Global Voices became one of my major voluntary commitments since autumn 2008, when I kicked off their Polish Lingua (translation) project,  and I am really happy that today the Polish team has almost 20 volunteers.

Global Voices itself is a community of citizen journalists delivering information about discussions from regions where mainstream media is nor present or has no access to, highlighting different aspects of stories as well as working on specific issues like freedom of expression or transparency.

Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining 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.

Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices.

Global Voices is incorporated in the Netherlands as Stichting Global Voices, a nonprofit foundation. We do not have an office, but work as a virtual community across multiple time zones, meeting in person only when the opportunity arises (usually during our Summits). We rely on grants, sponsorships, editorial commissions, and donations to cover our costs.

Global Voices Summit marked a point in the project where my own efforts as an editor were not enough, so Krzysztof Pawliszak has agreed to step up to this role as co-editor. We hit benchmark of 250 posts, which means a lot for such a young project. We have volunteers based across Europe, not only in Poland. We deliver information about discussions from all aorund the world carefully monitoring the countries of our coverage not to leave out any of those featured on the main site in English. I have also posted on the main site, Global Voices Advocacy and worked for Technology for Transparency, so Polish team was present in many areas of Global Voices work.

But for now we treat is as a beginning. Our Polish readership is steadily growing bringing new volunteers so we can share the workload and write more. I think next year will be very exciting - with our current team and content we can move to co-operation with the local mainstream media and other projects. (for my Polish speaking readers here is a video interview with four of us recorded in Santiago de Chile in May).

I would love to hear what you think of this idea! Do you feel the need for additional aspects of your mainstream stories? Do you think language can become a barrier in delivering or even discovering stories?