CrowdVoice.org - Tracking Voices of Protest
This entry has been selected as a finalist in the
Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition competition.
CrowdVoice offers a new way to view, share, moderate and organize information about human rights movements and demonstrations.
About You
About You
First Name
Esra'a
Last Name
Al Shafei
Twitter URL
Facebook URL
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Mideast Youth
Organization Website
Organization Country
Bahrain, CAP
Country where this project is creating social impact
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
The information you provide here will be used to fill in any parts of your profile that have been left blank, such as interests, organization information, and website. No contact information will be made public. Please uncheck here if you do not want this to happen..
Innovation
Entry Form title
CrowdVoice.org - Tracking Voices of Protest
Select the stage that best applies to your solution
Start-Up (a pilot that has just begun operating)
How long have you been in operation?
Operating for less than a year
THE NEED: Describe the need for your solution and the size/dynamic of the community (ies) you will engage
CrowdVoice.org is a user-powered service that tracks voices of protest from around the world by crowdsourcing information. Users create topics for current causes and demonstrations. Users worldwide then curate specific content on these issues from various sources (news, blogs, videos, photos and social media) - often from on-the-ground sources. CrowdVoice gives both active participants and visitors front-row seats to current events that are happening worldwide, allowing even more people to become engaged spectators. It continues to raise awareness especially about the many issues that go unnoticed by amplifying the participants' voices. It also helps to quicken and organize the dissemination of assorted information and current news.
THE SOLUTION: Please explain what your solution offers and how it is innovative. How will you put your solution into the hands of users or beneficiaries? Be specific!
CrowdVoice made its mark with thousands of visitors when the revolutionary protests began in Tunisia and Egypt. Users of these pages were quick to curate various content, especially videos and photos from local sources. Collecting and organizing local videos and photos is important especially in cases such as the Libyan uprising, where the media blackout meant that even mainstream news outlets relied on YouTube videos and photos from local sources to accompany their reports. Because of this, CrowdVoice proved to be a useful tool for journalists as well.
THE MODEL: Walk us through a specific example of how your solution makes a difference through use of information technology and media
When the protests were taking place here in Bahrain, there was a media blackout and widespread internet censorship. Journalists were not allowed near the protest areas and foreign journalists were not allowed into the countries. Bloggers were arrested, beaten and interrogated. CrowdVoice collected an endless amount of resources that was then used by The Guardian, the LA Times, UN Dispatch, amongst others who credited the site for finding important sources of info from witnesses. Al Jazeera also profiled CrowdVoice on a program about how crowdsourcing and organizing this type of content is crucial to compile evidence of abuse in the protests in Syria. Fast Company also listed the young site in an article titled "Google's Journalism Prize and the 5 Groups who should win it" for its short-term and long-term influences on how projects like these can impact the future of journalism.
THE MARKETPLACE: Who are your peers and competitors? What challenges could these players pose to your success or growth?
We partner with as many people as we can find, and have a healthy relationship with both Storify and Storyful, the latter of which we are exploring an extended partnership with as we both focus on current events. The biggest difference is that both of these services use a method that is not crowdsourced by the public, and rely on users to curate very specific content from one user's perspective, instead of a larger approach that we believe is faster and more balanced in its scope. Instead of picking only a handful of sources, we also rely on thousands per page, where users have the ability to view them by filtering the types of content they'd wish to explore.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
FOUNDING STORY: We want to hear about your “Aha!” moment. Share the story of where and when the founder(s) saw this solution’s potential to change the world.
As digital activists who have been running grassroots initiatives for years, amplifying voices of dissent proved increasingly difficult. We thought that perhaps the popularity of sites like Twitter and Facebook might make this easier, but it partly added to our frustrations, as the information spread throughout these services was overwhelming and disorganized. Organizing the content was time-consuming and with more information it kept becoming more difficult to stream what was worth reading and what wasn't. During these human rights campaigns, we were exhausted and overworked. We needed to improve the way we were receiving and sharing news with our members and readers, and we felt the best way to do so was to involve an open community that could submit pieces of news that grabbed their attention and which they wanted to share. We created CrowdVoice to address this very need, because the tools already available to us were increasingly insufficient. We realized that apart from organizing the content, it was also important to diversify sources, as it's crucial for people to constantly be exposed to various perspectives on a particular issue.
Specify both the depth and scale of your solution’s social impact to date
CrowdVoice was initially intended to be for the Middle East, as this is where we are based and where most of our campaigns are focused. However, weeks after we launched, activists from countries such as Russia, China, Kenya and others were requesting invites as they felt the project was useful to them as well. The site was used in prominent papers in Russia, Germany and others and used as resource on where to find the best information about particular causes, namely the Arab Spring revolutions. The pages were shared thousands of times via Twitter and Facebook during these events and was also facing censorship from the governments of Yemen and Bahrain, however we offered our users ways to bypass this censorship and they were able to continue their participation.
What is your projected impact within the next 1-5 years? Is your idea replicable? If so, how?
