2018 Annual Report

CEO's Note
In Numbers
What are people saying
Financials

This Annual Report reflects the state of Meedan and its financial health. Meedan is a US registered, San Francisco based, 501(c) 3 non-profit organization established in 2006 that works on projects to support global journalism and cross-cultural education.

1. CEO's Note

Note on the note: this writing was both human generated and authored two weeks before the release of the news on the non-release of the AINow text generator.

Friends of Meedan,

First, thanks for being the sort of friend of Meedan who makes their way to the deep corners of our online documentation and finds this year’s annual note. If it is your first time to visit an annual note, welcome to our creative meander through the year’s work.

We take a creative approach because the form itself is a bit starchy. This comes both in the expected formulation - breathless optimism overlaid on a ‘here is how we changed the world this year’ plot line, and in fact that as a CEO note, this is one person standing in to represent the work of a global, diverse, and increasingly complex organization.

Having Important Conversations

So, recognizing this challenge, we did a little daydreaming. Could we perhaps write software to programmatically generate the document? We have a corpora of previous years notes for training data, and in 2018, with the generous support of the AI fund, we brought bots into Check. The thinking was that we might just toss our g-docs (9,718) and travel receipts (653), Slack messages (144,661), tweets (too many), posts (not enough), emails (embarrassing, number withheld), conference talks (17), proposals (15) and board packets (4) into Check and set the AnnualNoteBot to work. We imagined the AI might generate a thoughtful, inspiring, and eloquent overview of the wonderful things that happened at Meedan during another arguably awful year for the planet and, particularly, for the digital surface of it that we have devoted our lives and this organization to improving.

Alas, our end of grant report to the AI Fund will not include any mention of the failed AnnualNoteBot, nor will this note include any algorithmically generated content.

Instead, it falls to me, with all my human biases deployed, to share with my assessment across the continuing story of this organization. Working on tools and programs supporting human rights investigators, election monitoring, and collaborative media annotation we have put our theory of change into motion with significant and award-winning results. In 2018 our team of 16 and our amazing organizational partners created: election media monitoring projects that pushed the boundaries of rigorous classification and creative memetic response to disinformation (Pop-Up Newsroom); structured data standards that generate machine readable signals from such work and might provide an early model for researching and defining standards that could help to bring a contextual layer of credibility signals to the web (CredCo); and, the open source software that keeps all of this work organized (Check).

Tom Trewinnard at Verificado

Mexico City 2018

In the past decade we have had some very successful programs, and certainly these have had impact on policy, spurred new technical approaches to collaborative translation and verification, and powered serious investigative journalism efforts, but in 2018 I think we actually helped change the world. In Mexico, the Verificado team from Animal Politicò, AJ+ Español, and more than 80 media partners had a significant impact on the quality of information flowing through FB, WhatsApp, Twitter, and the interwebs broadly during Mexico’s historic election. This week a Mexican citizen came to me in tears with his thanks for that project - that is impact. It was the beginning of us taking what had been very technical and assessment focused efforts and bridging those to visual, creative, memetic outputs. Verificado cracked the code on high impact collaborative journalism for election monitoring, and perhaps also serves as a point of hope and optimism against the backdrop of a very difficult year for journalism, democracy, and interweb idealism.

So, with that algorithimically identifiable upnote, on behalf of our 2018 team members - Tom, An, Karim, Caio, Noha, Sawy, Alex, Dani, Wafaa, Uva, Dima, Abdul Rehman, Nat, Dwight - and our great board - Jon, Hanan, Zeynep, Tim, Maria - and the many many partners, volunteers, funders, and fans - thanks for helping us keep this crazy dream of an organization going for another year.

Abrazos, Ed

CredCon

Austin – November 2018

Program Names

Check

Open source technology and programs supporting collaborative verification, election anti-misinformation, fact checking and investigations with partners across Latin America, North America, Europe, Africa, MENA, South and South East Asia.

Pop-Up Newsroom

Collaborative initiative co-design and training events (Verificado 2018, Riksdagsvalet 2018, Pop-Up Newsroom: India, Pop-Up Newsroom: Natural Disaster). Meedan does this work in collaboration with Dig Deeper

Credibility Coalition

Better standards for online content through rigorous research. Meedan does this work in collaboration with Hacks/Hackers.

