myVox 100th – All about AllVoices, the "Bottom-Up" Media

I thought I should dedicate my 100th post to the platform that gave a voice to my writings. In fact, I think that AllVoices has discovered the writer in me.

All of you might be knowing something about AllVoices. Some of you might be knowing all about AllVoices. But not all of you might be knowing all of AllVoices. So, here I am with all that I came to know about AllVoices; courtesy an article by David WeirDavid Weir in the BNET issue of Feb 5th, 2009.

AllVoices is a San Francisco based company founded by a Harvard educated Pakistani national, Amra Tareen whose express objective is to transform the world from the BOTTOM UP. In simple terms it means that AllVoices endeavors to give voice to the man at the 'bottom of the pyramid' to express his views on whatever is happening around him, issues that might be affecting him, his neighbourhood, his community, his country, his religion or what have you. In fact it could be something that need necessarily not affect him in any way at all. Damn it man, the topic could be anything – well, virtually anything.

And Allvoices would carry the voice of the man on the street, unedited, uncensored – irrespective of whether it is polished or raw and irrespective of which nook and cranny of the world the report originates from. To enable this, AllVoices has its portals open for anyone from any part of the world, intent being to serve the communication requirements of even the poorest of people - those whose voices would otherwise be lost in the midst of the world’s conventional media channels.

Weir calls Tareen “a pure force of nature’ - less of an entrepreneur actually and more of a driven- by-heart kind of a human being, if I may call her so. What else would you say of somebody who chaperons the cause of the common man, who reaches out to one and all through a vehicle which boasts of being the “first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere.”

True to the founder’s vision the seven-month-old fledgling of a company, allvoices.com draws on an average around 1.3 million unique visitors spanning across 100 diversified countries every month. Tareen recalls that the genesis of AllVoices has its roots partly in the devastation that rocked Pakistan in the form of an earthquake in the year 2005. The natural calamity shook the resolve of poor orphans, widows and women who were offered avenues of micro-credit in order to rebuild their disheveled lives. Amra, at that time was with Relief International, the organization that was at the forefront of relief measures and was fortunate enough to witness from close quarters, the fortitude and resilience of those who suffered the calamity. Amra reminisces: “This inspired me to start a company that would let people no matter where they were to write about what they knew about an event, upload photos, videos, and write their stories and views and share with the rest of the world”.

The datelines on some of the “citizen reports” belong to such far flung and unheard of places like Odesa, Ukraine; Dehiwala, Mount Lavinia, Sri Lanka, Eskişehir,Turkey; Dera Ghāzi Khān, Pakistan; Jaba’, Palestine; Sunan, North Korea; Sheboygan, Wis and Fayetteville, Ark – amongst the other more well-known places. If there is anyone who has heard of a more diversified global news service, I would like to be updated accordingly.

The reports that get posted on allvoices.com get contextualized with content imported from the mainstream media. With the incentive scheme in circulation the site is inundated with reports from citizen journalists who are a part of the over allvoices community. The technology for the site is supervised by leading experts in computer sciences, information retrieval and data mining drawn from Stanford and parts of the private sector. The entire text is analyzed, categorized and geo-coded for keywords.

Tareen’s grand vision for allvoices is that the site gets the patronage of “all six billion people on the globe”. A tall order that - but given the vision, drive, zeal, idealism, resources and last but not the least, charisma of the lady at the helm of affairs the transformation of the dream into reality would not be impossible, though for its fruition it would need a herculean effort from all involved.

Come one. Come all. Join the force that is allvoices.com. ‘Coz there’s room for not one, not two - but SIX BILLION of us!!

- myVox

http://www.allvoices.com/users/myVox