CrowdVoice is open sourced, so people can use this concept and application to repurpose it however they want. It's already been the inspiration for several organizations in the works, such as PenPal News. The application doesn't have to be used for just human rights or activism, the source code is also being applied on a sports website to crowdsource news about sports events worldwide. We have an established community that we're eager to continue growing through things such as mobile applications, continued improvements on our user interface, as well as better ways to integrate with the growing number of social media sources, and finding a solid business model to sustain future development.
Winning entries present a strong plan for how they will achieve and mark growth. Identify your six-month milestone for growing your impact
Six-Month Tasks
Task 1
Mobile apps and making the site compatible for mobile usage and the iPad
Task 2
Better and more flexible widget for embedding purposes
Task 3
Toolbar for people to implement on their own sites, personalized for the causes that they follow on CrowdVoice
Now think bigger! Identify your 12-month impact milestone
12-Month Tasks
Task 1
Business model (customizing the app for other orgs or businesses for a fee)
Task 2
Bigger improvements on UI (more features)
Task 3
Better way to organize the topics by the languages they're available in
How many people have been impacted by your project?
1,001 - 10,000
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
Sustainability
Explain how your company, program, service or product is structured
Non-profit
What barriers have hindered the success of your project to date? How do you plan to overcome these and other challenges as you grow your solution?
Censorship really slowed down our growth and while it is possible to bypass it, it still requires a lot of marketing and a lot of networking with the activists who make use of this platform and providing some level of training on the various ways to access this site. We're going to be implementing a way to do this much more simply, such as hosting the site at different IPs so that it gets more challenging to censor, amongst other potential solutions.
How do you see the information-technology and media sectors shifting over the next decade? How will your solution adapt to and/or drive that changing environment?
At CrowdVoice we are huge believers in the power of information-technology as we have been implementing all our solutions online and we do our best to quickly adapt to all the recent tools and platforms and integrating the ones most useful to our mission. This calls for constant iterations and improvements and building upon the existing platform, which we have been doing for many months.
Failure is not always an option. If your solution fails to gain traction in the next two years, what other applications of the idea could you explore?
There are certain things that haven't worked with the very first version of CrowdVoice, we spent weeks making a lot of changes, and we spent the months after that making even more changes until the site gains more traction and membership. We'll just continue doing that until we get closer and closer to our goals. Failure is not an option for us and this is a big idea that has already proved its significance, so if at any time we lose traction we will simply keep growing aggressively until we earn it back. It's our philosophy never to give up on a big idea.
Expand on your selections, explaining how you will sustain funding
CrowdVoice has come a long way with very little funding. When no one believed in the idea of CrowdVoice or agreed to fund it, I emptied out my life's savings to get the prototype up and running because it was a solution for a need that I really needed. Since then CrowdVoice experienced tremendous growth and Mideast Youth (the parent organization of CrowdVoice) has gotten funding from respected organizations such as the Omidyar Network. We're using the funds to sustain the growth of our projects by providing our skills to other organizations and companies for a fee, as well as building for-profit applications (such as Naseemi.com) and exploring other business models or potentially lucrative partnerships, such as the one we secured with the sports startup that is using the CrowdVoice app.
Tell us about your partnerships
What type of team (staff, volunteers, etc.) will ensure that you achieve the growth milestones identified in the Social Impact section?
As a primary team, there's 4 of us, two of us manage user participation, one does outreach and moderation, and one does product management (taking care of hosting, development, security and product growth.) The number of volunteers however are numerous and we rely on their ongoing support by continuing to grow our community of active participants.
Changemakers is a collaborative and supportive space. Please specify any community resources you would need to grow and sustain your initiative. Select all that apply
Investment, Marketing or media, Collaboration or networking.
Specify any resources you might offer to support other initiatives. Select all that apply
Research or information, Innovation or ideas.
Please elaborate on any needs or offers you have mentioned above and/or suggest categories of support that aren’t specified within the list
Summary
Define your company, program, service or product in 1-2 short sentences
CrowdVoice.org is a user-powered service that tracks voices of protest from around the world by crowdsourcing information.
Identify what is innovative about your solution in 1-2 short sentences
CrowdVoice offers a new way to view, share, moderate and organize information about human rights movements and demonstrations.
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Comments
Esra,
I went through your site, and am impressed by the work you are doing. I recently had the opportunity at the Global Media Forum 2011 in Germany to meet a few bloggers/citizen journalists who were active at the onset of the Arab Spring. In my conversations with them, there was a common theme of how effective the citizen media can be when living with oppressive regimes, and to find a way around censorship. I am sure your solution carries impact in such an environment.
My question is regarding your plan for mobile apps. We at Gawaahi have been thinking of creating such an app, but wonder about access. Having said that, we thought it may be possible for those who can afford the app to record testimonies (as we do) of those who cannot get their voices across to the power-bearers.
Is access something you have been thinking about, and if yes, what is your solution?
Look forward to your reply.
Naveen
Hey Naveen! Sorry, I must've missed this comment. Hope you excuse the delay in getting back to you!
