Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate and amplify the global conversation online - shining a light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own? Our international team of volunteer authors, regional blogger-editors and translators are your guides to the global blogosphere.

These amazing people are bloggers who live in various countries around the world. We have invited them as contributors or hired them as editors because they understand the context and relevance of information, views, and analysis being posted every day from their countries and regions on blogs, podcasts, photo-sharing sites, video-blogs - and other kinds of online citizen media. They are helping us to make sense of it all and to highlight things that bloggers are saying that mainstream media may not be reporting.

At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world's citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens' media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, podcasts, photos, video, wikis, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our interconnected world.

We aim to do the following:

1) Draw attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens' media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world

2) Facilitate the emergence of new citizens' voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves

3) Advocate freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

The idea for Global Voices grew out of an international bloggers' meeting held at Harvard University in December 2004. Global Voices started very small and has grown into a cooperative effort between contributors from every continent and dozens of countries who communicate over the internet. We have a team of about 20 regional and language editors and about 15 translation leaders. Each of these editors has volunteers who contribute time and writing to Global Voices. Altogether, there are more than 100 active individuals involved in the project and hundreds of thousands reading the website. Bloggers anywhere in the world can volunteer to join the project.