Georgia Popplewell has dedicated two decades to publishing local bloggers writing in 52 languages. What’s Global Voices fate in this strange era of the Internet? The long-time managing director of Global Voices joins the show to talk to her co-founder Ethan about the blogosphere of yore and why we’ll never stop needing global, local perspectives.
Georgia Popplewell is managing director at Global Voices and former host the fantastic podcast Caribbean Free Radio.
Transcript
Ethan Zuckerman:
Hey everybody, welcome back to Reimagining the Internet. I’m your host, Ethan Zuckerman.
I am here with a dear friend. I made the mistake the other day of referring to someone as a dear old friend. But Georgia and I have been friends for a very long time. Georgia Popplewell is a writer, an editor, a media producer. She, for the last 15 years, has been the managing director of Global Voices, which we’ll talk about today. She lives in Trinidad and Tobago, and in 2005, started the Caribbean’s first podcast, Caribbean Free Radio. She is a longtime blogger, social media person, media activist, dear friend. Georgia, welcome to the show.
Georgia Popplewell:
Thank you, Ethan. I’m delighted to be here.
Ethan Zuckerman:
We’re delighted to have you here. I will throw out the disclaimer that Georgia and I work together on Global Voices. I’m still on the board of directors of Global Voices. Georgia works on the project every day. To the extent that we have conflicts of interest, we’ve got all of them.
But I wanted to go back in history, Georgia, and talk about sort of the prehistory of your life online as a media creator. We started working together around 2005, around the onset of Global Voices.
What got you blogging and making audio and putting it online? What’s the path from you as an individual to you as sort of a media maker?
Georgia Popplewell:
Well, I did work professionally in media, in video production to be specific. I dropped out of a master’s program because I was lured by the opportunity to travel throughout the Caribbean. This is back in 1988. There was an opportunity that came up through the French embassy in Trinidad. Basically they were looking for someone who could make a video who was fluent in French and who could travel for three months. I was probably the only person in the country that fit the bill.
And the first year was only Martinique and Guadalupe, I believe. And the second year, they were looking for a non-French Antillean participant. But of course, it had to be done in French. So I spent five months in Martinique traveling around the Caribbean, making short films. And after that, I was like, no way am I going back to academia. This is too much fun. And camcorders had just come in. We had very early model Sony camcorders. So it was the point at which things were becoming miniaturized, kind of in a way, deprofessionalized. So this is kind of like a kind of like, you know, early echo of what would happen on the internet. And we’d present those on TV.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So you got sort of hooked on this ability to make media and disseminate it in video. So really, and this is an analog moment, right? This is really the core— This is analog. You’ve gone all digital.
Georgia Popplewell:
Exactly. I still have the tapes that I don’t know what I’d play them on ’cause I don’t own a machine that would play them.
And so I started kind of working professionally in video production. And eventually started my own company, left that, lived in the US for a while, did all sorts of things and continued doing video in various ways.
And then when the web 2.0 thing started happening, I was like, the one thing I have not been professionally, was audio, which is why I think I went for a podcast, apart from the fact of bandwidth, which in those days, if you did video, it meant that it was, had to be very low quality because otherwise people wouldn’t be able to see it. I had never worked with audio before and it completely freed me to think of doing something like a podcast.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So were you a podcaster before you were a blogger?
Georgia Popplewell:
I was a podcaster before I was a blogger. I had lots of friends who were bloggers, but I always saw the blog of the podcast as complimentary. I think my first blog post was probably show notes for the podcast. And the blog was called Caribbean Free Radio. So my entry in a way was sound. And I also, I mean, I’ve written professionally, I’ve been paid for that. And to this day, audio is the only medium I’ve worked at which I’ve never earned a cent.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Well, I mean, other than indirectly, right? Because in many ways it’s sort of, so you and I met, I believe, at, did we meet for the first time?
Georgia Popplewell:
In London.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Oh, we met for the first time in London.
Georgia Popplewell:
London 2005.
Ethan Zuckerman:
So a little bit of Global Voices history on this. Global Voices met for the first time at a conference at Harvard, hosted at that point by the Berkman Center, now the Berkman Klein Center. My dear friend, Rebecca McKinnon and I hijacked a little bit of a blogging conference to invite as many people from all over the world as we could. And shortly after that, we found ourselves running a blog aggregator and we started hiring people around the world who were prominent bloggers of one fashion or another. And I believe you were the founding Caribbean editor or Caribbean American editor.
