV english (other languages will follow soon). For questions, suggestions, and to contribute please check GV e-books! See you there 😉
Hi everyone,
Below is a quick update on our work on Cojiro over the past couple months. This being the first post since the award winners were announced, we’d like to say thank you to the community for selecting us! It’s so great to have your support, and so great that GV created these awards.
Apologies in advance: this post will be a bit technical since our main focus right now is on building the basic components of the application. I’ll try to keep the discussion as high-level as possible, but if you’re not interested in the technical stuff skip to #4 below.
For an overview of the project see our earlier post and proposal on the innovation blog, and the github page for the project. Continue reading
El abaratamiento de las cámaras de video, la ubicuidad de las mismas en otros tipos de dispositivos (celulares, cámaras fotográficas), el incremento de sus capacidades y la simplificación de su manejo, la cada vez mayor penetración de internet y con el la difusión de las plataformas para compartir contenido, han masificado el uso del video a niveles que resultan asombrosos según los estándares de hace pocos años. YouTube anunció hace poco que cada segundo se sube una hora de contenido a sus servidores.
Aunque es obvio que no todos los videos subidos nos interesan a todos, incluso la porción que nos interesa representa tal cantidad de horas de video que probablemente nunca terminaríamos de verla. Así pues el concepto de curación de contenidos aplicado al video se hace más que necesario.
Es por esto que ya desde hace buen tiempo en Global Voices nos hemos preocupado por seleccionar el mejor contenido en lo que corresponde a video ciudadano, no sólo de las noticias y eventos de actualidad, si no de diversos temas que vale la pena rescatar.
Sin embargo, el problema con esta gran cantidad de contenido no es sólo para el consumidor, también lo es para el productor.
Teniendo en cuenta esto GV ha decidido adentrarse un poco más en el mundo del video y, promover, apoyar y difundir la producción audiovisual. Para lograrlo ponemos a disposición de la comunidad videoblogger hispanohablante nuestro sitio web donde vuestros videos podrán ser parte de alguno de nuestros artículos, o incluso generar un artículo!
También ponemos a disposición de la comunidad este blog, donde intentaremos postear sobre temas que tengan que ver con las distintas fases de la creación de videos, así como el uso o aplicación que se puede dar a esta herramienta. Aquellos que quieran aportar con artículos serán gratamente bienvenidos.
1. Full name
| Claire Ulrich |
2. Global Voices sections to which you contribute
| GV in English |
| Lingua |
| Rising Voices |
3. Publication date of your latest post or translation
| Date: – 29/1/2012 |
4. Title of project
| GV goes mobile |
5. Project representative (person who will sign award agreement and receive funds)
| Claire Ulrich |
6. Describe the proposed project as clearly as possible in five sentences or less
| The rise of mobile devices heralds a new era for Global Voices and citizen media at large. In developing countries, mobiles could become the most available and in time the cheapest access to the Web. This project seeks to beta test a small scale “news via mobile or SMSs” experiment with a panel of 30+ beta users (Half being mobile and news savvy contributors/translators of GV, and half not acquainted with GV or news on mobile) located in Europe, South America, South Asia, Africa. The project aims to provide GV with feedback and findings on the following questions: 1- how can a citizen news outlets like GV be identified as such on mobiles, as opposed to traditional news providers, and reach to mobile users while encouraging participation? 2 – Which technical solution, functionalities, tools are needed to foster participation, conversation, and to encourage readers in different countries to contribute and share multimedia contents/news with GV? 3- How could GV current news formats (text or multimedia) be tailored to be useful and engaging for a global audience on mobile devices or even via SMSs, despite the regional constraints and differences in news reading? Special focus will be on users with limited and sometimes expensive connection, and/or not acquainted with citizen news or even smartphones. Findings from the two-month live test, will be presented to the GV community during the next GV Summit to inform the community and a discussion on the prospects of a GV mobile solution. |
