House of Translation Lecture Cairo March 12, 2013: Social Media Translation
I was honored to be a scholar-in-residence at the AUC under the National Center for Translation House of Translation speaker series earlier this month. For context on this series and the House of Translation, see my post on the HoT / AUC / National Center for Translation speaker series. Below is the text from this lecture and the deck I presented to accompany the talk. Of course the best part of the talk was the question and answer period, but, alas, I do not have that captured so this will... Read The Rest →
Meedan Cairo Lectures: House of Translation / AUC Translation Studies
I was honored to have been the third scholar-in-residence invited to Cairo under the House of Translation Series. The House of Translation is a joint collaborative initiative between the National Center for Translation of the Ministry of Culture in Egypt and the Center for Translation Studies at The American University in Cairo. This two week run consisted in two public lectures and an intensive workshop with 16 post-graduate students of translation studies. The seminar students were chosen from among almost 60 applicants, so represented the best and brightest of the new... Read The Rest →
Fahd from Transwikia at Meedan SF
Anas, Wasma, and I were pleased to have a visit today from Fahd Alhazmi, the founder and coder of the Transwikia project. Fahd is in the Bay Area to prepare for his Masters work in CS after having finished his undergraduate degree at King Fahd University in Saudi. For those of you who do not know about Transwikia – it is a project for enabling crowdsourced translation of Wikipedia articles. (Meedan’s WikiArabi project, which formally ran from 2010-11 but is still online, did not address the challenge of multiple contributors to a... Read The Rest →
Open Book: OER initiative for Arab Region
This past Monday January 28th, in the Franklin Room at the US Dept of State, Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton and Arab League Ambassador to the United States Dr. Mohammed Alhussaini Alsharif, convened a group of open education leaders to announce the launch of the Open Book Project. This project is an “initiative of the U.S. Department of State, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization and leading education innovators to expand access to free, high-quality open educational resources in Arabic, with a focus on science and technology and... Read The Rest →
George from Meedan
With an amount of nostalgia that exceeds my (significant) carrying capacity for such that we share word that our dear friend and colleague George Weyman has taken a post at the British Library. The title of this post plays on the English word ‘from’ – which connotes both going and belonging. I intentionally invoke it in both senses, though, the emotional referent leans more to the sense of belonging, as my memory goes to the message on George’s voicemail. There is, in the belonging/geographical shadings of the reference, a sense... Read The Rest →
Okki Dokki – Checkdesk Partner Meeting Dokki, Cairo
Once again typing away from the regular environs of the winged metallic tube – to be exact, these words come to you from seat 31A here on the Lufthansa brand transport experience, headed westward, my home direction. The past two weeks have been very good for Meedan. Most significantly and to the point of this post, we held our first partners meeting for Phase 2 of the Checkdesk project. From October 16-18, we brought the entire Meedan team (less Aaron, Andy, and Zainab it must be noted) together with an... Read The Rest →
Meedan Partners with Taghreedat
Today at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Meedan and Taghreedat announced a partnership to work together to promote Arabic Open Education Resource (OER) translation and localization. This announcement was made by Meedan’s CEO, Ed Bice on a panel shared with Taghreedat, Twitter, and Storify. Taghreedat’s other partnerships with international organizations include Twitter, Inc., TED, Storify and the Wikimedia Foundation. Taghreedat founders Mina Takla and Sami Mubarak meet with Meedan in San Francisco Taghreedat, is an inspired and completely volunteer Arabic e-content translation initiative supported by Abu Dhabi’s media development company,... Read The Rest →
Vancouver Variations
Meedan held a team meeting in Vancouver, BC two weeks ago. Six years into our experiment in fielding a globally distributed team, we treat our time together as a critical component of our organizational design. Seven days in the company of Tom Trewinnard, Anas Qtiesh, James Andres, Chris Blow, Karim Ratib, and George Weyman is hard to capture in a single blog post, but here is my best effort at offering a snap-shot of our gathering. Remarkably, we experienced one of the world’s most beautiful cities during a seven day... Read The Rest →
UN Crisis Information Management Advisory Group (CiMAG) Retreat
We were pleased to be invited to participate in a gathering of the UN Crisis Information Management Advisory Group (CiMAG) – convened by the ICT4Peace Foundation and Dr. Soon-hong Choi, the UN CITO (Chief Information Technology Officer). Meedan was honored to be presenting alongside Alex Barth from Development Seed, Nigel Snoad from Google, JK Kearns from Youtube, Nathanial Manning from Ushahidi, Dragana Kaurin from New America Foundation, and Ryan Lancios from ESRI. The ICT4Peace Foundation was formally established in 2006 to ”enhance the performance of the international community in crisis... Read The Rest →
Meedan wins International Press Instiitute News Innovation Contest 2012
Meedan Checkdesk, a platform facilitating collaborative journalism for Middle East new media, has been named as one of 14 winners of the 2012 IPI News Innovation Contest. The award will support Meedan designers and developers to tackle one of the very thorniest problems of the social web: how news teams can better verify breaking stories from the Middle East using citizen reporting. We are honored to count IPI as a funding partner, putting us as it does in the company of some very high profile grantees, including AFP Foundation, Media... Read The Rest →