international
OneWorld Connect
Imagine getting your news from people from around the world, instead of the mainstream media. Imagine getting different perspectives on global issues. Imagine being able to share your own viewpoints and get involved with issues you care about. Imagine OneWorld Connect, where people are better informed about global issues, can easily share their perspectives on what's happening in the world and connect with other people and organizations trying to make a difference. They will be able to create a customizable My OneWorld page to easily and quickly access and share information relevant to the countries and issues they care about the most.
People will be able to create a My OneWorld page with a dynamic world map that allows people to easily select the countries in which they are interested. They will also be able to select issues that interest them. Whenever a new article is published about a country or issue that interests them, they will be able to sign up to receive it via email, rss or sms. Oneworld currently has more than 400,000 articles published in 12 languages. They will also be able to share their stories about global issues and find out how they can get involved.
OneWorld U.S. publishes the latest news, analysis and feature stories on a daily basis and these stories are tagged by country and topic. We also have stories being published by twelve OneWorld centers worldwide. We have the content already, now we want to use mashups to deliver this content in a visual format through maps and customize it for users, so they can stay connected with the world. We hope to aggregate both editorial and user-generated content to illustrate how different global issues are interconnected and how people can work with others locally and globally to help create a better world.
We need technical development resources to help deliver our content on maps and personalize it for users. We also need help in pulling the stories from the different OneWorld sites. We would like to do mashups around maps, rss, mobile technologies and social networking tools. These mashups will enable our users to easily receive the content, find other people interested in these issues and contribute their own stories.
What the World is Saying: Election 2008
If the project is successful, American voters will learn the impact that U.S. foreign policy decisions have on people around the world, on a general and personal level. They will also see how U.S. democracy is perceived in contentious countries like Iran and China.
The aim of this project is to expose American voters to the impact that their decisions, and their elected government’s decisions, have on people globally, using user generated video, news video, feeds and statistics. U.S. voters will also become aware of how the 2008 U.S. presidential election is being covered by television outlets in other countries. This knowledge will help make voters more aware of the importance of their decision and the empowerment they gain through participation in the democratic process. It will also bring them closer to individuals outside of the U.S. by allowing them to make a personal connection through video dialogue.
The project may be a great first step toward a permanent and growing mashup of international news and reports on a variety of global issues beyond the election. Future iterations of What the World is Saying – Human Rights, Development Aid, the Environment?
Link TV has already launched a linear website that allows people to post “video letters†about the 2008 U.S. presidential election, with an emphasis on international submissions. Visitors can watch short videos uploaded from all around the world, of people speaking to the camera on diverse issues like aid to Kenya, Burmese autonomy and America’s image abroad. They can upload video letters themselves, or leave text and video comments. We envision making these videos more accessible by plotting them on a world map with pinpoints indicating where the videos come from. A concurrent project at Link TV records and logs TV news reports from countries all over the world (Global Pulse). We would like to take as many as 30 world reports covering the U.S. election from countries like China, Russia and Iran, and plot these videos on the map, too, using a different color pinpoint, adding new news reports as the election cycle progresses. These pop-up windows could play the news video, and also have a tab for an RSS feed from the featured broadcaster. Other tabs could have RSS headline feeds for that country from alternative news sources like Global Voices. As a “nice-to-haveâ€, it would be interesting to incorporate other statistical details with these video popup balloons, such as country statistics on GDP, poverty level, and (optimistically) broad assessments of U.S. aid and military involvement.
Link TV ( www.linktv.org ) is a non-profit satellite television channel that has been dedicated to cross-border dialogue since its inception over eight years ago. Our programs include news, current affairs, world cinema and documentaries, and we are dedicated to providing a unique perspective on issues and diverse cultures. We recently concluded an online film contest in collaboration with the organization One Nation to promote understanding of the American Muslim community, where users could upload their own videos and voting determined the finalists. Several of our original productions repackage and translate international news for the English-speaking world and our daily Middle Eastern news show, Mosaic, won a Peabody Award for this analysis in 2005. We will have the opportunity to promote this mashup on national television to an audience of millions.
Developer help to port information from our browser-based Content Management System, including video tags and videos, onto Google Maps. Ideally we need to create an RSS feed of our Dear American Voter videos. We will be posting select submissions to YouTube also, and if porting from our database isn’t possible, we could use YouTube’s automatic channel-based RSS feeds instead. We would need to create an RSS feed of the news report videos from our CMS, and associate them with the RSS feed of the relevant broadcaster. This may require adding a new data field to our CMS, depending on how the headline RSS feeds are drawn into the map. We could also have a tab in the news video popups that includes an RSS feed of headlines from Global Voices, a curated international news blog site that provides country specific RSS feeds. Challenges we face: plotting multiple videos to a single country and finding country information in a form that can be imported into the map as a data source.