7. What aspect or need of Global Voices does your project address?
| MGV (Mobile GV) wishes to address some of the questions raised by the fast migration of contents mobile handsets, globally, for a citizen website that does not only aim at distributing news, but has a wider mission. It seeks to provide feedback to the community and GV core-team, based on a 2-month live test with a multicultural panel in different regions of the world, to better understand the format, functionalities and possibilities to encourage participation and content sharing. |
8. How would the project further Global Voices’ mission?
| Global Voices’ mission, to amplify online conversation and make new voices heard, tackles a new environment on mobile handsets. The project wishes to gather and analyse users experiences and reactions to GVM in different contexts, from users with different profiles, in April and May 2012. The questions at stake are many, but the scope of the project is to identify readers interest and appreciation to different formats on their mobile, how they can be encouraged to participate in discussion, crowd sourced news and translations. It would also seek to list the prospects and challenges, the technical solutions and monetizing opportunities, when reaching out to a multilingual, multicultural, audience across the world on a small screen – with sometime limited and expensive mobile access. |
9. What is innovative about your project?
| The innovation lies in adopting a bottom up and multicultural approach to citizen news on mobile, testing GVM on users in different continents/contexts, with different interest and knowledge of mobile technology, to identify challenges and reactions to GV contents, willingness to use apps and tool to contribute, and to provide fresh ideas and perspectives. |
10. Which section of Global Voices would your project most benefit (if applicable)?
| GV in English |
| Lingua |
| Rising Voices |
| GV Advocacy |
11. How would the wider GV community utilize and/or participate in your project?
| The participation and support of the GV community and friends/partners of our community in the academic and mobile technology industry would be essential. The project would need technical skills and counseling for the development or choice of a simple platform and interface, editorial support, and local support to recruit beta testers and gather feedback. Lingua editors and contributors could help identify and recruit beta testers reflecting different cultures, languages, and technology literacy. They could be of great help to interpret context, costs and strategies, barriers to access, local users habits, and to relay the findings in their respective context. The community could in turn benefit from a “sand box” to experiment locally with their contents and communities and learn from other GV communities, getting a clearer picture of the challenges and possibilities offered by this first step for their local readership. |
12. List the other GV community members, if any, who will be actively working on the project. Please specify what role each person will play in the development of the project.
| Beta testers will be recruited and interviewed on their experience on GVM by different GV and Lingua community/members, able to contextualize their experience. Africa: GV French networks in Francophone Africa. Greece: Asteris Mousaras. South America: Juan Arellano. Brazil: Paula Goes. South Asia: Rezwan and Bijoy. |
13. What additional resources or expertise, if any, would you need to complete the project?
| Access to mobile industry expertise, development expertise in the GV community at large, either on a pro-bono or willing to contribute for a moderate fee, would be of great help. Contacts are underway with experts, NGOs, sponsors, and developers in Africa as well as in the Francophone tech community and any lead or advice on potential technical contributors, experts, and funders would be useful and much appreciated. |
14. Describe the prospects for sustainability/continuation once the innovation grant funding ends
| Given the current interest for mobile contents, it is hoped that both the private and non-profit sectors will be interested in branching on a multicultural, multi country, live-test and involve GV in their future projects. Humanitarian news, and mobile education, for instance, are topics of great interest for big NGOs currently: a partnership could be facilitated by the dissemination of the findings. Private or public sector media in Europe and elsewhere, who are currently exploring mobile news, can be approached. Telco companies in Africa, thriving with massive adoption rates of news via mobile, could also be a prospect to monetize or share revenues from mobile GV contents. |
15. Please specify the timeline for the project, from start to finish
| February – March 2012: building or choosing and tweaking a mobile platform, contacting sponsors and local mobile phones/access providers, designing and beta testing a format/content for daily/weekly edition for mobile testers, Recruiting and coaching members of the panel. April – May 2012: Testing the daily/weekly edition of GV mobile news (text and multimedia) on mobile site + via SMSs, weekly reporting via online survey or skype conversation, collation and analysis of feedback. June 2012: presentation and discussion of results during GV Summit |
