The Rosetta Foundation seeks volunteer English > Arabic translators to support translation for non-profits

Calling all English > Arabic translators and would-be translators – our good friends at The Rosetta Foundation are looking for volunteers to help translate resources for non-profits into Arabic. If you’re a translator who wants to give of your time to support non-profit work in the Arab region, or a translator starting out and looking for valuable experience, you can find the link to sign up at the end of the post:   The Rosetta Foundation works with volunteer translators to support the translation and localisation needs of non-profit organisations.... 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 →

Student engagement up as Meedan multi-lingual discussion platform gets a new look

Students of Qatar Foundation International‘s exchange program were discussing questions of space exploration, the environment, democracy, and technological innovation this week following a major update to the discussion forum they use to communicate, which is powered by Meedan. The exchange program alumni were logging in in record numbers and taking part more actively than ever thanks to a sweeping design refresh to the YALLAH platform (Youth Allied to Learn, Lead and Help), a three-language multi-media discussion forum. The design improvements, led by Meedan’s latest recruit to its creative team –... Read The Rest →

Google Middle East Regional Manager Wael Fakharany Joins Meedan Board

We are very excited to be welcoming Wael Fakharany, Regional Manager at Google Middle East, onto the Meedan Board of Directors.  Based in Cairo, Wael has over 20 years’ experience managing technology businesses in the Middle East and brings a wealth of business development knowledge that can help Meedan become sustainable.   We asked Wael some questions about joining the Meedan board, what he thinks he can contribute and where Meedan can bring value to Middle East web users in the years ahead. How do you feel about joining the... 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 →

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 releases update to participatory liveblogging service

Meedan has released a second iteration of its participatory reporting platform for Egyptian media partner, Al-Masry Al-Youm, as part of a multi-year project to support citizen journalism in the Middle East. The update further increases the visibility of citizen reporting in Al-Masry Al-Youm’s news output, and paves the way for the platform’s extension to five other Middle East media partners later this year as a collaborative verification workbench called CheckDesk. Its part of an effort to improve the use of citizen reporting in Middle East media. The platform enables citizens... Read The Rest →

Translating Tweets from the Arab Spring: Towards a Translation Workbench for Twitter

Think about the Arab Spring and you probably think about citizen media.  Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Bahrainis, Tunisians have not just been taking to the streets over the past year, but documenting their experiences in text, image and video – even building whole new social movements with a digital dimension. Has there ever been a historic moment of this scale unfold before our eyes through new media publishing tools? Surely this is inspiring to the rest of us who are not in the Middle East.  More than ever before, an American... Read The Rest →

Meedan & QFI release bi-lingual Arabic-English discussion forum at CGI

Meedan has released a new Drupal discussion forum for cross-language conversation, media sharing and networking. The site was developed with Qatar Foundation International (QFI) as a tool for the alumni of its student exchange programs. YALLAH, or Youth Allied to Learn, Lead, and Help, was developed to enable Qatari and American students to build friendships, learn about each others’ culture, and collaborate on community service projects. The site is entirely bi-lingual, using a combination of instant Machine Translation and human editing to produce translations for every post and comment between... Read The Rest →

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