So here we are, bringing to life one of the many wonderful ideas brought up in the last Global Voices Summit in Colombo [1], Sri Lanka last December. After a few months of slow cooking, GV LIFEstyles is up and running!
We just published the first two post of this new ‘beta’ GV section:
1. Passport stories: the volatile nature of the human right to travel [2]. By Violeta Camarasa. So many people contributed in different ways to this story—it has been a blast!
2. A GVer's Guide to Taipei, Taiwan [3]. By Ifan Lin. This one is part of a series “A GVer's guide to…” based on a common form. Let us know if you'd like to contribute answering questions about your city/ the city where you live!
We are keeping the new section on the Community Blog for now, which allows plenty of space to experiment with new story angles, formats, workflows… You can find the stories under the label GV LIFEstyles [4]. Getting excited? Please come join us! There are many ways in which you can contribute to GV LIFEstyles: writing or translating stories, editing, sharing ideas and resources, discussing new formats, helping coordinate…
Why are we doing GV LIFEstyles?
There are many ideas behind the creation of GV LIFEstyles. Here are a bunch of them (we are not even trying to hide the mess): writing down-to-earth stories, with a global perspective, about things that have an impact on everyday lives, that come out of real personal or collective experiences, that can help readers deal with/take action when facing often abstract and frustrating issues, that help connect global issues to personal experiences… Voilà. Hope that gives you a feel for it.
So far, we have been discussing several quite diverse content areas (and the list grows every day): Global Taboos, Travel, Understanding Tech, Healthy & Ethical use of Social Media, Vicarious Trauma in Digital Times, Environment, Animal Welfare, History… Endless possibilities! Plus some of us are quite excited about discussing and trying out new formats, both in text or in visuals.
How are we working together?
When we were discussing the idea of a GV LIFEstyles section during the Summit, there was something else that came across: we wanted to work together, in teams and counting on the support and feedback of other authors. With this in mind, we have set up a Google Group [5] and a GV LIFEstyles workspace [6] on Slack, where we are already discussing and collecting ideas on a few topics: menstruation as a global taboo (Marie Bohner, Elise Lecamp, Violeta Camarasa and Weiping are working on articles about art related to menstruation), travel (Eddie, Elise and I-fan Lin have been working on a form to give tips about your city), Understanding Tech (Ali Khalil is researching about cryptocurrency- related policies both by governments and companies like Google or Facebook)…
We'll also be holding regular online meetings. We had a kick-off meeting on March 2, and we'll have two follow up meetings this week, on March 22 and 26. You are very welcome to join us [7]!