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 →

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 →

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 →

Meedan wins International Press Instiitute News Innovation Contest 2012

Meedan Checkdesk, a platform facilitating collaborative journalism for Middle East new media, has been named as one of 14 winners of the 2012 IPI News Innovation Contest. The award will support Meedan designers and developers to tackle one of the very thorniest problems of the social web: how news teams can better verify breaking stories from the Middle East using citizen reporting. We are honored to count IPI as a funding partner, putting us as it does in the company of some very high profile grantees, including AFP Foundation, Media... Read The Rest →

Meedan wins multi-year grant to support citizen news curation in Middle East

Meedan has won a multi-year grant to support an innovative news project in the Arab world that will help put Middle East citizens in the driving seat of news gathering. The grant was awarded by the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) under its freedom of expression and democratization program. It will support Meedan to begin prototyping a news platform for citizen media curation in Arabic and English in collaboration with regional media partners. A leading daily newspaper in Egypt has agreed to take part in the first year, to be... 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 →

Middle East Protests: Follow Voices on the Ground

The protests sweeping the Middle East have taken much of the world by surprise. But perhaps that just means those of us outside the region need to listen better. We now have the opportunity to learn about emerging currents in societies in the region from the people who live there.  Social media and the emerging independent press give us that opportunity. So in an effort to help you discover new people to follow on Twitter, new blogs and columnists to watch and new Facebook pages to fan, we have created... 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 →

Meedan on YouTube: 5 videos to help you join a cross-language conversation

If you haven’t experienced a cross-language conversation and networking experience before, Meedan.net may throw up some surprises. It’s novel to most users that your comments are translated first by a machine and then by other members of the Meedan translator community. It’s also pretty fun to see your blog or article switch into another language. Unlike many other web services and applications, Meedan.net implicitly combines different roles for a successful experience. Middle East enthusiasts, journalists and bloggers may be drawn more towards posting links and writing comments. Arabic-English translators and... Read The Rest →

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