Towards a meaningful and representative global conversation

Global Voices recently announced its new outreach project 'Rising Voices'.

This project will try to fix the imbalance in the so called global conversation:

"..certain regions of the world and certain demographics within those regions have benefited from the boom in citizen media more than others. Most bloggers and podcasters still tend to be middle or upper-middle class. Most have a college-level education. Most live in large cities. And of the 70 million weblogs now tracked by Technorati, 95% of them are written in just 10 languages. The truth is, what we often call the ‘global conversation,’ is a privileged discussion among global elites."

'Rising Voices' is currently developing a curriculum of multilingual, how-to learning modules which will assist workshop leaders and citizen media evangelists who want to explain to friends and peers how to start blogging, podcasting, and video-blogging.

And it has just called for applications for its first micro-grant ($1000-$5000) for outreach projects across the world.

The digital divide is narrowing but the participation gap is expanding. We need representations of more voices in more languages to stop the gap in the global conversations.