A Digital Newsroom where Journalists and Citizens in the Arab World Can Work Together
- Citizen participation
- Intercultural relations
- Journalism
- Information & communication technology
- Media
Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the problem outlined here? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
Meedan
Swift
Meedan
1‐5 years
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Start-Up (a pilot that has just begun operating)
Operating for less than a year
In January 2011, a week before the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Meedanis gathered at Meedan HQ in San Francisco were left frustrated at the lack of mainstream media coverage of the quickly developing situation in Tunisia. As our regional community of content producers and translators struggled to find high quality, original media reporting from traditional media, we turned increasingly to Twitter, YouTube, and TwitPic for the latest and best coverage of what was happening on the ground in Tunis.
As the wave of protests spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, and the rest of the Arab world, and as mainstream media struggled to keep up, we devoted our efforts to translating citizen media: Twitter on Curated.By; blogs on News.Meedan; YouTube videos and voice messages as principal partner in the Alive.In Egypt & Libya projects.
Meedan Swift is a project born of a thirst for citizen voices which are under represented by the international media. By working with media partners and by developing advanced translation & curation tools, we can help journalists in their difficult work of covering fast-breaking news situations, and help amplify citizen voices to a global media audience.
With Meedan Swift still in a startup phase, the main social impact achieved has been in building links with journalists and leading international and regional media organizations. Meedan will also work with Noha Atef, a leading Egyptian activist and social media expert, and Birmingham City University on the training resources and workshops for citizen journalists. We believe that working with these high-profile partners and collaborators will greatly enhance the social impact of the project.
Meedan Swift builds on the principles and technologies first developed for News.Meedan.Net project, which saw the world's first cross-language media sharing platform launched to help broker online intercultural dialogue. Visitors to Meedan can read about news events as covered by a variety of citizen and mainstream media, which always includes content translated from and into Arabic and English. Translated content from News.Meedan.Net has been published by The Economist, the Guardian, Time magazine, Wired and the Huffington Post.
Over the next 3 years Meedan Swift will expand into a second phase, embracing further regional media partners in a variety of countries and training more regional citizen journalists. Once expanded, the project will allow media audiences across the Middle East to access citizen media, which in turn will encourage more people to participate in citizen journalism. Meedan’s development process will be described step by step on the Meedan blog, for others to learn from and observe, and technology developed through the project will be open source, for others to use and contribute to. Although Meedan Swift focuses on media in the Arabic/English language pair, others are able to take the open source software and adapt the technology for other under-served language pairs such as Chinese/English.
Full-time journalists using Meedan Swift to produce daily citizen journalism-centered content for line and offline publication
Build an early iteration of Meedan Swift that stems from user research carried out with journalists
Source and engage journalists with a passion for citizen reporting
Set-up a project office in Cairo, housed within the media partner newsroom
Media partnerships with 5 publishers in at least 3 different Arab countries, further 1000 citizen journalists ready for training
Build relationships with leading regional publishers, demonstrating Phase 1 success
A Meedan Swift tool that fully meets the needs of Phase 1 media partners
Build an active and engaged community of citizen journalists and editors who contribute to the project
More than 10,000
More than 10,000
Non-profit
An important obstacle for Meedan’s first cross language news project was the highly complex codebase of the original site. This made it difficult to update and add features to the platform, which hindered the development process. Since 2010, however, Meedan has been working on creating cross-language web spaces based on the Drupal platform. Drupal is an open source content management system that allows modular development, making it easy to develop and integrate new features into a platform without compromising core functionality. Drupal’s community ethos also allows and encourages us to share any modules with anyone wishing to deploy or build on the work we’ve done.
At Meedan we aspire to drive change in the way the internet functions as a network for ideas. We believe that language is the biggest barrier to global knowledge exchange, and our mission is to tackle this head on through the development of online translation workflows. Meedan Swift will not only be fully bilingual, but will integrate translation solutions that will help translate citizen voices across Arabic and English. We also believe in the power of community, and an active and engaged community will be a central pillar of the digital newsroom.
Although Meedan Swift is designed for use in a media context, we believe that an online cross-language platform that empowers communities to gather round resource curation and translation is an invaluable and innovative tool, whether it be in a context of citizen journalism, open education resources, religious texts, academic abstracts, business localization efforts - the list could go on. Because all technology developed will be open source, whether Meedan Swift fails to gain traction or is a hit, other creative minds can adapt our ideas and work to find their own solutions.
Meedan Swift has received start up funding from the Swedish International Development Agency, with grant applications that would expand the project’s scope and impact also being considered by major funders. These grant applications are in close collaboration with leading international media outlets that would help expand the project to a global media audience. SIDA’s support over a 3 year period, means that the project will be scaled up to involve more media partners and wider training programs in more countries in the Middle East. With leading media publications using Meedan Swift tools and training for news gathering and publishing, the project could become self-supporting, either as a paid service provided for publishers or as a media services project syndicating content to publishers.
Phase 1 partners with Al-Masry Al-Youm, who will work using the tools we develop and publish Meedan Swift content in print and online. AMAY will provide office space for the project in their Cairo newsroom, ensuring that Meedan Swift is housed at the very heart of Egypt’s media community. Meedan has engaged tech non-profit Ushahidi as a technology partner, to work collaboratively on Swift River, which will be developed as the digital newsroom platform. Meedan’s training partner for the project is Noha Atef, representing Birmingham City University.
Meedan Swift requires journalistic and editorial staff, community managers, a training manager, a translation manager, front-end UI/UX developers and back-end developers. Journalists and editors will ensure that the community-journalism driven content meets the highest journalistic standards. The community managers and translation manager will manage communities of volunteer journalists, editors and translators who have been trained by the training manager and his/her team.
Human resources or talent, Collaboration or networking.
Human resources or talent, Marketing or media, Collaboration or networking.
Meedan Swift: A Digital Newsroom Where Journalists And Citizens In The Arab World Can Work Together