Reporting breaking news online: Lessons from #BostonBombing
As we at Meedan followed the tragic and dramatic events as they unfolded today in Boston through both mainstream media (BBC, CBS Boston) and social media (Twitter) we noticed a couple of things that are worth recording: - If you Googled the name of the second suspect, which was first announced by the AP at 11:45 UTC then there was plenty of information to be found right away. Within 60 seconds of the name coming out, we could see where the 19 year old had gone to high school, that... Read The Rest →
House of Translation Lecture Cairo March 12, 2013: Social Media Translation
I was honored to be a scholar-in-residence at the AUC under the National Center for Translation House of Translation speaker series earlier this month. For context on this series and the House of Translation, see my post on the HoT / AUC / National Center for Translation speaker series. Below is the text from this lecture and the deck I presented to accompany the talk. Of course the best part of the talk was the question and answer period, but, alas, I do not have that captured so this will... Read The Rest →
Meedan Cairo Lectures: House of Translation / AUC Translation Studies
I was honored to have been the third scholar-in-residence invited to Cairo under the House of Translation Series. The House of Translation is a joint collaborative initiative between the National Center for Translation of the Ministry of Culture in Egypt and the Center for Translation Studies at The American University in Cairo. This two week run consisted in two public lectures and an intensive workshop with 16 post-graduate students of translation studies. The seminar students were chosen from among almost 60 applicants, so represented the best and brightest of the new... Read The Rest →
Fahd from Transwikia at Meedan SF
Anas, Wasma, and I were pleased to have a visit today from Fahd Alhazmi, the founder and coder of the Transwikia project. Fahd is in the Bay Area to prepare for his Masters work in CS after having finished his undergraduate degree at King Fahd University in Saudi. For those of you who do not know about Transwikia – it is a project for enabling crowdsourced translation of Wikipedia articles. (Meedan’s WikiArabi project, which formally ran from 2010-11 but is still online, did not address the challenge of multiple contributors to a... Read The Rest →
Open Book: OER initiative for Arab Region
This past Monday January 28th, in the Franklin Room at the US Dept of State, Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton and Arab League Ambassador to the United States Dr. Mohammed Alhussaini Alsharif, convened a group of open education leaders to announce the launch of the Open Book Project. This project is an “initiative of the U.S. Department of State, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization and leading education innovators to expand access to free, high-quality open educational resources in Arabic, with a focus on science and technology and... Read The Rest →
Meedan Partners with Taghreedat
Today at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Meedan and Taghreedat announced a partnership to work together to promote Arabic Open Education Resource (OER) translation and localization. This announcement was made by Meedan’s CEO, Ed Bice on a panel shared with Taghreedat, Twitter, and Storify. Taghreedat’s other partnerships with international organizations include Twitter, Inc., TED, Storify and the Wikimedia Foundation. Taghreedat founders Mina Takla and Sami Mubarak meet with Meedan in San Francisco Taghreedat, is an inspired and completely volunteer Arabic e-content translation initiative supported by Abu Dhabi’s media development company,... Read The Rest →
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 →
UN Crisis Information Management Advisory Group (CiMAG) Retreat
We were pleased to be invited to participate in a gathering of the UN Crisis Information Management Advisory Group (CiMAG) – convened by the ICT4Peace Foundation and Dr. Soon-hong Choi, the UN CITO (Chief Information Technology Officer). Meedan was honored to be presenting alongside Alex Barth from Development Seed, Nigel Snoad from Google, JK Kearns from Youtube, Nathanial Manning from Ushahidi, Dragana Kaurin from New America Foundation, and Ryan Lancios from ESRI. The ICT4Peace Foundation was formally established in 2006 to ”enhance the performance of the international community in crisis... Read The Rest →
Meedan partners with Syrian citizen news outlet Al-Ayyam
Meedan is working with the news newtork Al-Ayyam to bolster public voice, free expression and accountability in Syria. In a joint initiative that is designed to be responsive to critical and fast-changing needs on the ground, we seek to strengthen the role of citizen journalists to act together as a watchdog documenting the actions of the Syrian regime and armed groups operating in the country. Our objective is to provide a model for an investigative, citizen-led media in Syria and a building block of future reconciliation efforts. The partnership is... Read The Rest →
Meedan Community Partner to catalyze4change.org
Meedan is a community partner to the the @catalyze4 effort – our good friends at the Institute for the Future have partnered with Rockefeller Foundation on this effort. On April 3, at 4 pm in San Francisco, Dr. Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation will be hosting a conversation with three Bay Area leaders to discuss innovative approaches to social change. We will be LIVE-STREAMING this conversation with Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the Level Playing Field Institute); game designer Jane McGonigal, and Shannon Spanhake, Deputy... Read The Rest →