GV Board Elections 2017: Kevin Rennie

Global Voices Summit Cebu Philippines 2015

With friends at Global Voices Summit 2015 – Cebu, Philippines

Volunteer Representative election

My background

My paid working life was as a secondary teacher for 33 years in Australia, concluding with 4 years at an indigenous school in Arnhem Land. I was an active trade unionist throughout. The environment, human rights and refugee issues are among my personal passions.

I have been an active GV member with over 200 posts since joining GV's Voices Without Votes for the US election in 2008.

My personal web hub is Red Bluff Media, which has a detailed profile, plus links to my blogs and videos.

My broad involvement has included:

  • helping the social media and community blog teams
  • volunteer sub-editor for English posts originally in other languages
  • mentoring less experienced bloggers
  • writing in a range of areas such as Rising Voices and Advox
  • attendance at 3 GV Summits, among the most rewarding times as online friendships became the old fashioned kind
  • representing GV as a citizen journalist at many conferences and events

The challenges

Much of the world is unaware of the great service that Global Voices provides. GV’s real strength is our teamwork and our diversity. Our community needs to explore and participate in ways of finding the audience our work deserves, and making our many visitors regulars.

Part of the volunteer role on the board should be to engage authors and translators in this task. I would like to see better access to and use of analytics. Who's reading our posts? How many pageviews do individual posts receive? Where from? What topics? How many return to GV?

My role as representative

My priorities if elected would include: spreading the word about our unique multi-lingual community; supporting members, new and old, in their personal and collective endeavours; and helping the development of our future directions.

I am a team person who can listen to the concerns of volunteers and help foster further discussions such as the recent ones about our future directions.

Reflections: (“It's the journey not the destination”)

I have shared some of my experiences here:

Bloggers Stir the Globe outlines my early history with blogging in general and Global Voices in particular.

My Lingua Tribute: Translators are not tools

Please contact me if you would like to discuss any of these or other issues:

Email: at my contact form.
Skype: kevinrennie1
Facebook: facebook.com/kevin.rennie.3
Twitter: @Kevin_Rennie

Or leave a comment below.

11 comments

  • I identify with your personal passions: The environment, human rights and refugee issues.

    Good Luck dear Kevin!

  • […] am also campaigning for Kevin Rennie for volunteer representative. He is a long-time member of the GV community, an outstanding team […]

  • Hi Kevin – here is a question that I’m posing to all of the candidates, as a way to encourage discussion during the last couple of days of campaigning. Even though you did list some challenges, perhaps you would like to expand on one of them?

    1.) If you are elected board member, what would be the most critical challenge facing Global Voices that you would make your top priority to help address over the next three years? And why do you feel like addressing this challenge is especially important for our community?

    • Thanks, Eddie. My response to your question:

      One of the major challenges facing GV is finding and keeping our audience. For example, during the last 12 months there were approximately 2,600,000 sessions on English language posts, 2,040,000 new users and 3,400,000 pageviews. 79% were first time visitors. This seems a lot but we are hardly in the major league. Nor are we reaching and keeping the audience we deserve.

      I suspect the stats are similar for Lingua sites but I haven’t accessed the analytics.

      45% of the readers are from the U.S. and U.K. but stories about these countries are much less frequent than we should expect. This is also true of much of Northwestern Europe. We need to find and encourage authors and translators in places where we have poor coverage. This is a task that must involve our volunteer community as we are best placed to reach out and network. We should explore innovative ways of spreading the word about the unique service Global Voices offers.

      Every language student, both at school and tertiary level, should know about Lingua and use it regularly. Approaches such as the dormant GV Education group could help us to connect with the many people around the globe who are looking for an alternative to the mainstream media.

      GV is the best news story of 2017. Let’s make it go viral!

  • “GV is the best news story of 2017!” Hear, hear! Following Eddie’s lead, I’m asking all the candidates a question too.

    Do you have any thoughts on how Global Voices can scale the trust we’ve built internally in our community to larger audiences outside of our community, so we can make more of the world look like GV?

    I don’t think there are any right or wrong answers to this question. In fact, I’m not sure I have answers myself (!), but would love to hear any thoughts that it inspires.

    Good luck in the election!

  • Hi Sahar

    Some quick thoughts:

    We could flesh out our ethical guidelines and publish them in an accessible form. Both readers and members of the GV community could make some kind of pledge or endorsement of these standards of citizen journalism. These could be shared on social media and our websites.

    At an informal level, we should try to communicate with our sources: bloggers, tweeps, Facebook users, and other onliners quoted in our stories. I always try to reply to all embedded tweets with the title and link to the post and contact others.

    Cheers

    Kevin

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