Georgia Popplewell:
I first heard of Global Voices from a friend who said, oh, given what you’re doing, you would love this site. And then I started getting pingbacks from this thing called Global Voices. Because David Sasaki, then basically, he was a Western Hemisphere editor. It was technically Latin America, but he was covering everything that had to be covered in the Western Hemisphere. And one day David made an error in his coverage, an easy error, I will say.
Ethan Zuckerman:
As we all do, yeah.
Georgia Popplewell:
Exactly, and it was the parish of Jamaica had been devastated by a hurricane, the parish of St. Thomas, sorry, in Jamaica, had been devastated by a hurricane, And David kind of mistook it for the US Virgin Islands territory of St. Thomas. And I sent him a note saying, you know, just want to point this out. And he said, instead of pointing out errors, why don’t you come and take over the Caribbean because I know nothing about your region. And I started volunteering as a Caribbean author, first of all, and did that for about three months, David somehow persuaded you and Rebecca to invite me to the London summit in December 2005, which again, you’re all kind of like shoehorned into a Berkman event.
Ethan Zuckerman:
No, actually 2005, we actually got Reuters to pay for it. We met at Canary Wharf at Reuters headquarters and Reuters actually bought that whole summit, which is amazing. We never had a corporate sponsor help us out quite like that but blogs were real hot in 2005. Yeah, when I mentioned who I needed to be like all of the admin and all that basically Berkman organized it.
Georgia Popplewell:
But yeah no it wasn’t independent meeting but it was it was piggybacking on a Berkman meeting because remember there was also a Berkman meeting happening in London. After that meeting David somehow managed to persuade you Rebecca to create Caribbean editorship. So I, for all or three months I volunteered for Global Voices.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Which has gone on to be, I would argue, you know, perhaps our best covered region over the years. And I think a place that, you know, obviously, you know, given that we were crazy enough to hand over the Western Hemisphere to an American who’s got pretty good Spanish and a weird, you know, Japanese last name, but not to have francophones or lucifones or sort of anybody else. You know, sometimes the level of irresponsibility that we had early on in Global Voices ends up sort of
But let’s back up a little bit to 2005 when we started working together when you started making audio from the Caribbean, you talked about there being a big blogging scene, at least in Trinidad, was that really just the island or was it sort of across the Caribbean at that point? What was it like at that moment?
Georgia Popplewell:
Well, I guess it was big in comparison to the size of the population. And also there was a certain quality of work coming out of Trinidad that we weren’t seeing in the other islands. But you did have actually Guyana, which actually has a smaller population, had some really interesting blogs which went on for years. Barbados had a few, Jamaica oddly being the big anglophone territory did not have as much activity as we did for the South. And there was like a smattering of, there was actually some Dutch Caribbean stuff coming out. Not a ton from the French Antilles, and surprisingly in a way because in a way that we’re not connected enough with the non-English speaking territories. In my view, we could be doing a lot more to be, honestly, to be speaking other languages. But yeah, there just wasn’t a lot coming out of there. But in terms of the size of the region, there was quite a healthy blogosphere. And I think people were excited about the prospect of being able to talk about the places they came from in a way that felt authentic, that went against the stereotypes.
I used to say in the early days that if you Googled “Caribbean” back in those days, you were gonna get tourism, you were gonna get reggae, maybe some carnival, and then natural disasters, depending on the island, you may get a little bit of crime—there’s certainly a lot more of that today—drugs, that kind of thing. And of course, as we all know, that’s never the sum total of what a place is about. And I know a lot of my colleagues at the time at Global Voices were motivated by exactly the same.
Ethan Zuckerman:
But this motivation of how is our part of the world represented to the rest of the world is something that we hear again and again and again in Global Voices communities. We’re hearing it, particularly these days in indigenous language communities, people essentially saying, you know, we’re going to be invisible unless we find a way to do this.
Georgia, what do you think were the motivations for, I mean, I understand that as a motivation for you in amplifying these voices. What do you think were the motivations for people in Trinidad, for people in Guyana to start writing online? Was it that question of representation or was it about voices missing from local media, what is it that got people writing in the first place?
Georgia Popplewell:
I think it was both, but I think the opportunity to talk to a global audience was the, in a way, the more enticing prospect. Because at the time, when I started doing the podcast, a lot of people in Trinidad still had dial-up, if they had internet at all. So a lot of my audience was actually outside of the country and I knew that. And I knew that if I was doing audio, this bandwidth-hogging thing, I would end up with an audience that was mostly global. And that would certainly have been true of people in other territories.
