Global Voices Citizen Media Summit Keeps Giving

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 was held in Budapest, Hungary, June 27-28. As noted on the summit's website, the event brought together "the members of the Global Voices citizen media project and its wider community with a diverse group of bloggers, activists, technologists, journalists and others persons from around the world, for two days of public discussions and workshops around the theme 'Citizen Media & Citizenhood.'"

Evgeny Morozov provides a summary of meeting at openDemocracy.  Of the summit's attendees he notes,

The sheer diversity of countries represented at the Budapest summit - with bloggers from places as diverse as Mauritania, Colombia, Bangladesh and Tajikistan - suggests that the phenomenon they represent is indeed genuinely global. Even in places with low internet penetration, blogs can still have a significant impact in creating channels to voice dissent and influence wider media networks. Kenyan bloggers, for example, have built synergistic relationships with the country's radio journalists, who have come to rely on blogs for materials for their programmes, thus making blogs accessible (albeit indirectly) to virtually anyone in the country.

You can read the entire post here.

Joi Ito also posted an event wrap-up, saying of Global Voices:

Global Voices is a super-important part in fixing what I call the "caring problem". There is a systemic bias against reporting international news in most developed nations. When pressed, many editors will say that people just don't want to read articles about other parts of the world. This is because most people don't care. They don't care because they don't hear the voices or know people in other countries. I think that by providing voices to all over the world, we have the ability to connect people and get people to care more.

Read his entire post here.

For an up-to-the-minute peak into the event, take a look at the summit's liveblog archive.  Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman also blogged from Budapest.  Check out a couple of his posts here and here.  For summaries of panel discussions, visit Patrick Philippe Meier's blog, iRevolution.