From the Summit: Unheard Communities and Addressing the Challenge

What voices are missing from the online conversation?

During the internal meeting at the GV Summit in Cebu, I asked that very question to the attendees during my Rising Voices presentation. I asked them to think about what communities are not very well represented on the Internet. We asked this because that is what RV seeks to help address. We provide assistance in the form of microgrant funding, mentoring support, and resource sharing to these communities so that they can tell their own digital story. On the Global Voices site, we also highlight interesting people, projects, and tools that share our mission of developing and supporting these new voices with the hope that it can inspire others to take steps to increase diversity on the web.

However, we need your help to continue to identify these communities and to think about what we can do about this participation gap. So I asked the attendees to brainstorm to name some of these communities in their countries or regions so that we can begin to map them. We would like to continue to work more closely with regional teams who know their parts of the world much better to spread the word and our resources to these local communities. There may also be other ways to get more involved, such as hosting a GV Meetup. You can see some of their thoughts mapped below. Click on the pin to see the community described.

We invite all GVers, especially those that were not in Cebu, to submit their suggestions through this form and we'll continue to update the map.

Submission Form

But let's not stop at simply mapping these communities. From this list, we want to help the regional teams to begin to tackle some of these challenges starting with conducting some research to see what initiatives are taking place around the world that are addressing this need. These might be topics perfect for Rising Voices blog posts as a way to shine a light on some of these communities. If there aren't, maybe there are things that we can do, such as outreach to organizations that are working with these communities to let them know about ways to help them to use the Internet to share their story.

Let's work together RV and regional teams to start to think about these challenges.

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