20Apr
Last week Meedan was a invited participant at a World Bank event called the “Innovation Fair on Conflict and Fragility.” The event was a mix of technologists, researchers and entrepreneurs in three days of collaboration in Cape Town, South Africa. Meedan was invited for its role as a cross-cultural platform for use in conflict resolution [...]
08Apr
Image via Wikipedia What happens when the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Business School get together 150 people for 2.5 days to listen to 53 presentations from the folks who are working to reinvent global education in the context of ’Preparing Children and Youth for an Interdependent World’? The product of this high [...]
26Mar
Nina Curley– The ArabNet conference in Beirut, Lebanon just wrapped up after a whirlwind two days, and Meedan was there to witness it all. Bigwigs gave newbies advice on startups and developing the right entrepreneurial mindset. Young bloggers tweeted cheeky comments and shifted the direction of on-stage conversation with their questions. Women represented in the crowd, [...]
26Mar
What are the ingredients needed to craft an appropriate moderation policy for a cross-cultural forum? That’s a question we’ve been trying to answer for some time. In many ways, it’s a question we’ll need to be asking as long as this project exists. Meedan obviously brings together people of very different linguistic, cultural and religious backgrounds [...]
24Mar
We’re delighted to announce that Mohammad Kayali will be joining Meedan as our Arabic Content and Community Manager. Starting next week, Mohammed will be working to improve the quality and range of our Arabic language media sourcing and translations, and grow our community in the Middle East. Meedan’s VP of Engineering, Anas Tawileh, said: “We are delighted [...]
18Mar
Yesterday I presented Meedan’s approach to collaborative translation to students at the Centre for Translation Studies at Leeds University, UK. There was a great turn out, particularly from Arabic students, and I was absolutely amazed be the quality of the feedback. We discussed Meedan’s approach and how to get started using the tools, and I tried [...]
17Mar
In anticipation of the forthcoming Alpha release of the new Kohana-based Swift River codebase on March 30th, Meedan is sponsoring a hack night and discussion on Friday, April 2, 2010 at 5pm, at the Meedan offices in San Francisco, California. Proposed goals for the open-invite evening include: getting the new app running locally on some developer machines making [...]
26Feb
We’ve produced some simple one-minute videos to explain how to get started on Meedan. Enjoy! On Meedan our community tracks and discusses major Middle East news stories by bringing together translated commentary and news from a wide range of Arabic and English sources. See how we do this in this video or at http://News.Meedan.net. Meedan is a cross-cultural [...]
24Feb
There’s been a lot of great discussion about Meedan this week since our Monday release which has helped get our message and our product out and about. But for users of Meedan who’ve known the project for some time, what’s different from the beta version? The great news is that we’ve taken account of user experiences to [...]
23Feb
We’ve had a huge amount of feedback from our community in the past 24 hours after releasing the new look Meedan. First off, we have fixed the automated emails generated when you subscribe to another user, reply or send a personal message. Users noticed the links in these emails were pointing to the development version of [...]
Chris Diehl, a friend of Meedan who works on machine learning at Lawrence Livermore and is at the Hopkins Center of Excellence for the summer, asked me if I would swing by Hopkins and give a talk during my epic east coast summer tour 2010. Having just met Chris Calison-Burch from Hopkins at the UMD working group on crowdsourcing translation, I did not hesitate to accept the offer.
The fear of speaking in front of an audience from an advanced research lab for an hour is a powerful motivator to put together some interesting thoughts and insights. I decided this would be a good place to put a bit more flesh on some ideas which run through the center of Meedan- thoughts on the multi-lingual web and the globalization of understanding, and on diversity in ideas and viewpoints being as valuable as genetic diversity in an ecosystem. So I poured some tea, invited the powerpoint muse to sit with me, and began the work. Then I started getting the IMs, tweets, and emails. “Ed, check out Ethan’s talk at TED.” ”Dear Ed, It was nice to talk with you last week about Meedan, I thought you would be interested in this TED talk by Ethan Zuckerberg [sic].” “I hrd @ethanz just gave an amzing TED talk.” Of course Ethan Zuckerman is a good friend and a long time project advisor. Moreover, he is not the non-evil twin; his last name is Zuckerman.
I clicked through to Ethan’s posted notes from his TED talk.
That was the talk me and my muse were working on…damn.
What to do??
Naturally, I hit on the idea of reframing and remixing Ethan’s talk. Searching for inspiration on this I moved from the tea to the tea leaves. Nothing. Undaunted, I put a kite up in the stormy skies of my imagination. The arc from the bolt of lightening to the key on my kite to the vision in my mind sent me running for google image search …unbelievable…remarkable.
It was immediately clear that I was not simply going to remix Ethan’s talk, I was going to remix Ethan himself.
So, I sent a tweet off to Ethan asking whether I could remix his identity, and, if so, under what license.
He responded, “CC-Zero”. So, having cleared the copyright issues, I set about remixing @ethanz.
It turns out @EthanZ is Ben Franklin returned, the Dalai Franklin.
The internet loves this sort of discovery. It also loves Ethan. I bet @dalaifranklin is even an available twitter handle. All forces are aligned. It would be perfectly ironic for a senseless meme to evolve to promote the work of the man whose work is showing the world how truly dangerous senseless memes are (to wit, Michael Jackson’s death diverting the global gaze from #iranelection).
With this I am suggesting that Ethan’s TED talk might stand as the 234 year refresh on the Declaration of Independence. Or, as I state in the slides,
Birthing/building a diverse, global, internet is the modern equivalent of Franklin’s work building the framework for the modern democratic nation state.
We are perhaps in an era in which the structure that defines the nation state might be less important than the structure of the system we use to distribute and access data and information. The challenge in our interconnected world bypasses the many to one structure of democracy, it requires a many to many system wherein the success of the system is primarily dependent the range and diversity of information or data sources accessed by nodes in the system.
This is the grand challenge and for the digital optimists among us this seems as good a time as any to find a Dalai Franklin and with him to chart a new design for global living, a Declaration of Interdependence.
Many people have questions about what Meedan really is, both as a website and as an organization. Visitors are often surprised when they find the link “news.meedan.net”, wondering where and what is the original meedan.net?
This is a logical question, so let’s first clarify that “news.meedan.net” is one of several Meedan projects, aiming to enrich dialogue and discussion between English and Arabic speakers based on news events that are important to both groups.
