CrowdVoice.org – Rastreando Vozes de Protesto

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.