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 →

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

BBC Report on Arab Uprisings Calls for ‘Systematic’ Attribution for Citizen Footage

An internal BBC report on its coverage of the Arab uprisings this week revealed that three quarters of  reports containing citizen media failed to inform the audience about the source of that media. The report, authored by Edward Mortimer for the BBC Trust, said that journalists should use caveats or disclaimers to warn the audience that this video content – often mobile phone footage – came from particular activists on the ground. This striking, perhaps even alarming figure suggests that in the vast majority of reports on the Arab uprisings,... Read The Rest →

Google Updates Site Translation Plugin Allowing Owners and Readers to Improve Machine Translations

Google announced on Wednesday that a beta update to the site translation plugin, launched in 2009, now allows site owners and readers to “polish up” machine translation of a web page by contributing their own translation. Up til this latest update, the translation plugin only allowed users to view machine translations of a given web page with no ability to publish alternative, read: better, translations. Once a website sets up the plugin, users can choose the language they want to read the site in from over 60 possible languages. Then... Read The Rest →

Six Steps for Fact Checking Citizen Media

Anyone can be a publisher today – thanks to the web. As a result, there are so many more sources of news and information, which makes fact checking all the more critical in fast moving news stories.  When disinformation gets into the news cycle, it can lead to people being put in harm’s way.  Here, then, is a set of six tips to help you get it right. 1. Who is the original source? Every piece of news has a source – the person who told you the news.  Who... 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 →

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 →

Nurani: A Walk Through of Meedan's Inter-faith Scriptural Study Site

We are proud to announce the first release of Nurani, a platform for cross-language scriptural discussion for Muslim and Christian scholars managed by the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at the University of Cambridge, a programme of the Faculty of Divinity. Nurani is a cross-language open source platform for inter-religious dialogue developed by Meedan. The goal is to facilitate improved understanding between different faith communities and between speakers of Arabic and English. Nurani achieves this by enabling users to share and discuss scriptural and commentary texts from their faith traditions in two... Read The Rest →

Meedan at the Oxford Internet Institute: Understanding the role of the internet in Egypt's revolution

The role that social media played in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions is one question among many in understanding these profoundly important social events.  But perhaps it is a particularly important one for Meedan – after all we are strategically wedded to the idea that the web makes possible a more networked world in which information and ideas can be exchanged more freely.  That this debate has gathered such steam through the Arab revolutions is in part a feature of the newness of social media, but also the extent to... Read The Rest →

Nurani: How Meedan aims to promote deeper understanding between faiths

Nurani.org is a platform for dialogue between religious scholars, leaders and civic groups in two languages – Arabic and English. The product of a collaboration between Meedan, the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at the University of Cambridge,  the Coexist Foundation, and a consortium of universities and research centres, it allows members of the Abrahamic faith traditions to share and study their scriptures together. Nurani itself is designed for bi-lateral discussions between Muslims and Christians, though the underlying platform is being customized for three-faith dialogue involving Jewish participants. Nurani.org specifically aims to: enable... Read The Rest →

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