In short, this is Meedan. It’s a common mistake to think of Meedan as a news site: It may appear this way, but Meedan’s role is not to report or publish news. Instead we collect what is being discussed in English and Arabic on the web based on specific events, and present it in an easy-to-read format for readers of both languages. We translate every source in clear and simple language to make them available in both English and Arabic. This is the real mission of Meedan.
Breaking this language barrier is what benefits both people following the news and people who love to know what other people are thinking about events.
From a journalistic point of view, Meedan offers to curate what is being discussed in the press on both sides, taking key points from an article, and then to translate it and make it available to speakers of the other language. However, as an organization experienced in new media, our sources aren’t limited to the Arabic and English press. Our sources also come from the web; blog posts, Twitter posts, Facebook messages and forum discussions in both languages. Everything web users might produce as material related to an event will be used as a source for Meedan. This is where the strength of Meedan as a source lies, for anyone searching the web or anyone wanting to follow current affairs without fear of one opinion or point of view dominating the coverage.
But the work doesn’t stop with Meedan’s producers and translators. This is where the technology behind Meedan steps in, to give all its users the opportunity to add their own links related to the event for Machine Translation, which uses advanced technology which also allows continuous user modification and development which then feeds back into Meedan’s translation memory. Of course, your own personal comments are also distinct from the sources and links, and have their own place on Meedan events.
And it’s not only comments that can be translated on Meedan; we also have the IBM TransBrowser which translates the complete original source page from comments and links added to Meedan in a way which maintains the original appearance of the page.
Creating an account on Meedan allows you to access your personal page, which displays your translations, your activity on the site and your stats. In addition there is, of course, the opportunity to communicate with other users of Meedan, participate in events and your own personal blog badge. So it seems we have a mini social network too!
Meedan brings together all these ideas to provide a unique web service that allows participation in events, translation and communication, all with one goal: dialogue which breaks down the language barrier. Of course, Meedan has its own views about good dialogue: we always try to maintain the best kind of dialogue we can.
It’s true that we support and encourage freedom of expression and debate on Meedan, but – since language is at the centre of the Meedan project – we will always try to use a language of dialogue which is respectful and acceptable to everyone involved, whatever we may believe to be the truth. Calm and clear dialogue is what will lead us to becoming a better global community.
Translated to English by: Tom Trewinnard
I was at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina two weeks ago for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Collaborations for A New Beginning conference. The expectation was that some history would unfold over the three days, with a global audience assessing what Obama’s historic ‘New Beginnings’ speech had begotten. In spite of the very inspiring setting of the Bibliotheca and the equally inspiring projects described by the Director of the Bibliotheca, Dr. Ismail Serageldin, I am sorry to report, one year on, that New Beginnings has a translation problem. And if you think I am setting up a plug for Meedan here, you are mistaken. The translation issues were not linguistic, rather, they involved the crossing between actions and perceptions; the disconnect between the words that fell like rain to the desert on Arab ears one year ago and the actions since then which are perceived by the vast majority of those in region as inadequate.
But, contrary to the easy and popular assessment, I do not feel the perception is fueled by bad marketing on the part of the US gov; that the Muslim world is simply not aware of the many efforts which the Obama administration has undertaken. There has in fact been a great deal accomplished. Rashad Hussein offered a compelling list of achievements over the past year: Polio eradication, Science Envoys, Entrepreneur’s Summit, Mitchell’s efforts on the Peace Process, and Global Pulse, to name a few. Farah Pandith also offered a convincing overview of the administration’s commitment to building new relations with Muslims inside America and around the world.
Unfortunately, America has moved from the country that said the wrong things and did the wrong things to being the country that says the right things and does some very good things, but neglects to change the wrong things. As a Greek Tragedy in which fate moves countercurrent to the protagonists’ actions and history repeats a generational error, it seems an echo of the ‘mission accomplished’ banner was unfurled in Alexandria. The conversations I had in the hallways and in the cafes have hit home the only truth the White House needs to know about improving relations with the Muslim world: as long as policy (read Palestine, Iraq, Drones, in that order) remains stagnant, any efforts to improve access to capital, or dialogue, or knowledge that comes from the US government will be viewed in relief as evidence of capacity ill-applied. In this scenario even good works will generate ill-will.
Here is the newmedia flavored analogy: last week I talked to a colleague who was angered over a deliverable he did not receive on time. He received an apology and a lengthy excuse–too much work, no time, he was told. He also received 200 tweets from the overstretched engineer over the course of that week. Good tweets, but…their effect was to infuriate my colleague who otherwise would have excused the delay. OK, so envoys aren’t exactly tweets, but you get the point. The most powerful government in the world should be getting the peace process on track and leave the work of re-building citizen to citizen and scholar to scholar bridges to the vast network of NGOs, Universities, and Institutes who have ideas, the people needed to implement them, and who don’t have other, more significant, 40 year past-due deliverables.
What many of the conference goers did not know at the time is that Alexandria was in that week holding another, less subtle, tragedy one year from New Beginnings. While some facts remain unknown, a young Alexandrian named Khaled Said was dragged from a popular cafe and beaten to his death by undercover police just before our the gathering began. (Meedan put up a piece on Huffington Post with reactions across the Arab web.) In yet another marker on the time-line of new media fueling history, a single horrifying image of Khaled’s broken face circulating the internet and a Facebook group that has grown to 242,000, has touched a nerve in Egyptian society. Khaled has, in the past two weeks, become a symbol across Egypt and the Arab world, with a protest rally in Cairo on June 13, and another led by Mohammad El Baradei, the opposition presidential candidate leading a protest with several thousand people in Alexandria on June 26.
Meedan, as many of you know, tries to walk a middle line; we are trying to be from no country, against no country and working on technologies and platforms to weave together a more linguistically diverse set of thinkers and sources to create richer, more complex narratives in media, inter-faith, and education. We are simply trying to connect people, links, ideas, and data that might not otherwise be connected. But underneath this very even-keeled mission statement we go about our work with a great deal of hope and idealism. And when we see the hope which the world so deserves, hope held equally in a president’s speech and a mother’s dreams for her child, broken and failing, we have to admit to taking part; we have to (again) unfurl the small banner that reminds us that this is not what success is supposed to look like. Much work remains.
peace/salam
-e.
Once again, the events surrounding the Israeli raid on the Gaza aid flotilla shows the importance of the web in the flow of news and images between citizens around the world.
