Well, this isn’t really an Innovative Award proposal or anything similar, it’s a semi-joke and semi-crazy idea to have just for fun. How about adding new lingua sites for artificial and language games used by kids, such as Pig Latin or Inflationary English. The good thing is that we will not need real authors to do this, we can write some script to take an English post and translate it automatically to Pig Latin or so.

Ok, to the title is actually an attempt to summarize the three ideas I had. Here we go in a more detailed fashion 🙂

1. Online activism tool.
This actually nicely joins a suggestion that Portnoy made earlier. I am not sure whether this goes into the same direction as his idea though. What I thought about is having a wiki where to create something we can dub “a political memo tool”. As I am very interested in censorship and surveillance be it online, be it biometry, etc., I was thinking of creating this political memo as a database of all deputies and representatives who deal with these questions in countries where we have little knowledge about as the MENA region, for instance. So, in the EU and the US, we know who these people are in general, but not in countries from the MENA region or Asia or the CEE.

Since it is not enough just to have these guys/gals listed, my guess is it may be very interesting to have a crowdsourced tool to collect various things such as “inaccessible website for country X”. This already exist for some EU countries (respectmynet.eu, by the French citizen initiative La Quadrature du Net). A very useful resource as Telecomix does exist as well (e.g., Blue Cabinet), but RespectMyNet is different: it really aims at gathering factual data about internet censorship. We all know this happens, especially in the aformentioned countries. It would be very useful to gather this data and try to act against. This collection is also a way of educating people: “ah the site doesn’t work, too bad” or “ah, it doesn’t work, good, it is censored, I’ll use a circumvention tool and will access it anyway”. In the former case, people just obey to censorship in a passive way. In the latter case, people just skip the bigger issue: surveillance. And I think this is a crucial thing to work on.

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Another old idea that I think is very important: We need a group of people to assist the editors of different regions in proofreading our posts. I think this will improve the quality of the site.

Once more, I don’t know how much it would cost. I guess it will be the equivalent of a part time job given to a group of expert readers. Could be students in the final years of languages, or people with experience in editing.

What do you think?

This is an idea I’ve proposed already. Some of you might remember a bit of this: I proposed to devote a part of the site to the posts that we have tagged, so far, as «Culture». As a goal, I had the mental image of a site a bit like Advocacy, which is separate but not independent, gathering the posts we have written (and will write) on these subjects. I thought it might not be a bad idea to re-propose this, given the opportunity that this innovation grant has opened for discussion.

The first time we discussed this (It was during the Budapest Summit) we ended up agreeing that we should encourage more posts describing conversations about «culture». Nevertheless, I think we could do a bit more than that. There are lots and lots of conversations, debates and also conflicts with cultural differences and misunderstandings as a base, and that we’re missing because they fall into the big sac of the issues that are important, but not really that much.

The main reason is the conception we tend to have (especially from the newsroom point of view) of culture, and I think the tag we have would be the first proof of this. We put these articles under «arts and culture» which are not related close enough to make a single tag out of it. We think that culture has to do with classics, arts and literature. And to some extend, they do make part of that. But it’s also about how people live, think and behave in different given situations. A great point was made during the Summit in Santiago (If I remember well, it was Tsavvko’s point) : it is important to observe what do we think culture really is.

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