Access to mobile apps is always an issue, but over time it becomes less of an issue as these devices become more and more widespread. I think the challenge is primarily compatibility with the types of devices that the majority of people would have access to vs. the fact that they would have any access at all to such tools. I also think the Arab world in particular proved itself as "connected" considering the number of people who were actively publishing videos and photos from their mobile phones as more and more phones provided such swift access to these features. 10 years ago the protests here wouldn't have been as documented as they are today - completely bypassing state censorship and being televised to millions of people worldwide. I am sure we would have completely different footage of the Gulf Wars if people had the kind of access that they have today.
Access to mobile apps is always an issue, but over time it becomes less of a problem as these devices become more and more widespread (which is the case.) I think the other half is figuring out what to do when that ideal access level is reached, and that's just as significant. So to answer your question, yes we do think about access very often! But we think more about the level of access that already exists, and the kinds of powerful tools we can build for these users.
Hello Esra & Naveen,
If you are looking for access, we are the solution for you. On our globally innovative, technology-enabled, citizen media platform the local becomes global!
Kindly, take few moments to see our entry in this competition. 'Bolo'-The Human Voice Initiative (where local becomes global).
Regards,
Kamran Iqbal
Hi Esra,
The site is looking great! I love the integration with Facebook/Twitter. I was curious if you could give more details on how the site was used by newspapers and journalists? Also - what do you project your volunteer and funding needs will be for this project to expand in the next year?
Ravi
Hi Ravi, thanks for checking out the site and for your interest!
Sure, I will use Bahrain as an example for now. When the protests took place here, there was a media blackout. Journalists were not allowed into the countries and the ones that were here, had limited access to protest areas. For this reason, protesters relied on getting the information out via YouTube, tweets, images, blog posts, and the like. Some would include these in a CrowdVoice page that contains all of these sources in one place. This link would then be sent to journalists, tweeted out, blogged about, people would have the page widgets on their sidebar, etc. A reporter on The Guardian who was doing the live updates on the Bahrain protests said this about the site:
"Crowdvoice.org has pictures of teargas being used in Bahrain today and of injured protesters. It is a good resource for photos and videos of protests as well as links to news stories and reports."
Here it is being used on the UN Dispatch site and what the writer said:
"Crowdvoice’s Human Rights Crackdown in Bahrain is a must visit site for images and videos of the bravery of protesters set against brutality and depravity of Bahrain’s security forces."
The writer was crediting CrowdVoice for finding the protest videos and images, which were hidden between thousands of tweets or were otherwise not yet picked up by the mainstream media. It shows the power of amplifying this material, to serve as evidence of a human rights abuse, etc.
Al Jazeera also featured CrowdVoice.org as an important tool in crowdsourcing protest videos from Syria, and on its shows it featured a few videos from CrowdVoice on it. They also noted on one of their programs at Al Jazeera English that CrowdVoice was collecting important videos of women protesters in Yemen.
The LA Times also credited CrowdVoice in finding some of the videos from the Bahrain protests which they featured in their own reporting.
There were also links of CrowdVoice material from Russian and Italian papers online.
And on a blog called Cartography, which contains blog posts about the Arab Spring, etc, a writer said this:
"CrowdVoice is one of the best sites currently available for keeping track of recent developments in human rights movements around the world"
It shows how bloggers also make use of it, along with journalists, activists and anyone else looking for valuable information that would otherwise be difficult to find.
As for our volunteer needs, the site has been gradually growing with more content, thanks to our users. With more content comes the challenge of finding more moderators to help us maintain the relevance and accuracy of that content. As for funding, our budget is flexible because our platform is open source which allows other developers to adopt it, build upon it or repurpose it for their own needs or causes. However, the more funding we have, the more options we have in terms of new functionality (toolbars, faster engine, ability to feature more than just existing content on the web) as well as people we can bring on board to commit to ongoing development - which means we will have a much more solid product on our hands as a result, as well as a mobile optimized version. Wwe are currently working on a CrowdVoice version specifically for the iPad as it was a simpler challenge to tackle, but we're really eager for mobile compatibility.
We're also making various improvements to the site in the coming weeks to make the frontpage less overwhelming and easier to find content based on location or specific causes, and all of this could get done significantly better and faster if we had sufficient funding on our hands.
I hope that answers your question!
I'm a social activist and working for human rights, global peace, harmony,and education to all for a period of twenty years. I'm campaigning against death penalty. I'm very glad to join with you. Please visit www.facebook.com/saeedfalahi, www.facebook.com/haiyaalalfalahmovement, www.twitter.com/saeedfalahi
with well wishes,
regards,
saeed khan falahi, India.
Hello Saeed! We'd love to be of service to your cause. Feel free to sign up at CrowdVoice.org and creating a new 'voice' for the struggle against the death penalty in India. This will help gather information for your movement to increase further awareness.
Thanks a lot for yours quick response. I am going to do the same as you have stated.
Thanks once again,
Saeed Khan Falahi, India.
Thanks Saeed for your interest!
you are welcome. Yours support and cooperation is highly needed.
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