Certainly, this is a fresh reminder of the important role of twitter in providing realtime news and regardless of the technical problems, #FreedomFlotilla did trend on Twitter.
In Meedan, we gained an important experience reporting live on developments surrounding this story, adding a new component to traditional reporting: “live translation” – one of our key areas of expertise that hinges on collaborative, and almost realtime translation.
Of course, the challenge of translating in this way is that it crucially rests on teamwork in the community and constantly monitoring the most important sources in both Arabic and English. Meedan community achieved some real success in this, with multiple updates on developments and about 90 links shared across languages including important responses and various press coverage, all this in just two days.
This experience was very special and important at the same time. Creating dialogue and exchanging different points of view between the speakers of both languages from the media of each language is one of the most important tasks of Meedan which we are constantly working to improve in collaboration with our professional translation team.
At the same time, everyone on Meedan can take part in our collaborative translation. To get involved, all you need to do is register on Meedan and watch one of our tutorial videos:
How Meedan’s Community Covers Emerging Events
How to Post Links for Translation
How to Post Comments on Meedan
Meedan Search: Access Translated Links, Comments & Discussions on MidEast Events
How to Assign Yourself Translations on Meedan
How to Translate Articles on Meedan
How to Alert Meedan Moderators
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We’ve recently installed the Worldwide Lexicon plugin for Wordpress on the Meedan blog, and you should too.
It allows readers of other languages to access your content in their own language.
In our case, that means Arabic speakers who have Arabic as their default browser language can read our English language posts in translation.
Visitors to the Meedan blog whose browsers are set to Arabic can now read and edit translations of our posts.
WWL automatically offers a Machine Translation, or – where available – a human translation. Any reader can edit the translations on the page and improve them, much as we do on Meedan using the IBM Transbrowser.
Every translation is stored in WWL’s open source translation memory, and offered up whenever the translation is accessed by another user.
For more on how this works see this photo set I created demonstrating the steps to setting up and using the WWL plugin for wordpress or have a look at the wordpress plugin page.
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Last week Meedan was a invited participant at a World Bank event called the “Innovation Fair on Conflict and Fragility.” The event was a mix of technologists, researchers and entrepreneurs in three days of collaboration in Cape Town, South Africa. Meedan was invited for its role as a cross-cultural platform for use in conflict resolution and prevention.
Meedan is rarely discussed as having an role in conflict or violence — typically our work in aggregation and translation are understood as a journalistic effort. By contrast, many “conflict tools” or “crisis software” are focused on one of two poles:
1. “hot flash” emergencies, such as incidents of election violence or a sudden-onset natural disaster
2. “slow burn” crises, such as environmental problems or ongoing crime.
These terms, borrowed from our friends at Ushahidi, are useful for understanding the range of applications for new tools in the field of “crisis software.” To understand the role of News.meedan.net, I propose a third:
3. “Glacial” crises, such as cultural conflict caused by miscommunication (or noncommunication) across cultures.
Translation clearly has an important role in all of these types of crisis.
In sudden-onset issues, collaboration across languages is an especially important component of international relief work. (For example, in the case of a natural disaster like the recent earthquake in Haiti, one of the most important groups in the relief effort has been a dedicated team of translators working to get Hatian Creole into English and the various languages used by responders. So this is a strong example of how better tools are needed for rapid translation in crises.)
But the crises that unfold at an even slower pace, crises of culture, have haunted humanity over centuries, with its most devastating manifestations in outright war.
In this sense, Meedan, as a cross-cultural discussion forum, is at the far end of the crisis-response spectrum, and is addressing some extremely longstanding challenges. But despite the age of these problems, the perennial problems caused by the linguistic divide are not unsolvable. For the first time in history, we have communication technology such as machine translation, and collaborative techniques such as social translation. It’s our hope that these will be part of a deep and enduring movement toward collaboration and cross-cultural understanding.
What happens when the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Business School get together 150 people for 2.5 days to listen to 53 presentations from the folks who are working to reinvent global education in the context of ’Preparing Children and Youth for an Interdependent World’? The product of this high quality idea churn might take a few years to come down the pike, but the near term result of two days in conversation with this group has me feeling inspired, awed, and…well…educated.
I was honored to have the opportunity to sit on a panel entitled ‘Promoting Tolerance and Understanding Around the World.’ The panel was chaired by the great Henry Chow, former CEO of IBM China and a current Advanced Leadership Fellow at Harvard (who spoke about his interest in innovating new approaches to traditional Chinese medicine with roughly the same enthusiasm and energy you would expect from a 23 year old entrepreneur).
In terms of Meedan’s contribution’s to the event, I was–as I ever am–the one to stand up and talk about language as the inclusion/access to knowledge issue. I then bridged to discussion of social networks as facilitating, beyond access to knowledge, ‘access to each other.’ This is the promise of global education, namely, the ability for a diverse network of teachers and learners across the world to enable access to understanding.
Here are some notes from my talk- notes which were not read, but perhaps might resemble in some rough form some of what I actually said.
“It is an honor to be here for this gathering and I thank Fernando for inviting me to join
Today I would like to discuss the tangible, technical obstacles to global distributed learning, particularly those obstacles related to linguistic boundaries. I would also like to talk about changes that we see in the social web, implications that are fundamental not only to the range/scope of education and educational collaborations, but also to the form of these collaborations; to say, the evolution in the way that we create and share knowledge.
Meedan
The observations I will share have been gained over the course of a five year effort to develop the Meedan project. Meedan is the Arabic word for a town square, with Meedan.net we are enabling virtual town squares for cross language Arabic-English social networking and knowledge exchange.
Taking a lead from Peter Copen’s remarks yesterday–we do have a vision for Meedan, it is a big, irrational vision – and irrational completely; in the sense of being a vision that is technically, organizationally and culturally impossible. We only exist today because we have chosen to meet the charge with an equally irrational persistence.
The vision for Meedan from the start was the vision for social network driven translation communities where the common interest in access to information in a journalistic or educational setting would incentivize these groups to collaborate via the web to augment machine translation (MT) processing. We realized that MT was generally quite poor (in those days it was plain terrible), but supposed that the data we generated would create a powerful feedback loop to improve the quality of our MT engine.
In our first implementation, a media sharing site, news.meedan.net, this network of translators works concert with a distributed community of young journalists to weave together a global conversation that represents, and sometimes bridges, the many many narratives that generally surround a breaking news story.
