Cairo journalist and Twitter supremo Lilian Wagdy trains budding citizen reporters at Tahrir Lounge

Last week I took part in the first of a series of workshops organized by Meedan and the Birmingham City University Centre for Media and Cultural Research that aim to train citizen journalists in verification techniques for  social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The ultimate goal of these workshops is to introduce trainees to a reporting platform developed by Meedan and adopted by one of Egypt’s best-known independent newspapers, Al-Masry Al-Youm.  The platform, http://liveblog.almasryalyoum.com, is designed to support citizen journalists to verify and disseminate important citizen reporting, and... Read The Rest →

Meedan releases update to participatory liveblogging service

Meedan has released a second iteration of its participatory reporting platform for Egyptian media partner, Al-Masry Al-Youm, as part of a multi-year project to support citizen journalism in the Middle East. The update further increases the visibility of citizen reporting in Al-Masry Al-Youm’s news output, and paves the way for the platform’s extension to five other Middle East media partners later this year as a collaborative verification workbench called CheckDesk. Its part of an effort to improve the use of citizen reporting in Middle East media. The platform enables citizens... Read The Rest →

Meedan welcomes creative talents to international web development team

Appreciating a good conspiracy, and with the strategies and performance of global NGOs undergoing a round of public scrutiny for reasons viral and bizarre, I want to address head-on recently circulated rumors that Meedan has a secret and unstated mission. It is time to lay bare our true intentions and own up to them in the clarifying sunlight of complete disclosure.  It is true.  Meedan has gradually transformed from a few pretty great ideas to a lot of really great people. So, while we are all together in service of... Read The Rest →

Online Censorship, Surveilance, and Crime: Keeping Yourself Safe

Intro If you’re reading this article on a screen instead of paper, then you should be concerned about your privacy and freedom of speech online. Whether you’re an activist, or an owner of a huge farm on Farmville – the popular game on facebook – you spend a lot of your time online. Thus, more and more of your life is slowly conducted in a digital medium. Amazon is now selling more ebooks than printed books. When was the last time you actually printed a photograph, or browsed through a... Read The Rest →

Translating Tweets from the Arab Spring: Towards a Translation Workbench for Twitter

Think about the Arab Spring and you probably think about citizen media.  Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Bahrainis, Tunisians have not just been taking to the streets over the past year, but documenting their experiences in text, image and video – even building whole new social movements with a digital dimension. Has there ever been a historic moment of this scale unfold before our eyes through new media publishing tools? Surely this is inspiring to the rest of us who are not in the Middle East.  More than ever before, an American... Read The Rest →

Meedan takes over Tahrir (Lounge)

Cairo is an important city for me in many different ways: It was my home for over two years, the first place I moved after I graduated from university; it is where I witnessed, first hand, the start of a revolution; it is where my Meedan adventure began in the summer of 2009. It is for these reasons, among many others, that getting the chance to return to Cairo is something I always look forward to. In recent months, my happiness in returning to Egypt has each time been tempered... Read The Rest →

Checkdesk: A new approach to fact-checking citizen media of the Arab Spring

The advent of new media has ended the scarcity in which mass media journalism functioned, with repercussions for both newsgathering and publishing. No longer are audiences solely reliant on foreign reporters to tell the story of Homs or Hama. No longer is news delivered solely to the tempo demanded by the evening newscast or first edition. At both ends of the news workflow, journalists are playing catch up, chasing the barrage of content being published on the web in a bid to keep ‘on top of the story’ and publishing... Read The Rest →

Cambridge Calling

Last month, Karim, Chris, George, Tom, and I were lucky to spend a week at Cambridge University in the company of our Nurani project team colleagues Zainab Balogun, Rim Hassan, Hilary Marlow, and Mike Higton. Special thanks to David Ford for welcoming the Meedan team to Cambridge again. Regular readers of this blog (Hi, Mom) will recall that the second phase of our Nurani project continues with generous support from the British Research Council – as administered by the EPSRC. The EPSCR award promotes ‘research in the wild’ on projects of... Read The Rest →

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 →

« Older Entries Newer Entries »

Meedan Blog