Dear GVers,

I am pleased to introduce Connie Moon Sehat, our new project director for the News Frames project!

Connie has an unusual and diverse background, and should be a great complement to our community. She is both a PhD in history, and a nonprofit software developer and data architect who has spent much of her career in the digital humanities. She comes to us from the Carter Center, where she was the Associate Director of the Democracy Program, and developed the Open ELMO Initiative, an open source platform for elections and human rights monitoring. She was also the co-director of Zotero, the annotation and bibliographic software created at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Connie speaks English, German, French and some Korean.

Connie is getting started this week, and and is very interested in talking to GV community members about their workflow, experience in story creation, technology concerns and needs, and aspirations.

To remind you, the NewsFrames project will create a digital toolset and editorial process for rapid analysis of online media frames and trends in the world’s media markets, conducting research on global conversations, news and citizen media. We aim to produce digests of popular, important and under-reported stories by country and topic/theme, as well as stories based on the data and on real-world issues that result from the research. 

As we ramp up NewsFrames, we’ll be looking for community members interested in collaborating on ideas, structure, and testing of editorial workflow, and eventually, of the platform that we’ll be building together with MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media, where our co-founder Ethan Zuckerman is based.

We are excited to have GV community members and others interested in working with us share their experiences and participating in the development. If you are interested, please comment here in this post, or write directly to Connie at her author's page.