I will briefly discuss some of the challenging elements of a cross-language exchange. I am known as one of the people who speaks with reporters about the real world application of Machine Translation technologies. When the first circuit board was etched and engineers began to pass complex queries off to uncomplaining machines, human quality automated translation was said to be near-term achievable. My organization has been engaged with Salim Roukos and his team at IBM research working on Arabic/English MT for the past five years. From the outset of our engagement with IBM we forwarded a wikipedia model for translation, allowing a distributed network of humans to collaborate, improving and revising the MT output. With this model we have been able to modestly scale the world’s first truly bi-lingual media sharing site. Our translators process about 300,000 words per month through our system (data that is used, by the way to improve the system performance). Translation itself becomes a social pursuit on Meedan. While anecdotal estimates right now have MT and translation memory systems bringing about 20-30% saving in translation efficiency, the fact that we are creating a feedback loop has me reasonably optimistic that we will see disruptive progress in MT over the coming five to ten years.
Meedan Inter-faith
We are taking this model also into interfaith scholarship, with a pilot project under development for Cambridge University and Al Azhar to network Arabic and English speaking religious scholars via distributed online professional translators. This inter-faith project will provide bi-lingual evidence that dialogue and scholarship can happen across language communities. Due to the sensitivity of these dialogues, we are using trained and vetted human translators to process these scholar’s dialogues.
Meedan for Education
What does the social web and translation technology mean for global educational engagement. A couple trends we should keep in mind:
1. The transition from the information age to the annotation age. In the evolution of catchphrases, we move from ’content (and in the educational domain substitute ‘curricula’) is king’ to ‘conversation is king.’ This is not the end of the classics and the fall of the empire of formal education, rather it is the ascendence to publishing of the real spark of learning, namely, the interaction that has happened in every great classroom since we started writing on cave walls. To say, the technologies that are redefining how we interact on the web seed forms of education that are more social, conversational, and creative.
2. The blurring of boundaries between formal and informal learning networks. Social networking enables persistent connections. The promise of global education is not simply enabling what we have called ‘access to understanding’ – the more profound pedagogical fall-out is the opportunity for the student in such settings to trade roles as the de facto teacher.
So, what does the platform for Global collaborative education look like? There is an opportunity to provide bundled social learning solutions to groups like iEARN (whose Ed Gragert is here in today) and we hope to engage a discussion with a network of private, non-governmental, and public sector stakeholders to explore and pilot these technologies in the context of classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher engagement. Building a globally networked learning community seems to us to be a fairly important piece of the broader work of wiring the world for understanding and tolerance. We at Meedan are pleased to be a part of the global conversation about the technology that might support this vision.”
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Nina Curley– The ArabNet conference in Beirut, Lebanon just wrapped up after a whirlwind two days, and Meedan was there to witness it all. Bigwigs gave newbies advice on startups and developing the right entrepreneurial mindset. Young bloggers tweeted cheeky comments and shifted the direction of on-stage conversation with their questions. Women represented in the crowd, even if not as much on the panels, and stood up for their voice. Palestinians were honored for their great entrepreneurial ideas despite being absent due to visa issues. The amazing Maya Zankoul produced fantastic cartoons of the conference throughout the day. And mostly, a lot of business cards were exchanged over brownies.
Here are some relevant highlights and questions for Meedanis:
– On Learning: Georges Harik, Director of R&D at Google and Angel Investor, noted that a great place for a startup to be in is where it has a core of users and can say what it has learned from those users.
So let us know: What do you enjoy about Meedan? What could we improve?
– On Value: Feroz Sanaulla, Director of Middle East, Turkey and Africa for Intel Capital, emphasized that one must first think about doing good, and then think about how to monetize your product. This sentiment was echoed through the Venture Capital panel: it’s important to first think of one’s added social value, and then conceptualize at some point down the road how to monetize this concept. (One example of this way of thinking might be Twitter; they are just releasing their business plan now, almost four years after inception).
What social value do you find in Meedan? What further social value would you like to see developed at Meedan? How could Meedan enhance its ability to “do good”?
– On Arabic Content: During the Content session, it was emphasized repeatedly that the world needs more web content in Arabic, since only 1% of the world’s internet content is in Arabic, while 5% of the world speaks Arabic. Additionally, Mostafa Kamel, the general manager at masrawy.com and Andy Abbas, Senior Director of Product and Product Marketing Management at Yahoo! Middle East and Africa noted that a successful social network will consist of mostly user-generated content, and a critical means of growing a network is to encourage comments.
Here at Meedan we are clearly trying to change the face of the internet by enhancing Arabic content.
What do you think we could do to encourage more comments?
A couple of controversies were evident at ArabNet 2010:
1) Ten Palestinians (six from the West Bank and four from Gaza) could not attend because of difficulties getting visas. While Mercy Corp in Palestine had facilitated visa applications for five in the West Bank and three in Gaza, none of the Gazans were able to successfully exit Gaza, and none of the West Bank residents were allowed to enter Lebanon. Since two of the Ideathon finalists were included in this group, several attendees suggested that they be allowed to present their ideas remotely. However, the internet in Lebanon remains too slow to make this a feasible reality. The internet at ArabNet was slow, although ArabNet managed to expand their bandwidth halfway through the conference so that it was decent. But this resulted in ArabNet consuming 1% of all available bandwidth in Lebanon at the time; a remote video conference would have been difficult. Hopefully next time this issue will be anticipated.
2) The question of why people were speaking in English at a conference aimed at promoting Arabic content came up repeatedly. Yet, as ArabNet founder Omar Christidis as well as several panelists and attendees pointed out, English is the international language of business. Additionally it was a practical if controversial choice; more members of the audience would require translation if the conference were in Arabic. The asymmetry in conference tweets also reflected this imbalance, since there were far more in English than in Arabic, but Meedan could correct this imbalance next time by potentially providing real-time Twitter translation.
I hope to see more Meedanis at ArabNet 2011! For now, you can read my cheeky conference summaries at @9aa.
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What are the ingredients needed to craft an appropriate moderation policy for a cross-cultural forum?
That’s a question we’ve been trying to answer for some time. In many ways, it’s a question we’ll need to be asking as long as this project exists.
Meedan obviously brings together people of very different linguistic, cultural and religious backgrounds – which makes moderation challenging in two distinct respects.
One, there are not obvious cultural norms we can draw on. And two, we are necessarily bringing together divergent viewpoints which are more likely to disrupt sensitivities in any one particular community – often without users even being aware of it when they post.