16. Provide a detailed budget of up to US$5,000 for project costs. (Please try and present as accurate a budget as possible: applicants are encouraged to submit budgets for less than the maximum amount as smaller grants allow us to fund more projects)
| – Hardware/connection costs: It is hoped that local telephone retailers and access providers could sponsor part of the project, in some countries, by providing free or lent smartphones with built-in camera or video for fifteen beta users, and credit bulk “minutes” of mobile connection for this project.- Technical development and maintenance: 2000 USD
– Project management and related expenses: USD 2000 – Provision for mobile internet connection costs and bulk SMSs : USD 1000
|
| Tomomi Sasaki |
| GV in English |
| Lingua |
| Date: – 9/1/2012 |
| Cojiro, a cross-lingual curation tool |
| Chris Salzberg |
| 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 |
| Our project addresses three aspects of Global Voices: 1. GV is a closed platform: people cannot contribute without approval from the community of editors. 2. GV does not offer a natural way for people who lack writing (or translation) skills to contribute to content creation in other ways (e.g. through knowledge of specific topics) 3. Translators and writers are separate groups without a natural way to collaborate (decentralized publishing reverses the flow of translation but doesn’t really change this). 1. and 2. are reminiscent of traditional journalism, which separates content consumers from content producers. Having this type of barrier prevents the kind of spontaneous, low-threshold contributions that power popular community sites such as Quora (expert answers), Amazon (product reviews) and Slashdot (news curation). There is no lack of tools and platforms which enable open contributions of the kind described in 1. and 2., and indeed GV has used many of them (blogs, wiki, etc.). But the real problem — and the real opportunity — comes with the third point: most of these platforms do not deal with languages in a way which would enable Global Voices authors, Lingua translators and their community of readers to collaborate freely in story-writing. Cojiro is an attempt to fill this void. |
| Cojiro will further GV’s mission by creating a shared space for GV authors, translators and readers to collaborate in content curation and creation. This would add transparency to the story-writing process, which currently is mostly hidden from readers. It could also bring down the barriers to cross-regional collaboration, which has been greeted with enthusiasm at summits but achieved limited success in practice. The process of actually “building a tool” would also, we feel, be beneficial for GV to be a part of. The Global Voices website states that GV will “work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard”, but in practice GV has mostly used existing tools rather than built its own. This is unfortunate given the growing importance of tool-building to modern news-gathering (see data journalism, for example), and the unique set of problems that GV faces, which often go beyond the features of popular web services (e.g. translation in Storify). |
| Most projects tackle language barriers with one of two solutions: human translation or machine translation. A project like Meedan, for example, focuses on how to efficiently combine both to create a space for parallel conversations in Arabic/English. We look at the problem differently, not as a translation problem but as one of combining the right sets of skills in the right way. Our approach is to minimize translation by targeting only the most important and valuable elements of a story, and situate this translation as part of a larger curation workflow. Full texts are never translated and language agnostic content such as images play a strong role. This approach gives a clear sense of purpose to the translation, and allows for useful contributions without demanding a large investment of time. A tool like this will impact the way that GV contributors and audiences interact with our content, in a way that highlights the cross-lingual aspect that is unique to Global Voices. |
| GV in English |
| Lingua |
| We’d love for a subset of the wider community to use the tool in their daily gathering/writing process and provide feedback on product development. This would be accomplished by setting up instances of the tool in the relevant language pairs for a few interested communities. |
| * Chris Salzberg: Product lead & head developer * Tomomi Sasaki: User experience & community outreach * Taku Nakajima: Project development and technology strategy adviser |
| Front-end coding and graphic design resources are required to speed up the development process, especially as the service becomes available to more users and we gather feedback. Cojiro receives voluntary support from two companies: AQ, the creative agency where Tomomi works, provided the visual identity and will continue to offer their expertise in building digital tools. Brain Co,.Ltd., the system development company where Taku works, provides consulting on system architecture. http://www.aqworks.com http://www.brain-tokyo.jp/ |