So all the text was easy. But I honestly think it was about the global reach. All of a sudden you are sitting in this you know tiny, you know arguably insignificant place and you could be publishing and you could be read by the world. And the blogosphere was also a very tight knit community and the podcast scene was even smaller. Certainly the English language podcasting scene, you know, everybody knew each other, at least by reputation, referenced each other’s work.
That was, as we know as bloggers, that’s a thing you did. You linked back. And part of linking back was not always entirely altruistic. It was also to gain the attention of someone. And that happened. There was a lot of conversation. There’s still podcasters from other countries that I, you know, every so often we connect somehow online and say hi and usually kind of bitch about the current state of things.
Ethan Zuckerman:
I think this international piece is really interesting and worth looking at because one of the things that we were reacting to Rebecca and I when we were building Global Voices was just how incredibly Ameri-centric discourse about blogging in the United States was. I mean, everything was about how is this going to affect the US presidential election? Is this going to change US political power? The idea that there was a rest of the world was not something that that got talked about very often.
At the same time, that dynamic that you were talking about, which is podcasting was probably not the best way to reach your neighbors in Trinidad, you would have done a lot better becoming a DJ or writing for a paper.
Georgia Popplewell:
Or local radio.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Absolutely, yeah. But that ability to sort of talk to international audiences and people who could end up sort of hearing, What made you sort of realize that this was working? Was there like any experience early on in creating Caribbean free radio where you were like, oh, wow, okay, I’m actually having meaningful dialogue with people somewhere else in the world?
Georgia Popplewell:
Well, there was commenting those days. People actually took the time and there was community around the work you did in a way that is much harder to do today. But another, of course, the big reason for doing something on my own, as opposed to attempting to get a column in the newspaper or show on the radio was being able to set my own agenda. And I could do whatever I wanted, you know, on my podcast. Nobody could tell me, you know, not to do something.
But there was a, one of my regular segments or episode kind of templates was actually talking to a band, a musical band that I’m friendly with called Three Canal. And they actually, we developed this kind of relationship where I could use their music, and they would be on my show all the time and I would, you know, just do all sorts of fun things with them, you know, we’d, you know, walk around and, you know, do interviews and that was a really important relationship. And I think it, it, it gave me a kind of anchor in, in Caribbean music that was not, you know, the normal thing that people, you know, thought of as a standard Caribbean music.
One of the stories that I kind of really loved doing and would love to do again actually, do different versions of was after there was a fire in Port of Spain that destroyed a couple of city blocks. And I decided to go downtown and do what was then a kind of format in podcasting called the sound seeing tour, where you would walk around and describe what you’re seeing and have good enough sounds to give people an impression of what you were experiencing.
And I asked my friend Mark Franco, who is an architect and who also has a conservation bent. And it turns out that was not the first time that Port of Spain had been devastated by fire. There’d actually been two other occasions, one during which the seat of parliament had actually burnt.
And the two of us went down on a Sunday afternoon and walked through Port of Spain and talked about the current fire and kind of looked back and put it in the context of a city that has withstood and been changed by this thing. And I would actually love to do more of that kind of work that, you know, really gives, you know, really great sounds that captures the essence because back in those days, Arte was doing the French, the European media organization was doing some really great work in that area about just like the sounds of different places. And I I’m fascinated by that.
Ethan Zuckerman:
You’re also just making me very nostalgic for this moment, Georgia, where citizen journalism was a big thing. And sort of looking at something and saying, I know this fire in Port of Spain is gonna get like three lines in the New York Times and like maybe 10 seconds on the BBC. Maybe I can do something that is gonna help people realize people live here, people see things. You know, this is a real experience for a lot of people and deserves this documentation, deserves the narrative.
Georgia Popplewell:
Yep, absolutely. And of course, that’s a lot of what we are attempting to do on Global Voices with our coverage, you know, taking what are, you know, in the global scheme of things niche events. Of course, they’re not at all insignificant to the people experiencing them. And to bring them to the forefront, help people understand from the point of view of people experiencing these things, what it’s like to be there
Ethan Zuckerman:
So 18 years into your involvement with Global Voices, 15 years as managing director, let me just say, I only have 19 years of involvement with Global Voices and not nearly at the level of intensity that you have had. What’s Global Voices?
