SOPA/PIPA – An unexpected voice in the debate: Hosni Mubarak

I suppose in the era of Wikileaks the leader of an international NGO shouldn’t be surprised to receive a leaked email from an incarcerated dictator written to the ranking members of the US House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Still, you can imagine our shock at Meedan when we read the following letter from Hosni Mubarak. RE: S.968, Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act and H.R.3261, Stop Online Piracy Act Dear Chairman Leahy, Ranking Member Grassley, Chairman Smith and Ranking Member Conyers: I hope... Read The Rest →

Citizen Liveblogging Egypt’s Phase 2 Elections

As part of our ongoing project supporting citizen news curation in the Middle East, we are today working with the awesome team at Egypt Independent to test our new citizen media liveblog. As Egypt goes to the polls in phase two if the first post-Mubarak parliament, we are posting citizen content to our citizen reports page for the journalists at Egypt Independent to use in their reporting. Posting a citizen report to the testing liveblog is wonderfully simple, and is something anyone can get involved with! All you have to... Read The Rest →

Abu Dhabi Gallup forum – Dec 7-8, 2011

I am just back from the inaugural Abu Dhabi Gallup Center Forum held at Qasr al Sarab, Abu Dhabi. Meedan was honored to be given a seat at the table of this inaugural gathering with the likes of Dr Aref Nayed, Dr. Sherman Jackson, Sultan Al Qassami, Wael Khalil, Muna AbuSulayman, Fadi Ghandour, Rami Khouri, Dalia Mogahed, and 80 other thought leaders from around the world. Experimenting with Twitter plus Storify in an effort to share a bit of the pulse of the two days. View the story “abu dhabi... Read The Rest →

Zainab Balogun in SF

Zainab Balogun is a young, dynamic, talented and soft spoken software engineer who is working on the Nurani project under the 18 month UK Research Councils Digital Economy grant. Zainab grew up in Lagos, Nigeria took her MS in Software Engineering from the University of Westminster, London. Zainab just finished the first of four scheduled working trips to SF under the terms of the grant, which is administered by the EPSRC as a ‘Research in the Wild Grant’. She she spent a good portion of her time with our Director of... Read The Rest →

Meedan and QFI launch digital Initiative to connect classrooms across languages

We’re excited to be releasing a new platform in collaboration with Qatar Foundation International that is designed to connect classrooms and build a diverse learning community around the world. The platform, called Classroom to Classroom (‘C2C’ for short) is dedicated to resource discovery, standards-aligned content, authorship and life-long learning. C2C is being launched with Boston Arts Academy’s Peers Educating Peers (PEP) project. PEP is a student-led curriculum development project that trains students on the skills and tools they need to effectively teach their peers. QFI Executive Director, Maggie Mitchell Salem... Read The Rest →

Meedan named as finalist in Changemakers Citizen Media comp, voting starts now!

The wonderful folks over at Ashoka Changemakers have named the 11 finalists in their exciting and important Citizen Media competition. It is a great honour for Meedan that we are among those 11, alongside some seriously cool projects. We really encourage people to head over to Changemakers.org/CitizenMedia to check out the first class array of ideas and innovators from around the world who have entered the competition. One of the great things about the voting system is that it allows users to vote for up to THREE entries – so... Read The Rest →

Meedan at World Innovation Summit for Education WISE 2011

I have just returned from this year’s World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Doha, where I had the honor to Chair a panel on ‘Online Platforms for Global Collaboration’. Doha is a bit surreal – a sort of heritage zone for brilliant modern architecture put to the purpose of transitioning this tiny Gulf emirate to a knowledge economy by 2030. WISE 2011 was, not surprisingly, framed with a nod to the Arab Spring – ‘Changing Societies, Changing Education’.  However, coming to Doha, as I was, from a Cairo where... Read The Rest →

Egypt’s revolution is in turmoil but its social media activism points to a bright future

“Same book, different cover.” That was how a well-connected social media manager described Egypt’s post-revolution transition when the Meedan team met him last week in Cairo. Working in a pristine air conditioned office located in the rapidly expanding hinterland of the Egyptian capital, our contact nevertheless expected 2012 to be a year of dramatic growth and vitality in the Egyptian web publishing market. In the city centre, heavily armed soldiers still surround the crumbling Maspero television building, long the propagandistic power base of the Mubarak regime, now circled with barbed... Read The Rest →

Translating Interfaces vs. Translating People: Closing the Online Language Gap [Guest Post]

This is a guest post by An Xiao Mina, an American design thinker, new media artist, and digital community builder. Her work has been featured in venues internationally, from the Brooklyn Museum to Shanghai’s Xindanwei, and in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian and LA Weekly.  She co-founded Bird’s Nest: Ai Weiwei in English, a site dedicated to translating the Twitter account of artist Ai Weiwei.  Learn more at www.anxiaostudio.com or follow her on Twitter at @anxiaostudio.   This past month, I arrived in South Korea, sight unseen,... Read The Rest →

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