Georgia's 16 years managing Global Voices

BitDepth#1505

Mark Lyndersay

GEORGIA Popplewell is coming to the end of a 16-year stint as managing director with Global Voices (GV). Popplewell began engaging with the project five years before that when her blog, Caribbean Free Radio, began to get global traction through GV's surfacing of her work.

In a 2009 interview with BitDepth (https://cstu.io/1ec7dd), the project was described as "a way of using the internet to aggregate the many blogs and postings about countries that go unheard from when there isn't a war or disaster putting them in the news."

The changing landscape of the internet and the growth of corporate interests and walled gardens that thrive on harvesting personal data have changed the way that GV and the news business itself operates.

Today, the operation is "an international, multilingual community of writers, translators, and human rights activists founded in 2004."

The core mission remains unchanged and Global Voices continues to leverage the internet to raise the profile of under-reported stories.

Doing that has meant defining its role more clearly amid the hubbub of conversation online. Its Lingua corps of volunteers translate stories into dozens of languages. Spanish and Malagasy top the list of more than 20 subsites, each offering a direct translation of the English website.

The Advox team advocates for free speech, with a particular eye on legal, technical and physical threats to internet users speaking in the public interest.

Rising Voices offers training and mentorship to local, under-represented communities that want to tell their own stories.

Popplewell recalls the work that Global Voices did on tracking and advocating for Ethiopia's Zone9 bloggers (https://cstu.io/6e6c6e), four of them members of GV, and the first story in English about Russia's Alexei Navalny (https://cstu.io/a925a9).

"We focused more on under-represented voices, giving space to people whose stories are not normally told online. Our community has changed. Practically all of us who joined in the early days had blogs and many of us discovered Global Voices because the platform was linking to us.

"We are primarily volunteer. If a translator is doing something of their own volition, you do it as a volunteer. If we ask you to do something, we probably pay you, so translators are coming to the community with particular interests that may range from a personal interest to wanting to see certain stories in a certain language.

"There also people who are interested in certain topics. There's lots of people who are coming who are interested in human rights and they want to translate everything that relates to human rights or women's issues.

"We also have more researchers. We've been doing research on narrative frames and authoritarianism, so that's another cohort. We have a media development arm that's working on indigenous languages. We have many young people who want to speak indigenous languages, who are enthusiastic about getting online."

Global Voices has begun, with limited scope, to commit to its own reporting on subjects that are invisible to traditional media.

The Bridge was introduced in 2012 after considerable internal discussion and hosts features that go beyond the crowdsourced aggregation stories that have been the site's norm.

Popplewell came to the end of more than 20 years with Global Voices at the end of March, but is holding on until her successor is named.

"I'm stepping down from the managing director role, but I'm not leaving. The executive director and I made a commitment that after a certain number of years we would hand over leadership to other people. He stepped down in September last year. I describe it as Butch and Sundance, but with a big delay between the jump. I will revert to being a volunteer, which is the way I started.

"I would say it's the best job in the world. If I'd had to invent a job, it's probably the job I would have invented. It allowed me to work from home. It allowed me to travel widely.

"I'm kind of wanting to write again, not the best time to be doing that, and I'm glad that I'm not doing it as a 20-year-old. I did not plan this life. I'm doing more in real-life things. I've started sewing because in high school we never learned to make anything useful. I've grown to like sewing.

"I think one of the many consistent things (about Global Voices) is that it remains a place of kindness and decency. If you want to have good conversations on the internet where people are listening to you and not fighting, we actually kind of consider that one of our key values."

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there