Add to that – our aim is to generate better listening and better understanding (as opposed to most many media outlets which seek to elicit shock responses) so moderation becomes particularly important.
In our existing terms, we say:
The Meedan project is designed to enable cross-language cross-cultural dialogue and knowledge sharing. We request that Users help us pursue this goal when taking part on meedan.net and use the site accordingly. We are particularly aware that the varying political, social, and cultural sensitivities of our Users demand we take an active approach to ensuring everyone can enjoy meedan.net as a respectful, inclusive online environment.
Perhaps we should go further.
I was introduced to some useful ideas on how to build better relations on the Interfaith Network for the UK: http://www.interfaith.org.uk/publications/buildinggoodrelations.pdf
I particularly like the following suggestions:
- learning to understand what others actually believe and letting them express it in their own terms
- respecting the convictions of others
- recognising that all of us fall short of the ideals of our own traditions
- always seeking to avoid violence in our relationships
- recognising that listening as well as speaking is necessary for a genuine conversation
- not misrepresenting or disparaging other people’s beliefs or practices
- correcting misunderstandings whenever we come across them
- being straightforward about our intentions
Could these approaches help with moderation?
One big unanswered question is how you expose the average user to this language. Most users don’t take much time to read Terms of Use if at all.
Maybe a pop-up or some explainer text on every comment page could help to normalize a conversation built on respect and a genuine willingness to listen and learn.
Please tell us what you think.
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Chris Diehl, a friend of Meedan who works on machine learning at Lawrence Livermore and is at the Hopkins Center of Excellence for the summer, asked me if I would swing by Hopkins and give a talk during my epic east coast summer tour 2010. Having just met Chris Calison-Burch from Hopkins at the UMD working group on crowdsourcing translation, I did not hesitate to accept the offer.
The fear of speaking in front of an audience from an advanced research lab for an hour is a powerful motivator to put together some interesting thoughts and insights. I decided this would be a good place to put a bit more flesh on some ideas which run through the center of Meedan- thoughts on the multi-lingual web and the globalization of understanding, and on diversity in ideas and viewpoints being as valuable as genetic diversity in an ecosystem. So I poured some tea, invited the powerpoint muse to sit with me, and began the work. Then I started getting the IMs, tweets, and emails. “Ed, check out Ethan’s talk at TED.” ”Dear Ed, It was nice to talk with you last week about Meedan, I thought you would be interested in this TED talk by Ethan Zuckerberg [sic].” “I hrd @ethanz just gave an amzing TED talk.” Of course Ethan Zuckerman is a good friend and a long time project advisor. Moreover, he is not the non-evil twin; his last name is Zuckerman.
I clicked through to Ethan’s posted notes from his TED talk.
That was the talk me and my muse were working on…damn.
What to do??
Naturally, I hit on the idea of reframing and remixing Ethan’s talk. Searching for inspiration on this I moved from the tea to the tea leaves. Nothing. Undaunted, I put a kite up in the stormy skies of my imagination. The arc from the bolt of lightening to the key on my kite to the vision in my mind sent me running for google image search …unbelievable…remarkable.
It was immediately clear that I was not simply going to remix Ethan’s talk, I was going to remix Ethan himself.
So, I sent a tweet off to Ethan asking whether I could remix his identity, and, if so, under what license.
He responded, “CC-Zero”. So, having cleared the copyright issues, I set about remixing @ethanz.
It turns out @EthanZ is Ben Franklin returned, the Dalai Franklin.
The internet loves this sort of discovery. It also loves Ethan. I bet @dalaifranklin is even an available twitter handle. All forces are aligned. It would be perfectly ironic for a senseless meme to evolve to promote the work of the man whose work is showing the world how truly dangerous senseless memes are (to wit, Michael Jackson’s death diverting the global gaze from #iranelection).
With this I am suggesting that Ethan’s TED talk might stand as the 234 year refresh on the Declaration of Independence. Or, as I state in the slides,
Birthing/building a diverse, global, internet is the modern equivalent of Franklin’s work building the framework for the modern democratic nation state.
We are perhaps in an era in which the structure that defines the nation state might be less important than the structure of the system we use to distribute and access data and information. The challenge in our interconnected world bypasses the many to one structure of democracy, it requires a many to many system wherein the success of the system is primarily dependent the range and diversity of information or data sources accessed by nodes in the system.
This is the grand challenge and for the digital optimists among us this seems as good a time as any to find a Dalai Franklin and with him to chart a new design for global living, a Declaration of Interdependence.
Many people have questions about what Meedan really is, both as a website and as an organization. Visitors are often surprised when they find the link “news.meedan.net”, wondering where and what is the original meedan.net?
This is a logical question, so let’s first clarify that “news.meedan.net” is one of several Meedan projects, aiming to enrich dialogue and discussion between English and Arabic speakers based on news events that are important to both groups.
In short, this is Meedan. It’s a common mistake to think of Meedan as a news site: It may appear this way, but Meedan’s role is not to report or publish news. Instead we collect what is being discussed in English and Arabic on the web based on specific events, and present it in an easy-to-read format for readers of both languages. We translate every source in clear and simple language to make them available in both English and Arabic. This is the real mission of Meedan.
Breaking this language barrier is what benefits both people following the news and people who love to know what other people are thinking about events.
From a journalistic point of view, Meedan offers to curate what is being discussed in the press on both sides, taking key points from an article, and then to translate it and make it available to speakers of the other language. However, as an organization experienced in new media, our sources aren’t limited to the Arabic and English press. Our sources also come from the web; blog posts, Twitter posts, Facebook messages and forum discussions in both languages. Everything web users might produce as material related to an event will be used as a source for Meedan. This is where the strength of Meedan as a source lies, for anyone searching the web or anyone wanting to follow current affairs without fear of one opinion or point of view dominating the coverage.
But the work doesn’t stop with Meedan’s producers and translators. This is where the technology behind Meedan steps in, to give all its users the opportunity to add their own links related to the event for Machine Translation, which uses advanced technology which also allows continuous user modification and development which then feeds back into Meedan’s translation memory. Of course, your own personal comments are also distinct from the sources and links, and have their own place on Meedan events.
And it’s not only comments that can be translated on Meedan; we also have the IBM TransBrowser which translates the complete original source page from comments and links added to Meedan in a way which maintains the original appearance of the page.
