micro-proposal: A wiki for online activism and social media around the world

Premise: I really want this idea to come true, but sadly I don’t have enough time to make it happen. If anyone is interested in this idea and pick it up as a real proposal, thank you very much.

Basic idea: A wiki runs like Wikipedia, but exclusively for online activism and social media sphere around the world.

More detail: Like Wikitravel for travel. Not everyone can easily understand a country’s latest online buzz if one have no background knowledge of the country. Most of the time we add limited information in the first paragraph in GV articles, but I think it is not enough.

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Proposal: GV media publishing

Since its inception in December 2004, GV published a huge amount of material on a variety of topics, countries and languages. To date, just the GV English sites alone total over 75,000 posts long and many more have been published on each of the localized sites. Those archives are an important historical and cultural treasure and deserve broader dissemination, thus advancing GV’s mission of fostering “voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.”

We should take advantage of the themes we’ve already covered, re-packaging and re-proposing our archived multimedia content, after a proper search of relevant posts/materials across countries, topics, languages. We could create electronic books, dossier and topic publications in a variety of formats (pdf, html, 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. In time we can build a unique catalog focused on citizen and social media material to be distributed/used on many occasions and in many venues. For example, we could create right away a “Global Voices 2011” or an “Arab Spring Voices” ebook including best posts on these topics already published on GV, enriching and adapting them accordingly.

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Innovation Grant Guidelines

Dear GV Community –

Do you have an idea for a project or tool that would help enhance Global Voices’ work or mission? Do you need support in making that idea become a reality?

The four-year grant we received from Omidyar Network in 2010 includes funding to support innovative ideas coming from our community members that could advance the mission of Global Voices. We are launching our first round of internal innovation awards to support this innovation, and invite members of the GV community to propose projects. We expect to award three or four grants in this first round. Each award will be for a maximum of US$5,000. We expect to hold at least one more round of innovation awards in 2012.

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