| Cojiro started in 2010 as a volunteer project, and we have managed to build a proof of concept and working prototype without any material support. The funding will greatly help in advancing the project but the project will not necessarily halt once it ends. Currently, we see two future avenues, which are not mutually exclusive: 1) Cojiro could be financially supported by multiple parties and worked on by the original team in their available time, in much the way Global Voices operates. 2) Anyone interested in the tool could participate in its development or fork the codebase to start their own version. Cojiro is being developed as open source software on the github platform under our team name Netalab, and is open to any collaborators. |
| The award will help cojiro reach the next stage, but there is no clear start or finish to this project. Cojiro is currently a password protected prototype that is available to a couple of people. With the funding, we would build an alpha version that can withstand usage from a bigger group of testers. After the project team and our testers are happy with the quality of the service, our goal would be to deploy it to support wider usage. Once more details are provided, we can draw up a timeline in a way that’s relevant to the award. |
| Estimated cost for one year ($5,000) * Services and infrastructure costs ($1,700) ** Linode server ($500) ** Domain names ($100) ** Third party services, including Embedly ($1,000) ** License fees for fonts and icons ($100) * Development resources ($2,300) ** Backend development ($1,300) ** Frontend coding ($1,000) * Non-development costs ($1,000) ** Conference attendance fees ($500) ** Incidentals for meetings ($300) ** Books and tutorials ($200) |
| Juan Arellano Valdivia |
| Lingua |
| Date: – 24/1/2012 |
| GV – Filming our posts |
| Juan Arellano Valdivia |
| The intention is to create Global Voices own videos through agreements with small independent video producers (individuals and organizations) in Spanish speaking countries. So these producers would be in charge of creating audiovisual material per request (Us specifying the subject and other requirements for the video). The videos would be produced fortnightly (each time in a different country) as a base for GV articles. Articles that will be especially written by our authors from those countries. Thus, our content will be dynamized and will feed our YouTube channel in order to enrich its image and attract new audiences. Furthermore, to attract people interested in video production, a citizen video contest will be held during the project. |
| The project covers GV’s lack of own audiovisual material that would facilitate using the whole potential video has in informing and spreading content through platforms such as Youtube. |
| The process of creating and publishing own video material through the alliance of Global Voces and video producers allows to include citizens’ voices from unrepresented communities or sectors on (and off) the internet and record their opinions about a specific matter, differently from the text. |
| The innovative part lies with the combination of already existing Concepts, such as viralization power via Youtube, the collaborative associations between Global Voices and other institutions, and the ability Global Voices has to write articles based on citizen contents. This merge of elements hasn’t been previously tested on Global Voices and it is innovative as it allows to provide a renewed image to the public we already have, and to bring more individuals and collaborators to our network. |
| GV in English |
| Lingua |
| The idea of the project can be replicated on other sites of Global Voices, and so the whole community can be involved and also contribuye with the sustainability and its continuance in time, sharing the produced videos and proposing alliances with other smaill video producters. If this proposal is chosen, at the end of its period I will publish a Guide with its procedures and experiences as a way to help duplicate it in others GV sites, and to stablish a long term plan. |
| Cati Restrepo – Be aware of topics that are generating discussion in Spanish speaking countries. – Coordinate with video producers the making of the videos (topic, duration, deadlines submitting the video to Global Voices). – Collaborate with broadcasting the video once it’s been published. |
| – The networks of GV Latam-team – Alliances with institutions such as Flickr or Vimeo for a video competition that would be created during the project. |
| To assure the project will keep on going, during the project a video competition will be promoted, that will allow to add to our network small independent video producers (organizations and individuals as well) that are not participanting in the project’s first part, besides that we could present our videos in audiovisual competitions. Besides that, the production of new videos might be possible through alliances with Communication schools. |
| Ten months. Fortnightly publication. Every fortnight, a different country and topic. By the fifth month, a competition will be held for new independent producers. |
| Human resources. – Coordinator: US $100 per month (Total US $1000) – Assistant coordinator: US $500 (unique payment) – Video producer: US $150 per video (Total US$ 3000) – Competition prize: US $500 |