Bridge

Open source infrastructure for humanitarian and crisis response translation.

Geographic areas served

Latin America
North America
Europe
MENA
East Africa
South Asia
South East Asia

CredCon

Austin – November 2018

Timeline

A timeline of the events that took place and Meedan participated at in 2018!

These are the places Meedan visited in 2018

An Xiao Mina attended and presented on the Credibility Coalition at the Global Standards for News Organizations meeting

The Shorenstein Center at Harvard University

Ed Bice attended and presented on the Credibility Coalition working meetings for the Factful project in New York City hosted by the Open Society Foundation

NY City

Caio Almeida gave a talk about the software stack behind Check at Rubyfuza, a conference about the Ruby programming language

Cape Town, South Africa

Daniela Feitosa and Caio Almeida gave a talk about Check at the Chicas Poderosas event at Google Campus in São Paulo, Brazil. During a Hackathon at this event a Check project was used to verify information about candidates.

Later on, this same project evolved to be used during the actual elections in Brazil.

São Paulo, Brazil

Tom Trewinnard organized and led a workshop in Mexico City for 100 journalists from across Mexico, to lead training and co-design in collaborative verification and kick off Verificado 2018.

Mexico City

Wafaa Heikal led workshops at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia on verification and translation.

Valencia, Spain

Ed Bice, Tom Trewinnard and An Xiao Mina presented on their work at the International Journalism Festival.

Perugia, Italy

Caio Almeida joined a discussion in "Media Chat" event about fake news - where he presented Check.

Natal, Brazil

Meedan with the help of Arabic, French and Spanish volunteer translators translated RightsCon.

Toronto, Canada

Meedan team and partner meeting with friends from Syria Archive, Bad Idea Factory and Moderator

Toronto, Canada

Wafaa Heikal presented on Check at Global Fact V.

Rome, Italy

Caio Almeida gave a talk about Check at Campus Party.

Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

Ed Bice and Tom Trewinnard in the newsroom for the Verificado project.

Meedan hosted (W3C F2F Meeting) the first W3C Credible Web Comunity Group meeting, with representatives from Mozilla, Google, Facebook and Twitter present, along with core members via remote calls and in person.

San Francisco

Dev team joined the 18° Free Software Internacional Forum and gave two talks: "Microservices Architecture with Ruby On Rails and multiclients with React.js" and another about Check for users.

Caio Almeida gave a talk about Check at Campus Party.

Brasília, Brazil

Verificado beats out NYTimes and Guardian to win the inaugural OJA (Online Journalism Award) for Large Scale Collaborative Journalism Project .

Austin, TX

Tom Trewinnard led trainings and the usage of Check tool at Pop-Up Newsroom for the Sweden general election.

Stockholm, Sweden

Ed Bice presented Verificado and Connie Moon Sehat presented CredCo at TED Truth and Trust in New York.

Meedan led trainings in Check and verification best practices at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Caio Almeida gave a talk about Check at the Science and Technology National Week.

Governador Mangabeira, Brazil

Caio Almeida gave a talk about Check at the Computing Security Meetup.

Salvador, Brazil

With the Credibility Coalition, Meedan presented workshops at MisinfoCon.

London, UK

Pop-Up Newsroom-led Verificado 2018 wins WAN-IFRA LATAM award for Innovation in Engaging Young Audiences at WAN-IFRA LATAM Summit.

Bogota

Wafaa Heikal presented Bridge at Bread and Net.

Beirut, Lebanon

Tom Trewinnard and Fergus Bell led Pop-Up Newsroom workshops to co-design a collaboration around misinformation and the 2019 Indian elections.

Delhi, India

Members of Meedan's engineering, design and product teams converged for a team retreat and, with the Credibility Coalition, led workshops, presentations and hacking sessions at CredCon.

Austin, Texas

Caio Almeida joined a discussion about democracy and technology where he talked about Check for election monitoring.

Federal University of Bahia, Brazil

Dwight Knell presented on Pop-Up Newsroom at Rebuilding Trust In Information Ecosystems.

New York