I am proud to announce the first release of Nurani, Meedan’s platform for cross-language scriptural discussion for Muslim and Christian scholars managed by the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at the University of Cambridge, a programme of the Faculty of Divinity.

The long term goal is a federated system of discussion fora (Nurani, ScripturalReasoning.org and others run by new partners) drawing upon a common textual resource (the library).  The next phase in this vision is to be funded over 18 months by a UK Research Council Digital Economy Grant with two new developer positions to be hired at Cambridge with project management, design and strategy provided by Meedan.

One thing that big media could do almost immediately is publish a nutritional guide to any article that relies substantially on citizen or unverified sources.

This could be published at the top of the article, and should contain two things: a statement of how confident the media outlet is of the source’s authenticity and the efforts that have been taken so far to establish that level of confidence.

Why did the Mubarak regime turn the internet off?

That was the question I asked the attendees of a gathering recently at the Oxford Internet Institute looking at the role of the internet in the revolutions sweeping the Middle East.

The question gives us, I suggested, a route into understanding the other side of the equation, ie. How authoritarian regimes maintain their power. It therefore connects us to a long standing debate that has encompassed media studies, cultural anthropology, political science and more.

Hosni Mubarak appears to be on his way out as Egyptian President.

This is a huge moment in the modern history of the Middle East – and it is an astonishing achievement by the Egyptian people. Who can say in their lifetime that they took part in the overthrow of a dictatorship?

The Egyptian people have been incredible throughout the last two weeks, just incredible – full of huge courage, energy, and joy. I hope this brings them a brighter future of real prosperity, security and freedom.

What is the relationship between translation and intellectual production? It is not obvious, you might think. Translation, by necessity, does not provide new insights but rather makes existing knowledge available in another language. If everyone spoke English it would not really be an issue.

What do the next ten years hold for creativity, innovation and intellectual production in the Middle East? Among the presentations to the Arab Thought Foundation’s ninth annual conference, FIKR9, one narrative for how the region should evolve dominated all others.

This said the region can harness its ‘youth bulge’ to create a knowledge economy. This can happen from within the existing political structures, and will fuse Gulf oil wealth and investment expertise with the ever growing pool of human talent from across the region. But it was not the only narrative by any means.

Earlier this year, I was invited to sit in on a theological gathering at Cambridge University.  Over three intense days, I watched scholars from as far afield as Asia, North America, the Middle East and Russia pour over passages of scripture in small mixed faith groups.  Although the academic surroundings were familiar to me, I was to be exposed to a form of shared study that I had never witnessed before.

As the sole London-based member of Meedan’s far flung team (we have developers in Damascus, Amman, San Francisco and Portland, not to mention our team of editors and translators across the Middle East), I was glad to have some company last week when some of my colleagues dropped in for a visit.

The occasion was a two-day gathering at the University of Cambridge with the academic partners behind our inter-faith project.

On Wednesday 8 September, with the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks still three days away, Kabul police went on high alert for violent protests in the Afghan capital. The move was triggered not by the repercussions of a local conflict, but the actions of a little-known American church pastor thousands of miles away in Florida who was planning to burn copies of the Qur’an in a protest against what he called ‘radical Islam’.
The crisis, which elicited stark warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the top U.S. …

The BBC appears to be thinking seriously about using translation to connect its global audience online.

On Thursday the World Service hosted a cross-language discussion between English, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Persian, Indonesian and Spanish speakers with Google’s Machine Translation service providing translations.

What ensued was a bizarre disjointed discussion about nothing much in particular, resembling a collection of spam attacks.

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 to demonstrate how getting involved would increase translators’ opportunities by boosting their profile, increasing their technology awareness and honing their translation skills with a live audience.