Georgia Popplewell:
That’s a really good question. And we, different people answer in different ways. And of course a lot of it depends on who you’re talking to and what they, the way they understand things. But Global Voices is basically a community. It’s also a network of people who have come together to use the internet to deepen understanding of the experiences of ordinary people in the world. Ordinary as in people who are not journalists, politicians, et cetera. Although we do have journalists in the community.
And we have done that by privileging the involvement in the community of people who live in the places they report on, who speak the languages that they– that are spoken in the places that they report on, so that they have access to information, and it’s kind of from the horse’s mouth in a way.
We also have, since its inception, added media development arm called Rising Voices. I use media development in the broadest sense. We have done different things in Rising Voices from grant making to communities of people who want to use the internet to further their work and whatever way they want. These days, that section is doing most of its impactful work on indigenous language development and activism. A lot of it through creating networks of peers in Latin America and other parts of the world. We also have a digital rights section called Advox, which used to be called Global Voices Advocacy. We can understand why we chose to get a snappier name.
Ethan Zuckerman:
A bit of a mouthful at a certain point, yes.
Georgia Popplewell:
Exactly. And Advox reports on digital rights issues, has done some campaigning, reports on digital rights policy and corporate policy and things like that. And these days is doing a lot of research on things like narrative formation and digital authoritarianism. We also translate our work into 30 plus languages. That’s why it takes a while. I mean, we are yet to work out the elevator pitch although we practice.
Ethan Zuckerman:
It takes a while. You and I were in a board meeting in New York not very long ago where we spent the better part two days trying to answer the question, what does global voices do? I love that you described it as a community and a network first. I was waiting for the word conspiracy to come in there.
Georgia Popplewell:
But that’s for other people to say.
Ethan Zuckerman:
That might be for other people to say. But this is a surprisingly successful and robust project. This has been going for 19 years. We’re hoping to celebrate our 20th year next year. We’ve had the grace of many funders around the world who chipped in to support this from progressive foundations to corporations to different national governments to individuals writing checks. What we’ve mostly had though is generations of people willing to put in an enormous amount of time as volunteers because it’s mostly a volunteer organization. The organization involves about a thousand people but has a budget of about a million US dollars a year. So there’s no way you can sort of pay for everything. From your perspective leading this community, managing this community.
Talk a little bit about how this desire to sort of make media and make a mark in the world. How has that changed from 2005 to today? You’ve really had a front row seat for 18 years of this. And that’s a period during which essentially social media got invented. What’s happened, Georgia?
Georgia Popplewell:
Well, first of all, I wanna say but I do not lead this community-slash-network-slash-organization by myself. My colleague Ivan Sigal, who’s the executive director, really has been the person that’s kept Global Voices alive.
Ethan Zuckerman:
And Rebecca and I, who are increasingly uncomfortable with the title co-founders of Global Voices, have told both you and Ivan that we now consider you two to be the other two co-founders of this. So you and I on this call here are really sort of two of the four.
Georgia Popplewell:
Exactly, yeah.
Ethan Zuckerman:
But admitting that we’re all sort of sharing responsibility here and hat tips and love to Ivan and Rebecca.
Georgia Popplewell:
Absolutely.
Ethan Zuckerman:
The question still goes to you.
Georgia Popplewell:
Yeah, well, yes. So we have had a front row seat, as you say, on the evolution of the space that we know that we love, for better or for worse. And it has not been a comfortable ride, especially for those of us who actually remember the time, like in the 90s when there was a kind of resistance to corporatization of the internet. It was like, oh, making money off things that happened online was actually frowned upon. We’ve reached the point where it’s like, you know, that’s the, that’s the norm.
But the, the rise of social media, I, and I discuss this with, you know, other bloggers from time to time, has not been a comfortable one for, for those of us who were online early. And it’s really, you know, I have very mixed feelings about, about saying that because the whole, you know, democratization of a space is, you know, in theory, good thing. So the idea that I, you know, especially people who are podcasting were actually narrow casting to a very elite audience of people and we were talking you know amongst each other that’s you know I can you know be very nostalgic about that while also understanding that that was not a it was first one never going to last and it wasn’t you know desirable.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Do you feel like it’s become more democratic? I was going to say, more dramatic. Do you feel, yeah, how is that aspect of things changed?
