-
- In: Design, maya zankoul, Team
- No Comments »
Mapping Meedanis: an inside look at Meedan’s distributed team approach
One of the great benefits of having awesome designers like Maya Zankoul on the Meedan team is that she makes beautiful things like this, which shows the global nature of the Meedan team: Looking at this magnificent map gives us pause for thought on how Meedan’s distributed team works and what we’ve learned from not only advocated for making the internet a better place for cross-cultural interaction, but from also practicing those values as we go about our work. Meedan currently has 17 core team working across 5 continents (+... 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 →
Meedan named as finalist in Changemakers Citizen Media comp, voting starts now!
The wonderful folks over at Ashoka Changemakers have named the 11 finalists in their exciting and important Citizen Media competition. It is a great honour for Meedan that we are among those 11, alongside some seriously cool projects. We really encourage people to head over to Changemakers.org/CitizenMedia to check out the first class array of ideas and innovators from around the world who have entered the competition. One of the great things about the voting system is that it allows users to vote for up to THREE entries – so... 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 →
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 →
Meedan welcomes Alaa Batayneh at Damascus developer retreat
Damascus is surely one of the hidden gems of the world. I say hidden because there are far fewer tourists here than the historical riches would suggest. The old city in particular is breathtaking – an endlessly fascinating labyrinth of narrow streets replete with shops, restaurants, Turkish baths, mosques and churches. It surely is a match for Venice, Paris or Rome. So I guess I have been very lucky to join Meedan developers Khaled Al-Hourani and Alaa Batayneh on a three-day development retreat in this beautiful city. An established talent... Read The Rest →
Meedan blog goes cross-language
We’ve recently installed the Worldwide Lexicon plugin for WordPress on the Meedan blog, and you should too. It allows readers of other languages to access your content in their own language. In our case, that means Arabic speakers who have Arabic as their default browser language can read our English language posts in translation. WWL automatically offers a Machine Translation, or – where available – a human translation. Any reader can edit the translations on the page and improve them, much as we do on Meedan using the IBM Transbrowser.... Read The Rest →
Meedan at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Think Tank on Global Education
Image via Wikipedia What happens when the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Business School get together 150 people for 2.5 days to listen to 53 presentations from the folks who are working to reinvent global education in the context of ’Preparing Children and Youth for an Interdependent World’? The product of this high quality idea churn might take a few years to come down the pike, but the near term result of two days in conversation with this group has me feeling inspired, awed, and…well…educated. I was... 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 →
Mohammad Kayyali joins Meedan as Arabic content and community manager
We’re delighted to announce that Mohammad Kayali will be joining Meedan as our Arabic Content and Community Manager. Starting next week, Mohammed will be working to improve the quality and range of our Arabic language media sourcing and translations, and grow our community in the Middle East. Meedan’s VP of Engineering, Anas Tawileh, said: “We are delighted to be joined by someone of such a great calibre, and one who certainly understands the trends and nuances of the Arabic web.” “Mohammad has a strong technical background, along with a passion... Read The Rest →