Flashing back to 2006

This week, we are marking Meedan’s 20th anniversary at a moment of profound global turmoil. The region where Meedan’s story began — North Africa and Western Asia — is once again convulsed by war, displacement, and the targeting of civilians, as conflicts in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran exact an unbearable human and environmental cost. The struggles that animate our work and our partners’ work — for human rights, for climate justice, for gender equality, for a safer and more inclusive internet — are not separate causes but a single, interconnected struggle against systems that concentrate power at the expense of the many. 

Threading through all of it is information integrity. Our collective work has never mattered more, and it has never been under greater strain. Disinformation continues to be a weapon of war, while algorithms are architected to concentrate profits and reward outrage. Governments still deliberately criminalize the act of witnessing, while AI rewrites the rules of what counts as evidence, as authorship, as truth itself. But if the forces of division are organized, so are we. The coalitions Meedan has built over the past 20 years, between hyperlocal journalists, human rights defenders, technologists, and civil society organizations on the front lines, are our own act of resistance and a reason for hope.

It is in this spirit that we invited Ed Bice, our founder who stepped back from leading Meedan in November after two extraordinary decades, to reflect on what this organization has been, and what it must continue to become.

— Dr. Dima Saber, Executive Director of Meedan

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The fact that Meedan has existed for 20 years is remarkable in itself. That it has done so within a framework that has prioritized kindness and creativity is, I hope, inspiring to others who might travel these roads. 

The idea for Meedan began on the first day of the Iraq War. That this 20-year anniversary (of our official IRS incorporation of the project as Meedan) falls on the beginnings of another major war in the region is just another indicator that the work of advocating for context and compassion is still (and perhaps forever will be) necessary. 

Meedan has chosen to work at the level of the knobs and wires of our digital meaning-making infrastructure, designing software and programs to help build context and understanding during those moments when information is most critical (and when information distortions are most prevalent). In the early days, this meant confronting a linguistically siloed web. With the rise of the social web’s attention circus, we were forced to confront the rise of hyperbolic, hateful, and harmful speech and the misinformation crisis that accompanied it. Now, Meedan is again in front of seismic changes in knowledge systems brought on by the rise of AI, coupled with the forward march of global authoritarianism. 

Throughout this journey, we have been alongside knowledge workers: the journalists, epidemiologists, open source intelligence investigators, and civil society advocates who’ve worked at the front lines of the information wars, often at personal risk. For as long as we live in societies that allow power to increase through force, corruption, intimidation, and deceit, the systems that are used to tell the truth of the world (and of its governments, corporations, and powerful people) will be controlled to preserve those interests. Meedan’s work is to chip away around the edges of this disease, to give knowledge workers better tools for truth-telling, and to hold in our organizational imagination a view of a world where transparency bends the arc of history toward a more peaceful and just world. 

Thanks to the hundreds of idealists who have worked at Meedan, to the thousands of partners who have worked alongside us, to the tens of thousands of knowledge workers who have used our software, and to the many millions who have benefitted from their work. May our 40-year anniversary find a world farther from war. 

— Ed Bice, Founder of Meedan