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 →
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 →
UK Research Grant supports Meedan web service to improve communication between religions
Meedan’s Nurani platform – a digital project to develop online dialogues between Muslims, Christians and Jews – has won a prestigious UK Research Councils’ grant worth $450,000. Developed with our partners at the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme and the Coexist Foundation, Nurani is a pioneering web service that enables cross-language discussions between religious leaders, scholars and civic groups in Arabic and English. The research grant, which is part of the highly competitive Digital Economy Programme, will support the creation of the world’s first inter-faith library of religious texts and the further... Read The Rest →
Questions the London Conference on Libya didn't ask: Notes from Belief in Dialogue forum
Most eyes in London were on Lancaster House today as Hillary Clinton joined foreign secretaries from around the world to talk about an international response to Libya. But just a stone’s throw away overlooking the Mall in the magnificent building of the British Academy, a different, but perhaps no less important, conversation was underway. The Belief in Dialogue symposium brought together scientists, theologians, political historians, policy people, and inter-faith practitioners to thrash out a model of the way in which religious and secular forms of knowledge and practice can coexist.... Read The Rest →
Lessons of Scriptural Reasoning for cross-cultural dialogue
Earlier this year, I was invited to sit in on a theological gathering at Cambridge University. With few expectations about what I was to experience, I turned up on the first morning armed with a pen and paper, and a cup of fresh coffee. Over three intense days, I watched scholars from as far afield as Asia, North America, the Middle East and Russia pour over passages of scripture in small mixed faith groups. Although the academic surroundings were familiar to me, I was to be exposed to a form... 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 →
Meedan in Plain English – ميدان بلسان عربي
How does Meedan aim to improve Arab-West understanding? Watch this video by Maya Zankoul to find out: And in Arabic: A BIG thank you to Mohammed S.Kayyali (from Hyperlink Podcast) who recorded the sound & translated the text to Arabic on a very short notice, and to SMEX Beirut for providing a flip cam to do the video recording. Related articles by Zemanta New English/Arabic Translation Site Hopes To Promote Citizen Diplomacy (tech.slashdot.org) Meedan puts machine translation into practice (guardian.co.uk) News translation website Meedan aims to improve Arabic-English relations (guardian.co.uk)... Read The Rest →
Meedan to build religious dialogue platform with Cambridge Inter-faith Programme
Meedan has partnered with the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme to develop an online platform for inter-faith discussion. We aim to produce a world-class, high-impact, web-based platform to aid discussion and promote understanding between leading figures in the Abrahamic Faiths. We envision a universally accessible resource for government, the press, educational institutions and the general public. We aim to build a ‘first port of call’ for inter-faith comment, analysis and discussion. The platform has two elements, each of which addresses a significant challenge to media designed for the web: (1) It will... 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 →