Meedan 2011 Annual Report

We are delighted to present the Meedan annual report for 2011, published today on Issuu. You can view this below, download or share. The report covers Meedan’s partnerships, technology development and programmatic focus through a year of tumultuous change in the Middle East. In presenting this report, we are grateful to the brilliant design work of Meedan Designer Maya Zankoul. We hope you enjoy it. Open publication – Free publishing – More arabic Share → Tweet

Meedan wins multi-year Arab Partnerships grant to support citizen journalists in Middle East

Hot on the heels of success in the IPI News Innovation Contest, Meedan has won a multi-year grant through the UK’s Arab Partnerships fund towards the development of a fact checking workbench and training program for citizen journalists in the Middle East. The funding will support Meedan’s development team to build on the success of the citizen-led liveblogging platform  it developed for Al-Masry Al-Youm, one of Egypt’s leading independent newspapers.   This platform supports the Al-Masry Al-Youm community to share and mark-up newsworthy content with the newspaper’s journalists, who can then quickly... 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 →

Global Censorship: Case Studies from Syria and Egypt

“The ubiquity of the Internet has added an additional layer of complexity to issues of government censorship.  It is both an unrivaled tool for speech and an incredible tool for monitoring and surveillance.” The above paragraph is an excerpt of the description of the Global Censorship Conference that was held at Yale Law School March 30 – April 1. I had the pleasure of being on a panel with Lina Attalah, Managing Editor of Al Masry Al Youm (AMAY), discussing case studies of censorship. The panel discussed censorship in different... 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 →

Cairo violence shows citizens need corroboration tools

Were they clashes? That’s the word swirling through the web already.  Clashes suggests two parties fighting each other.  It suggests an equivalence. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that there was something more serious still going on – that the real crux of the events in Cairo yesterday was a series of coordinated ‘attacks’. Who was responsible? Mobs driven by sectarian hate?  That’s what Egypt’s Minister of Justice Mohamed El-Guindy seems to be saying – at least according to Al Ahram.  Why else dish out military trials... Read The Rest →

WARNING: Social media is dangerous. Here's how you can reduce the risks.

Social Media in Repressive States: The Risks Egyptians could never have removed Hosni Mubarak, or even made the case for deep reform, without reclaiming the streets.  Much of the struggle of the January 25 protests centred on whether protesters could maintain a popular presence in public space.  The violence meted out by police and regime supporters sought to remove people from public space, and scare away those who were thinking of joining. It is widely thought social media played an important role in galvanizing protesters to take part. But social media... Read The Rest →

Crafting a moderation policy for cross-cultural dialogue online

What are the ingredients needed to craft an appropriate moderation policy for a cross-cultural forum? That’s a question we’ve been trying to answer for some time.   In many ways, it’s a question we’ll need to be asking as long as this project exists. Meedan obviously brings together people of very different linguistic, cultural and religious backgrounds – which makes moderation challenging in two distinct respects. One, there are not obvious cultural norms we can draw on. And two, we are necessarily bringing together divergent viewpoints which are more likely... Read The Rest →

TED Global 09: Are social media tools for liberation or repression?

We asked Meedan adviser and TED fellow 2009, Dr Shereen El Feki, to blog TED Global 2009 from Oxford, UK.  Here, in her first post, she describes how internet expert Evgeny Morozov posed challenging questions for the future of participatory media like Meedan. The theme of this year’s TED is “The Substance of Things Not Seen”–more on that as the week unfolds. What is pretty evident, however, is just how well TED is weathering the global economic crisis. I haven’t seen the numbers, and I don’t have previous experience of... Read The Rest →

Saatchi Gallery unveils 'vibrant' Middle East art scene in controversial exhibition – Times review in Arabic

Read original in Times Online here.  Article translated by Wesam Abd El Nasser. كشف النقاب: فن جديد من الشرق الأوسط يُعرض في جاليري سآتشي يكشف الجاليري الثاني لسآتشي عن الشرق الأوسط وعن مجده المثير للإهتمام. جوانا بيتمان من الواضح أن تشارلز سآتشي يستمتع بدوره كأكثر الناس استفزازاً فى عالم الفن، فمعرض إحساسه! الذي يُعرض بالأكاديمية الملكية ليس إلا أحد المعارض التي أثارت الغضب، فهو عرض قد يمثل الفن المعاصر، يقيم سآتشي الآن معرضاً للفن المعاصر من الشرق الأوسط يحتوي على عناصر قد تثير ردود فعل عدائية كبيرة داخل الأوساط الأصولية... Read The Rest →

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