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 [1] for the US election in 2008.
My personal web hub is Red Bluff Media [2], 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 [3] outlines my early history with blogging in general and Global Voices in particular.
My Lingua Tribute: Translators are not tools [4]
Please contact me if you would like to discuss any of these or other issues:
Email: at my contact form [5].
Skype: kevinrennie1
Facebook: facebook.com/kevin.rennie.3
Twitter: @Kevin_Rennie
Or leave a comment below.