Georgia Popplewell:
It’s umm… What is democracy? But it’s certainly more dramatic. The idea that more people have access to, you know, a megaphone is, I guess, it’s democratic. Does it work? Is it useful? Is it helpful? Those are questions I think we’re all asking. And is it sustainable as well as a space? We have seen that it’s tearing itself apart. It’s imploding and exploding at the same time. So it has really been crazy and has felt, to be honest. It has felt like a kind of decline. I have, I’m less on social media than I ever was these days. I am more reluctant to express opinions online, not simply because I am afraid to do so. I just don’t want to have arguments with strangers. And it’s not how I want to spend my time.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Which is interesting because early on in the blogosphere, we were strangers, but we were a little less strange because you could go read someone’s blog and sort of understand where she or he was coming from. And now we’re both sort of all very online, but often in ways that aren’t as deep or revelatory.
Georgia Popplewell:
Yes, absolutely. That’s the thing, you know, and when you were selecting people to be involved with Global Voices from the early, you know, don’t, you know, you were scanning their blogs for tone and maturity and things like that. You were not inviting, you know, well, the population of trolls was not as big, but you were not going to, you know, be inviting the conspiracy theorist blogger to join.
Ethan Zuckerman:
We’ve had our share and some of them have even turned out to write for very good international news networks.
Georgia Popplewell:
Exactly, yeah. But yeah, so there was a way, as you say, in which you knew who you were dealing with. You know, you don’t know that on Twitter or Facebook or Reddit. Unless you have been on these platforms for a long time and have kind of like kept track of people. And then it’s just like, it’s also the mass of people. It’s really hard to kind of scan these platforms for things.
Peopl who were blogging back in the day were all kind of frustrated writers who kind of had time to spend and who loved writing. So there was a lot of self-revelation and there was a kind of like a kind of emphasis on, you know, making arguments kind of that were cogent. If not, you just weren’t going to get read or commented on or, you know, linked to.
Ethan Zuckerman:
You know, I get very frustrated sometimes because I early on in Global Voices really believed that somehow we were going to transform the global media system to pay a lot more attention to voices from the global south. Can you convince me that we haven’t failed terribly over the last 19 years, 18 of which have been with your significant involvement?
Georgia Popplewell:
I think we have done, I hate the best you can do. So I’m not gonna say that. I think the fact that GV is still alive, that we actually have better, as good or as better kind of traffic than some of our kind of, I don’t want to say rival, but—
Ethan Zuckerman:
Commercial competitors?
Georgia Popplewell:
Commercial competitors. I think that’s proof that people are reading. I mean, nobody is reading, nobody’s being read by everyone. Granted, they are, we know that in the New York Times is like read by a lot of people and it’s highly influential and certain other publications. But there are actually relatively few media outlets that have that kind of reach certainly outside of the US. I think given our size, our budgets, the fact that we are primarily volunteer, I think GV has actually made its mark.
Many of the people, the organizations that came up with us, you know, no longer exist. And say what you want about our model. We, people in our community, they treat each other decently. It’s like, one of the last bastions of kindness on the internet. Sometimes people think we’re, you know, we say, oh, it’s all too nice. I am looking for nice in this day and age. And I think a lot of people join Global Voices and stay because it is a place where you can come, you can express an opinion. Granted, Global Voices does kind of self-select for progressives. We aren’t trolls and fascists aren’t flocking.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Although some passionate patriotism and nationalism within progressives, which is actually kind of a cool mix, Right? Like generally speaking, people who are enormously proud of the places they come from, the cultures they represent, even while they’re critical of them and often open to a whole lot of others. As an American, you know, nationalism has never been comfortable for me, and it’s been super interesting to watch it periodically be a very powerful force within our community.
Georgia Popplewell:
Absolutely. And we’ve seen, for instance, the reaction to Ukraine. And some of our coverage has been interesting on that score. We have had, for instance, there’s a piece about India’s ambivalence, not necessarily with the person writing it agreed. But they understood. In fact, one of our associate editors, her mother’s a geophysicist. And she said a lot of the textbooks that her mother used were from Russia. And that was the physics. It was, you know, as a scientist in the developing world were Russia oriented, especially during the time of the non-line movement and all that. So the complexity of feelings around support, this kind of support for Ukraine that the West was requiring, we actually had a front-row seat to that in a very thoughtful way.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Let me throw a curveball at you. I ended up discovering recently playing around with a little tool developed by The Washington Post that global voices is in the top thousand websites being used to train artificial intelligences. And so whether this is Google’s Bard project or Facebook’s Llama project, we don’t know for sure, but there’s a very good chance that OpenAI has also trained on Global Voices. Global Voices has created hundreds of thousands of texts in many, many different languages because we translate between 30 different languages. How do you feel about that?
