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 →

Student engagement up as Meedan multi-lingual discussion platform gets a new look

Students of Qatar Foundation International‘s exchange program were discussing questions of space exploration, the environment, democracy, and technological innovation this week following a major update to the discussion forum they use to communicate, which is powered by Meedan. The exchange program alumni were logging in in record numbers and taking part more actively than ever thanks to a sweeping design refresh to the YALLAH platform (Youth Allied to Learn, Lead and Help), a three-language multi-media discussion forum. The design improvements, led by Meedan’s latest recruit to its creative team –... Read The Rest →

On the Meedan Radar – August 2012

- Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard publishes Summer Report all about social media, verification and truth: http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/issue/100072/Summer-2012.aspx It’s all excellent, but highlights relevant to Checkdesk are: Craig Silverman: A New Age for Truth Mark Little: Finding the Wisdom in the Crowd David Turner: Inside the BBC’s Verification Hub Phil Brinkman: The Story that Rocked the Clock Also worth reading is Patrick Meier’s summary/review: http://irevolution.net/2012/07/26/truth-and-social-media/ - IREX launches new center for collaborative technologies: http://www.irex.org/news/irex-launches-new-center-collaborative-technologies “IREX is very pleased to announce the launch of its new Center for Collaborative Technologies (CCT) to... Read The Rest →

Meet Meedan’s 2012 Summer Interns: Flora Cabili and Andrew Ver Steegh

The ever growing Meedan family is excited to welcome the Flora Cabili and Andrew Ver Steegh as interns for the Summer of 2012. Flora, a McGill University student, is researching various development and media indicators in the MENA region, and is currently focusing on Syria to support our collaboration with the Syrian media collective, Al Ayyam. In her own words: For a short time this summer, I am joining the Meedan team as an intern for Anas. I am filled with excitement and curiosity for the work you all do... Read The Rest →

“Finding the Wisdom in the Crowd” and creating spaces for knowledge sharing

It’s an infrequent occurrence on the Meedan blog that we feel pushed to hit the “reblog” button, but sometimes important blog posts coincide with even more important breaking news events, and the time comes to reblog and remix. A few short weeks ago, Nieman Reports released their summer issue – essential reading for those of us pondering the increasingly overlapping worlds of social media and news reporting, and developing tools to help make sense of the social web. As a disjointed picture of events emerged yesterday from across Syria and journalists around... Read The Rest →

On the Meedan Radar – July 2012

This post is going to be a monthly round up of projects we’ve been talking about at the Meedan watercooler, research that is guiding our work, and links that have us hitting “share” - BBC publishes major report on Arab Spring coverage (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/arabspring_impartiality/arab_spring.pdf ) What is generally apparent is that the BBC are doing good things with UGC verification, but lack policy and structure to handle this issue of “caveat” in a consistent and methodical way. At the same time, though much of the process has been written in blog... Read The Rest →

Egypt’s presidential elections covered through the eyes of the voters

As Egypt took to the polls for the historic first round of presidential elections last week, our partners at Al-Masry Al-Youm took a decisive and innovative step to put their citizen-media driven liveblog, developed in partnership with Meedan, at the very heart of their reporting. With their talented team of social media-savvy journalists posting regular updates throughout the day, and sharing their work via Facebook and Twitter, the Al-Masry Al-Youm team built up a sizable audience and community of users contributing content and comment to the page. In the week... Read The Rest →

Pop-up newsrooms spring to life in Cairo for #EgyPresElex

The candidates have been named, symbols have been assigned (Will Moussa’s sun leave Shafiq on a ladder to nowhere?) and ballot boxes are being prepared across Egypt for the country’s first presidential election of the post-Mubarak era. The stage has been set for this historic poll, and we want you to help us cover the events as they’re happening on the ground. Join us at a pop-up newsroom For both daysp we’ll be hosting a pop-up newsroom, where you can get together with fellow citizen journalists and members of our... Read The Rest →

Meedan partners with Go Local and Egyptian Democratic Academy for Egypt citizen journalism training

As part of our ongoing project in support of citizen media verification in the Middle East, Meedan is currently running a series of training workshops for citizen journalists in Egypt. From the outset, we knew that for our training to be a valuable resource for Egypt’s citizen journalists, we would need to reach beyond the Cairo megalopolis. To help us with our outreach to citizen journalist and training logistics for our workshops outside of Cairo, we found two fabulous partners working on truly inspiring projects in Egypt’s governorates: Go Local,... 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 →

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