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 →

Meedan welcomes creative talents to international web development team

Appreciating a good conspiracy, and with the strategies and performance of global NGOs undergoing a round of public scrutiny for reasons viral and bizarre, I want to address head-on recently circulated rumors that Meedan has a secret and unstated mission. It is time to lay bare our true intentions and own up to them in the clarifying sunlight of complete disclosure.  It is true.  Meedan has gradually transformed from a few pretty great ideas to a lot of really great people. So, while we are all together in service of... Read The Rest →

Meedan Translates Twitter

A couple of weeks ago here at Meedan we asked ourselves an important question: How can Meedan bridge the conversations taking place right now between Arabic-speaking users and between English-speaking users on Twitter? In our search for a solution, we decided that we should look to the structure of Twitter and to normative user conventions as means to maximise the potential impact of translated Tweets. Here we highlighted a number of avenues to explore: Twitter lists Back in January, Twitter rolled out its new Local Trends feature. Now users could... 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 →

How to Get Started with Your Cross-Language Conversation

We’ve produced some simple one-minute videos to explain how to get started on Meedan. Enjoy! On Meedan our community tracks and discusses major Middle East news stories by bringing together translated commentary and news from a wide range of Arabic and English sources. See how we do this in this video or at http://News.Meedan.net. Meedan is a cross-cultural forum for discussing the news across Arabic and English. On Meedan you can interact with people outside your language community by commenting on current events we’re discussing through our translation and dialogue... Read The Rest →

Feedback and Fixes after a Day in Public View

We’ve had a huge amount of feedback from our community in the past 24 hours after releasing the new look Meedan. First off, we have fixed the automated emails generated when you subscribe to another user, reply or send a personal message. Users noticed the links in these emails were pointing to the development version of the site rather than the real live site. I’m glad to say this is resolved – but if you experience any further problems with automated emails do let us know by emailing feedback [at]... Read The Rest →

Lessons for public diplomacy from the demise of the traditional corporation

‘The corporation as we know it, which is now 120 years old, is unlikely to survive the next 25 years.’ That was the prediction of Peter Drucker, made in an interview with James Daly in August 2000. If Drucker’s prediction is right, corporations have just 16 years to run their course in current form. The clock is counting. But what to become? According to Greg Oxton, Executive Director of the Consortium for Service Innovation, the corporations which seek to become dynamic networks will be more effective than those which remain... Read The Rest →

Social Translation: Benefits and Risks … join #Meedan IRC discussion

From next week we’ll be restarting our weekly meet-up on IRC at 16GMT on Thursday 30 July. The aim is to give you a chance to say what you think Meedan should be doing to broker a cross-language conversation. Each week, we’ll discuss a new topic with a new chairperson running the show. Topics could include our community plans, partner network, networking tools, content creation and more. Feel free to suggest a topic you want to discuss. This week, we’ll be discussing the benefits and risks of social translation –... Read The Rest →

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