Georgia Popplewell:
I’m glad that there’s quality text being trained on, first of all. So I, you know, global voices, you know, one of our key principles is openness. And we are, we publish our work under the most liberal Creative Commons licenses possible, which some in our community, especially those who didn’t grow up, you know, in the blogging era have some discomfort with because basically it allows anyone to take our work and do whatever they want with it. But one of the reasons we do that is because of translation, because a translation is a derivative work according to the law.
In the early days of when we used to be very active in the kind of translate the open translation field, we discovered that many of our work was being used to train translation machines, because we have this incredible corpus of parallel translations. And those corpora were going into these systems. And in languages where you don’t normally have kind of parallel translations across several languages—Malagasy, Bangla, and Bahasa Indonesia—you could find an article of Global Voices that is translated to those three. And that is, you know, of amazing value. I’m glad that it’s not only garbage going in.
I think that this is the moment that might cause us to do some even deeper introspection as to what you know, who, to what extent do we allow our work to be monetized? You know, it’s one thing if a blog is accepting us or like, you know, republishing us. But we have been republished by commercial outlets. And, you know, we have thus far treated as, you know, amplification of, of that work.
Ethan Zuckerman:
Right, the danger is, of course, when you’re trading a large language model, you’re not necessarily retaining the point view of the politics, you might be, you know, only giving them phonemes.
Georgia Popplewell:
Yeah, exactly.
Ethan Zuckerman:
My dear friend Betsy Rosenblatt does a lot of legal issues for An Archive of One’s Own and various organizations around fanfic. And she got asked by an interviewer, you know, how she felt about fan archives, you know, going to train these models. And people are able to demonstrate that weird details that only show up in fan works are now starting to show up in these models. And she ended up suggesting maybe it’s a good thing fans tend to have a much broader view of human sexuality and possibilities than everybody else.
And I feel much the same way about Global Voices. I mean, I want the Malagasy language to continue to exist. I want Madagascar’s wonderful people in politics to continue to exist. But there were some in her community who came back, you know, infuriated that this was not what they had signed up for. This was not why they were writing fan works. And I suspect there are people in our community who probably feel strongly that this is not what they’re translating for and not what they’re writing for.
Georgia Popplewell:
No, that’s true as the, we have seen the community change, of course, you know, since the beginning because we were a community of bloggers. Bloggers are a rare species these days. If we had to recruit only bloggers to GV, we would both quickly have gone out of business. So we have many different ethical positions regarding even things like, you know, is the a volunteer community still a viable thing in this age where labor rights is a topic of conversation that’s gone almost mainstream?
So there’s a lot, the conversations happening in GV have evolved over time. We are of the world. So we are discussing the same things that are the rest of the world is discussing. And, and just coming to figure out where we position ourselves in relation to them. So yeah, GV is not the same as when I first joined. The composition of the community is different. Luckily, we have more money than we used to, which is not something that every digital-only organization can say.
But yeah, we have had to learn how to mine social media for the, the perspectives that we used to get from blogs. We have, shifted from just reporting on social media to doing, original writing, we, the nature of, of Advox has changed, you know, as time, during, for instance, the Arab uprising, we were, you know, in the, in the midst of things. We were in the fray and we had a huge Middle Eastern community now. We don’t have a big Middle East community. You know, we are a Francophone African community is currently growing because we have a very dynamic editor. So there’s all of those shifts. You just have to keep on your feet and try not to be too nostalgic about, you know, what things were.
Ethan Zuckerman:
I’m so glad you used the nostalgia word because that does feel like a great place to close on. You just mentioned that Global Voices right now is very strong in Francophone Africa.
One of the things I was most embarrassed about very early on in the Global Voices project was the invisibility of Francophone Africa because I don’t speak French and it turned out that language was an enormous barrier towards participation. It was the Francophone Africans who in many ways convinced us that that we needed to be able to publish in French first and then be able to translate from there. And that opened up Global Voices to all different languages. Maybe that in micro is sort of the lesson in macro, which is that the actual practice of this, the people involved, what they’re doing have changed enormously over the years. I don’t feel like the ethics or values have.
She is Georgia Popplewell. She is the Caribbean’s first podcaster, one of its earliest bloggers, the managing director for the last 15 years of Global Voices, a volunteer and community member with Global Voices for 18 years. One of the pioneers of participatory and digital media in the Caribbean, Georgia, what a pleasure.
Georgia Popplewell:
Not more than it was a pleasure for me, Ethan. Thank you.