Creating an account on Meedan allows you to access your personal page, which displays your translations, your activity on the site and your stats. In addition there is, of course, the opportunity to communicate with other users of Meedan, participate in events and your own personal blog badge. So it seems we have a mini social network too!
Meedan brings together all these ideas to provide a unique web service that allows participation in events, translation and communication, all with one goal: dialogue which breaks down the language barrier. Of course, Meedan has its own views about good dialogue: we always try to maintain the best kind of dialogue we can.
It’s true that we support and encourage freedom of expression and debate on Meedan, but – since language is at the centre of the Meedan project – we will always try to use a language of dialogue which is respectful and acceptable to everyone involved, whatever we may believe to be the truth. Calm and clear dialogue is what will lead us to becoming a better global community.
Translated to English by: Tom Trewinnard
I was at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina two weeks ago for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Collaborations for A New Beginning conference. The expectation was that some history would unfold over the three days, with a global audience assessing what Obama’s historic ‘New Beginnings’ speech had begotten. In spite of the very inspiring setting of the Bibliotheca and the equally inspiring projects described by the Director of the Bibliotheca, Dr. Ismail Serageldin, I am sorry to report, one year on, that New Beginnings has a translation problem. And if you think I am setting up a plug for Meedan here, you are mistaken. The translation issues were not linguistic, rather, they involved the crossing between actions and perceptions; the disconnect between the words that fell like rain to the desert on Arab ears one year ago and the actions since then which are perceived by the vast majority of those in region as inadequate.
But, contrary to the easy and popular assessment, I do not feel the perception is fueled by bad marketing on the part of the US gov; that the Muslim world is simply not aware of the many efforts which the Obama administration has undertaken. There has in fact been a great deal accomplished. Rashad Hussein offered a compelling list of achievements over the past year: Polio eradication, Science Envoys, Entrepreneur’s Summit, Mitchell’s efforts on the Peace Process, and Global Pulse, to name a few. Farah Pandith also offered a convincing overview of the administration’s commitment to building new relations with Muslims inside America and around the world.
Unfortunately, America has moved from the country that said the wrong things and did the wrong things to being the country that says the right things and does some very good things, but neglects to change the wrong things. As a Greek Tragedy in which fate moves countercurrent to the protagonists’ actions and history repeats a generational error, it seems an echo of the ‘mission accomplished’ banner was unfurled in Alexandria. The conversations I had in the hallways and in the cafes have hit home the only truth the White House needs to know about improving relations with the Muslim world: as long as policy (read Palestine, Iraq, Drones, in that order) remains stagnant, any efforts to improve access to capital, or dialogue, or knowledge that comes from the US government will be viewed in relief as evidence of capacity ill-applied. In this scenario even good works will generate ill-will.
Here is the newmedia flavored analogy: last week I talked to a colleague who was angered over a deliverable he did not receive on time. He received an apology and a lengthy excuse–too much work, no time, he was told. He also received 200 tweets from the overstretched engineer over the course of that week. Good tweets, but…their effect was to infuriate my colleague who otherwise would have excused the delay. OK, so envoys aren’t exactly tweets, but you get the point. The most powerful government in the world should be getting the peace process on track and leave the work of re-building citizen to citizen and scholar to scholar bridges to the vast network of NGOs, Universities, and Institutes who have ideas, the people needed to implement them, and who don’t have other, more significant, 40 year past-due deliverables.
What many of the conference goers did not know at the time is that Alexandria was in that week holding another, less subtle, tragedy one year from New Beginnings. While some facts remain unknown, a young Alexandrian named Khaled Said was dragged from a popular cafe and beaten to his death by undercover police just before our the gathering began. (Meedan put up a piece on Huffington Post with reactions across the Arab web.) In yet another marker on the time-line of new media fueling history, a single horrifying image of Khaled’s broken face circulating the internet and a Facebook group that has grown to 242,000, has touched a nerve in Egyptian society. Khaled has, in the past two weeks, become a symbol across Egypt and the Arab world, with a protest rally in Cairo on June 13, and another led by Mohammad El Baradei, the opposition presidential candidate leading a protest with several thousand people in Alexandria on June 26.
Meedan, as many of you know, tries to walk a middle line; we are trying to be from no country, against no country and working on technologies and platforms to weave together a more linguistically diverse set of thinkers and sources to create richer, more complex narratives in media, inter-faith, and education. We are simply trying to connect people, links, ideas, and data that might not otherwise be connected. But underneath this very even-keeled mission statement we go about our work with a great deal of hope and idealism. And when we see the hope which the world so deserves, hope held equally in a president’s speech and a mother’s dreams for her child, broken and failing, we have to admit to taking part; we have to (again) unfurl the small banner that reminds us that this is not what success is supposed to look like. Much work remains.
peace/salam
-e.
Once again, the events surrounding the Israeli raid on the Gaza aid flotilla shows the importance of the web in the flow of news and images between citizens around the world.
Certainly, this is a fresh reminder of the important role of twitter in providing realtime news and regardless of the technical problems, #FreedomFlotilla did trend on Twitter.
In Meedan, we gained an important experience reporting live on developments surrounding this story, adding a new component to traditional reporting: “live translation” – one of our key areas of expertise that hinges on collaborative, and almost realtime translation.
Of course, the challenge of translating in this way is that it crucially rests on teamwork in the community and constantly monitoring the most important sources in both Arabic and English. Meedan community achieved some real success in this, with multiple updates on developments and about 90 links shared across languages including important responses and various press coverage, all this in just two days.
This experience was very special and important at the same time. Creating dialogue and exchanging different points of view between the speakers of both languages from the media of each language is one of the most important tasks of Meedan which we are constantly working to improve in collaboration with our professional translation team.
At the same time, everyone on Meedan can take part in our collaborative translation. To get involved, all you need to do is register on Meedan and watch one of our tutorial videos:
How Meedan’s Community Covers Emerging Events
How to Post Links for Translation
How to Post Comments on Meedan
Meedan Search: Access Translated Links, Comments & Discussions on MidEast Events
How to Assign Yourself Translations on Meedan
How to Translate Articles on Meedan
How to Alert Meedan Moderators
لننظر معاً إلى الحدث التالي المفصلWe’ve recently installed the Worldwide Lexicon plugin for Wordpress on the Meedan blog, and you should too.
It allows readers of other languages to access your content in their own language.
In our case, that means Arabic speakers who have Arabic as their default browser language can read our English language posts in translation.
