Open Up!: How can Open Data, Civic Engagement and Technology Make Governments More Accountable?
Transparency advocates from as far afield as India, Africa and the Middle East gathered in London on Tuesday to share their experiences working on open data and civic engagement projects in some of the world’s most gruelling political environments. Attendees at the Open Up! event in London’s ‘Tech City’ spoke eloquently about their attempts to put technology to the goal of greater openness and citizen empowerment in their countries, despite what some reported as profound infrastructure constraints, government hostility and even harassment. Highlights included ‘Yemi Adamolekun‘s introduction to Enough is... 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 →
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 →
Advancing New Media Research: Review of USIP Report
Very interesting to read the conclusions of a special report by a panel of new media experts and researchers for the US Institute of Peace. The report advocates for new research tools and methods to understand the impact of new media – particularly tools that parse languages other than English, new ‘open’ approaches to collecting data, and new approaches to categorization: Better research tools are urgently needed. Although some highly promising tools exist, they need to be developed so that they can parse languages other than English. New tools that can... Read The Rest →
Meedan's Arabic-English Translation Engine Makes Strides – With Your Help
If you’ve ever contributed a translation to Meedan, you have helped to improve the potential for Arabic and English speakers to communicate and share content online. At Meedan, we hope to encourage communities across the web to contribute their translations towards an open licensed data source of parallel corpora comprising source language and human-generated target language. The value to you as a translator is that can go to any page on Meedan, generate translations and share them out to friends, knowing that your work is not just furthering meedan, but... Read The Rest →
How you can help spark east-west dialogue with a delicious tag
If you’ve ever tagged a bookmark on delicious, you can help us. What? Yes, we want you to help us track, aggregate and translate the stories and sources you care about, using a popular bookmarking service on the web. All it takes is a simple tag: for_meedan. How? Imagine you’ve just read a brilliant article about Gaza that you feel needs to be seen more widely. You might share it with your close friends on facebook, or send it to a mailing list. But you can also pretty easily share... Read The Rest →
Meedan looking back to 2009, looking ahead to 2010
Thanks for all your brilliant contributions and support to the Meedan project over the last twelve months. We’ve achieved so much with your help: For 2010, we’ve created a Meedan public calendar: http://bit.ly/8zm4CC We’ll be alerting our community to: - Middle East events - conferences on ICT4D in the Middle East, Arab media, social web, or translation technologies - partner projects - staff or community travels - project releases - weekly IRC meetings Only IRC chats on there right now, but welcome to suggestions. If you have a calendar tell us... Read The Rest →
& 'slashtags'">Collating better data about sources: schema, networks & 'slashtags'
In today’s Meedan meet-up we’ll be talking Tagging. Under the supervision of our UI lead, Chris Blow, we want to put in place a new community approach to tagging so we can channel the source work we do every day into a more structured data set. In other words, every time a Meedani tags an article on Delicious or Twitter, we want to encourage the use of some structured tags that give key information (location, author, publisher type, outlet). Open for debate is not just the data we should be... Read The Rest →
5 ways Twitter location API can help improve global understanding
When I first encountered Twitter’s location search, I was awestruck. Here was a way to filter what people were saying in Tehran just as the post-election protests were gathering pace. It seemed a great way to get closer to authentic Iranian voices and an invaluable stream which seemed more likely to be reliable. It helped make the Twitter experience of the crisis so compelling. Until – that is – activists from around the world suddenly decided to start setting their location to Tehran. Then it became a mess. The idea... Read The Rest →
Why open data matters
We had a great team chat last night in which our VP of Engineering, Anas Tawileh, gave an impassioned defense of why it is so important to keep data open. It was such fun, I want to share some of it with you now, by way of reminder as to why Meedan – and the other nonprofits we admire most – takes open source so seriously. It feels like many debates really miss the point on this. The question at the front of my mind is not about whether licensing... Read The Rest →