In this season for giving, let me point you to Global Voices Online, which aggregates blogs and other citizen-based media from around the globe. GV, a non-profit organization (I’m an advisor), has been supported in recent years with foundation grants, but it needs wider support. I’ve sent some funds, and hope you will consider doing so as well.
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on Dec 22nd, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I am supportive of the concept of Global Voices, but unsubscribed and stopped reading because of the proliferation of:
– Americans writing from other countries
– People from other countries writing from the United States
I would be more supportive of Global Voices if it featured *exclusively* people from other countries living in those countries and writing form them.
on Dec 23rd, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Stephen, ideally we want to hear from native people in their own lands. But expat communities have a lot to tell us.
on Dec 26th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Hi Dan, warm thanks for posting the appeal and making a donation.
Hi Stephen, I am not sure whether you are referring to any particular country in your critique. In some regions Global Voices certainly has fewer authors than others. But overall, it’s simply not true that there are mostly Americans writing on Global Voices nor that authors primarily live in the United States.
Our regional editors alone live in Trinidad & Tobago, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Bolivia, Canada, Hong Kong, Brazil, United Kingdom, Germany, Namibia, Taiwan, Belgium, Japan, Singapore, France, Colombia, Netherlands, as well as a few in the USA. And then there are those of us who live between several different cities!
Once you browse the list of authors you’ll see that people come from dozens of countries and sometimes have roots in more than one. http://globalvoicesonline.org/authors/
A lot of the people who are attracted to volunteering for an organization like Global Voices tend to be either global citizens who have traveled or lived in more than one place, or in other cases people whose only connection to the rest of the world is by writing about their own country in a global forum. The diversity of languages, religions, ethnicities, and nationalities in the community is something we celebrate.
Global Voices never made it a “rule” that people should be from one place or another. Diaspora blogging, travel blogging, expat blogging, bridge blogging, etc produce far too many insightful results for us to ever want to do that. Thankfully, there are better metrics. In the case of Global Voices, I think it’s far more important who people link to, and how they contextualize and understand local perspectives than where their computer is located.
Our translators’ community (Lingua) have produced a neat Google map of where our translators for 15 different language websites are currently located (just scroll down to see). We haven’t made a similar map for authors, but it would not look so different: http://globalvoicesonline.org/lingua/
Best,
Solana