Visitors to the Meedan blog whose browsers are set to Arabic can now read and edit translations of our posts.
WWL automatically offers a Machine Translation, or – where available – a human translation. Any reader can edit the translations on the page and improve them, much as we do on Meedan using the IBM Transbrowser.
Every translation is stored in WWL’s open source translation memory, and offered up whenever the translation is accessed by another user.
For more on how this works see this photo set I created demonstrating the steps to setting up and using the WWL plugin for wordpress or have a look at the wordpress plugin page.
Last week Meedan was a invited participant at a World Bank event called the “Innovation Fair on Conflict and Fragility.” The event was a mix of technologists, researchers and entrepreneurs in three days of collaboration in Cape Town, South Africa. Meedan was invited for its role as a cross-cultural platform for use in conflict resolution and prevention.
Meedan is rarely discussed as having an role in conflict or violence — typically our work in aggregation and translation are understood as a journalistic effort. By contrast, many “conflict tools” or “crisis software” are focused on one of two poles:
1. “hot flash” emergencies, such as incidents of election violence or a sudden-onset natural disaster
2. “slow burn” crises, such as environmental problems or ongoing crime.
These terms, borrowed from our friends at Ushahidi, are useful for understanding the range of applications for new tools in the field of “crisis software.” To understand the role of News.meedan.net, I propose a third:
3. “Glacial” crises, such as cultural conflict caused by miscommunication (or noncommunication) across cultures.
Translation clearly has an important role in all of these types of crisis.
In sudden-onset issues, collaboration across languages is an especially important component of international relief work. (For example, in the case of a natural disaster like the recent earthquake in Haiti, one of the most important groups in the relief effort has been a dedicated team of translators working to get Hatian Creole into English and the various languages used by responders. So this is a strong example of how better tools are needed for rapid translation in crises.)
But the crises that unfold at an even slower pace, crises of culture, have haunted humanity over centuries, with its most devastating manifestations in outright war.
In this sense, Meedan, as a cross-cultural discussion forum, is at the far end of the crisis-response spectrum, and is addressing some extremely longstanding challenges. But despite the age of these problems, the perennial problems caused by the linguistic divide are not unsolvable. For the first time in history, we have communication technology such as machine translation, and collaborative techniques such as social translation. It’s our hope that these will be part of a deep and enduring movement toward collaboration and cross-cultural understanding.
What happens when the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Business School get together 150 people for 2.5 days to listen to 53 presentations from the folks who are working to reinvent global education in the context of ’Preparing Children and Youth for an Interdependent World’? The product of this high quality idea churn might take a few years to come down the pike, but the near term result of two days in conversation with this group has me feeling inspired, awed, and…well…educated.
I was honored to have the opportunity to sit on a panel entitled ‘Promoting Tolerance and Understanding Around the World.’ The panel was chaired by the great Henry Chow, former CEO of IBM China and a current Advanced Leadership Fellow at Harvard (who spoke about his interest in innovating new approaches to traditional Chinese medicine with roughly the same enthusiasm and energy you would expect from a 23 year old entrepreneur).
In terms of Meedan’s contribution’s to the event, I was–as I ever am–the one to stand up and talk about language as the inclusion/access to knowledge issue. I then bridged to discussion of social networks as facilitating, beyond access to knowledge, ‘access to each other.’ This is the promise of global education, namely, the ability for a diverse network of teachers and learners across the world to enable access to understanding.
Here are some notes from my talk- notes which were not read, but perhaps might resemble in some rough form some of what I actually said.
“It is an honor to be here for this gathering and I thank Fernando for inviting me to join
Today I would like to discuss the tangible, technical obstacles to global distributed learning, particularly those obstacles related to linguistic boundaries. I would also like to talk about changes that we see in the social web, implications that are fundamental not only to the range/scope of education and educational collaborations, but also to the form of these collaborations; to say, the evolution in the way that we create and share knowledge.
Meedan
The observations I will share have been gained over the course of a five year effort to develop the Meedan project. Meedan is the Arabic word for a town square, with Meedan.net we are enabling virtual town squares for cross language Arabic-English social networking and knowledge exchange.
Taking a lead from Peter Copen’s remarks yesterday–we do have a vision for Meedan, it is a big, irrational vision – and irrational completely; in the sense of being a vision that is technically, organizationally and culturally impossible. We only exist today because we have chosen to meet the charge with an equally irrational persistence.
The vision for Meedan from the start was the vision for social network driven translation communities where the common interest in access to information in a journalistic or educational setting would incentivize these groups to collaborate via the web to augment machine translation (MT) processing. We realized that MT was generally quite poor (in those days it was plain terrible), but supposed that the data we generated would create a powerful feedback loop to improve the quality of our MT engine.
In our first implementation, a media sharing site, news.meedan.net, this network of translators works concert with a distributed community of young journalists to weave together a global conversation that represents, and sometimes bridges, the many many narratives that generally surround a breaking news story.
I will briefly discuss some of the challenging elements of a cross-language exchange. I am known as one of the people who speaks with reporters about the real world application of Machine Translation technologies. When the first circuit board was etched and engineers began to pass complex queries off to uncomplaining machines, human quality automated translation was said to be near-term achievable. My organization has been engaged with Salim Roukos and his team at IBM research working on Arabic/English MT for the past five years. From the outset of our engagement with IBM we forwarded a wikipedia model for translation, allowing a distributed network of humans to collaborate, improving and revising the MT output. With this model we have been able to modestly scale the world’s first truly bi-lingual media sharing site. Our translators process about 300,000 words per month through our system (data that is used, by the way to improve the system performance). Translation itself becomes a social pursuit on Meedan. While anecdotal estimates right now have MT and translation memory systems bringing about 20-30% saving in translation efficiency, the fact that we are creating a feedback loop has me reasonably optimistic that we will see disruptive progress in MT over the coming five to ten years.
Meedan Inter-faith
We are taking this model also into interfaith scholarship, with a pilot project under development for Cambridge University and Al Azhar to network Arabic and English speaking religious scholars via distributed online professional translators. This inter-faith project will provide bi-lingual evidence that dialogue and scholarship can happen across language communities. Due to the sensitivity of these dialogues, we are using trained and vetted human translators to process these scholar’s dialogues.
Meedan for Education
What does the social web and translation technology mean for global educational engagement. A couple trends we should keep in mind:
1. The transition from the information age to the annotation age. In the evolution of catchphrases, we move from ’content (and in the educational domain substitute ‘curricula’) is king’ to ‘conversation is king.’ This is not the end of the classics and the fall of the empire of formal education, rather it is the ascendence to publishing of the real spark of learning, namely, the interaction that has happened in every great classroom since we started writing on cave walls. To say, the technologies that are redefining how we interact on the web seed forms of education that are more social, conversational, and creative.
2. The blurring of boundaries between formal and informal learning networks. Social networking enables persistent connections. The promise of global education is not simply enabling what we have called ‘access to understanding’ – the more profound pedagogical fall-out is the opportunity for the student in such settings to trade roles as the de facto teacher.
So, what does the platform for Global collaborative education look like? There is an opportunity to provide bundled social learning solutions to groups like iEARN (whose Ed Gragert is here in today) and we hope to engage a discussion with a network of private, non-governmental, and public sector stakeholders to explore and pilot these technologies in the context of classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher engagement. Building a globally networked learning community seems to us to be a fairly important piece of the broader work of wiring the world for understanding and tolerance. We at Meedan are pleased to be a part of the global conversation about the technology that might support this vision.”
Nina Curley– The ArabNet conference in Beirut, Lebanon just wrapped up after a whirlwind two days, and Meedan was there to witness it all. Bigwigs gave newbies advice on startups and developing the right entrepreneurial mindset. Young bloggers tweeted cheeky comments and shifted the direction of on-stage conversation with their questions. Women represented in the crowd, even if not as much on the panels, and stood up for their voice. Palestinians were honored for their great entrepreneurial ideas despite being absent due to visa issues. The amazing Maya Zankoul produced fantastic cartoons of the conference throughout the day. And mostly, a lot of business cards were exchanged over brownies.
Here are some relevant highlights and questions for Meedanis:
– On Learning: Georges Harik, Director of R&D at Google and Angel Investor, noted that a great place for a startup to be in is where it has a core of users and can say what it has learned from those users.
So let us know: What do you enjoy about Meedan? What could we improve?
– On Value: Feroz Sanaulla, Director of Middle East, Turkey and Africa for Intel Capital, emphasized that one must first think about doing good, and then think about how to monetize your product. This sentiment was echoed through the Venture Capital panel: it’s important to first think of one’s added social value, and then conceptualize at some point down the road how to monetize this concept. (One example of this way of thinking might be Twitter; they are just releasing their business plan now, almost four years after inception).
What social value do you find in Meedan? What further social value would you like to see developed at Meedan? How could Meedan enhance its ability to “do good”?
– On Arabic Content: During the Content session, it was emphasized repeatedly that the world needs more web content in Arabic, since only 1% of the world’s internet content is in Arabic, while 5% of the world speaks Arabic. Additionally, Mostafa Kamel, the general manager at masrawy.com and Andy Abbas, Senior Director of Product and Product Marketing Management at Yahoo! Middle East and Africa noted that a successful social network will consist of mostly user-generated content, and a critical means of growing a network is to encourage comments.
Here at Meedan we are clearly trying to change the face of the internet by enhancing Arabic content.
What do you think we could do to encourage more comments?
A couple of controversies were evident at ArabNet 2010:
1) Ten Palestinians (six from the West Bank and four from Gaza) could not attend because of difficulties getting visas. While Mercy Corp in Palestine had facilitated visa applications for five in the West Bank and three in Gaza, none of the Gazans were able to successfully exit Gaza, and none of the West Bank residents were allowed to enter Lebanon. Since two of the Ideathon finalists were included in this group, several attendees suggested that they be allowed to present their ideas remotely. However, the internet in Lebanon remains too slow to make this a feasible reality. The internet at ArabNet was slow, although ArabNet managed to expand their bandwidth halfway through the conference so that it was decent. But this resulted in ArabNet consuming 1% of all available bandwidth in Lebanon at the time; a remote video conference would have been difficult. Hopefully next time this issue will be anticipated.
2) The question of why people were speaking in English at a conference aimed at promoting Arabic content came up repeatedly. Yet, as ArabNet founder Omar Christidis as well as several panelists and attendees pointed out, English is the international language of business. Additionally it was a practical if controversial choice; more members of the audience would require translation if the conference were in Arabic. The asymmetry in conference tweets also reflected this imbalance, since there were far more in English than in Arabic, but Meedan could correct this imbalance next time by potentially providing real-time Twitter translation.
I hope to see more Meedanis at ArabNet 2011! For now, you can read my cheeky conference summaries at @9aa.
What are the ingredients needed to craft an appropriate moderation policy for a cross-cultural forum?
That’s a question we’ve been trying to answer for some time. In many ways, it’s a question we’ll need to be asking as long as this project exists.
Meedan obviously brings together people of very different linguistic, cultural and religious backgrounds – which makes moderation challenging in two distinct respects.
One, there are not obvious cultural norms we can draw on. And two, we are necessarily bringing together divergent viewpoints which are more likely to disrupt sensitivities in any one particular community – often without users even being aware of it when they post.
Add to that – our aim is to generate better listening and better understanding (as opposed to most many media outlets which seek to elicit shock responses) so moderation becomes particularly important.
In our existing terms, we say:
The Meedan project is designed to enable cross-language cross-cultural dialogue and knowledge sharing. We request that Users help us pursue this goal when taking part on meedan.net and use the site accordingly. We are particularly aware that the varying political, social, and cultural sensitivities of our Users demand we take an active approach to ensuring everyone can enjoy meedan.net as a respectful, inclusive online environment.
Perhaps we should go further.
I was introduced to some useful ideas on how to build better relations on the Interfaith Network for the UK: http://www.interfaith.org.uk/publications/buildinggoodrelations.pdf
I particularly like the following suggestions:
- learning to understand what others actually believe and letting them express it in their own terms
- respecting the convictions of others
- recognising that all of us fall short of the ideals of our own traditions
- always seeking to avoid violence in our relationships
- recognising that listening as well as speaking is necessary for a genuine conversation
- not misrepresenting or disparaging other people’s beliefs or practices
- correcting misunderstandings whenever we come across them
- being straightforward about our intentions
Could these approaches help with moderation?
One big unanswered question is how you expose the average user to this language. Most users don’t take much time to read Terms of Use if at all.
Maybe a pop-up or some explainer text on every comment page could help to normalize a conversation built on respect and a genuine willingness to listen and learn.
Please tell us what you think.
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