2019 Annual Report
Meedan is a global technology not-for-profit that develops open-source tools for creating and sharing context on digital media through annotation, verification, archival, and translation. We co-create programmatic initiatives with technologists, newsrooms, fact-checkers, public health professionals, NGOs and academic institutions on award-winning projects from election monitoring to pandemic response to human rights documentation.
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
Hi Meedan Friend,
It’s comforting to return. Probably has something to do with the fact that we are on a planet that spins on its axis once a day. During times of chaos, confusion and uncertainty being asked to return to a regular task can feel like a lifeline. Writing this note to you from day 22 of our shelter-in-place here at the home office in Woodacre, CA, I am grateful not only for the honor of looking back across an amazing year for this organization but also for the momentary normality from my annual return to the task of remarking on the past year at Meedan.
How our past shaped our future
As a context company, I will make an effort to also situate this note in the data that describes the current global pandemic. This annual CEO letter is being written on a day when the World Health Organization notes 1,279,722 confirmed global cases of COVID-19. The year began with concern for Wuhan and China, but by the start of March there was more attention on other East Asian countries. By the end of March, of course, more focus on Iran, Europe, and the US. We are currently bracing ourselves for the focus to unfortunately move to countries in the greater Global South, including the North Africa Western Asia region, Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific, where social distancing is much harder, and where COVID-19 is likely to have unprecedented devastating effects.
Today as I write this note, we have made public an ambitious COVID-19 response database and toolkit effort with the support of Sida, Google, Facebook, Omidyar, and a cast of global public health experts. I am reminded of a similar point in the early weeks of 2011 when our team efforts were in the course of a few short days converted to working with a community of hundreds of translators to share personal narratives from inside the Egyptian revolution.
Just as our work to establish and staff a team of journalists and engineers in Cairo from 2007 placed us in a unique position do important work during the Arab Spring, our work on Covid-19 response began in 2018 when we established Meedan’s Digital Health Lab as a research and practice hub for developing a standard of care for responding to misinfodemics. Which is perhaps a thread I can follow here to get back to the task of reporting on Meedan’s remarkable year in 2019.
We have always viewed our work as fundamentally global, from our beginnings in 2006 building a social network for translating and annotating global media to our work since 2011 on media verification and fact-checking workflow, we have always emphasized the need to work across boundaries and between communities. In 2019 we formalized this community aspect of our work, launching the Check Global Network with LatAm, APAC, NAWA (North Africa West Asia), and East African partners. A few of the highlights from this network:
We supported the inspiring women’s media collective Chicas Poderosas to lead two collaborative media design and training workshops, or “mediathons” in Colombia and Mexico, each of these brought together more than 100 women journalists for fact-checking and verification trainings and media innovation co-design. Mediathons are two-day events where journalists, communicators, designers, and other women who work in media gather with the aim of creating collaborative, multimedia, journalistic projects to make visible under-represented issues.
The NAWA Investigative Fund is an initiative of Check Global to financially support new, quality investigative journalism from, for, and about the Arab region. The NAWA-IF supports a new generation of digital investigative journalists in the North Africa and West Asia (NAWA) region by providing micro-grants for investigative work across all media.
During 2019, our partner Mnemonic has published four full-length open source investigations in Syria. The investigations included the bombing of civilian infrastructure such as medical facilities, as well as the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria and the export of these chemicals from the EU to Syria after sanctions.
Our work with Hacks/Hackers on the Credibility Coalition continued in 2019, with the release of the CredCat as a compendium of misinformation response efforts around the world.
Our election monitoring work continued with important efforts in APAC. We ran a Pop-Up Newsroom (our partnership with Fathm) with WhatsApp and the civic media studio Proto. The Checkpoint project team monitored and responded to visual misinformation circulating on WhatsApp through the run up to the Indian national election in July. In parallel we ran election monitoring projects in Indonesia, Cekfakta, with partner Tempo.co, and in the Philippines, Tsek.ph, with partner Vera Files.
Checkpoint was also the first release of our open source solution for monitoring and responding to misinformation on WhatsApp. This technology is a version of Check that is integrated with WhatsApp (and a dozen other closed messaging apps) and optimized for efficiently sorting thousands of incoming messages and generating visual cards for viral response. We’ve been extremely fortunate to have WhatsApp as a partner in this work to design and develop tools to address the most daunting aspect of the global misinformation challenge - misinformation response in E2E encrypted messaging networks.
Looking back, it is clear that our accomplishments in 2019 have positioned us well to contribute to the unfolding crisis of Covid-19. From this vantage point it is pretty clear that now, more than ever, the world needs Meedan to succeed in its mission to improve the equity, diversity, and inclusion in our digital ecologies as a means to create and extend a healthier world. As a small but mighty organization we will continue to build global infrastructure in code, data, partners, and research to address the grand challenges that feel so close and pressing.
Please be safe and stay healthy.
Yours,
Ed
Woodacre, CA
Program Names
Mission Statement
Meedan is a technology not-for-profit that builds tools and develops programs to strengthen global journalism, digital literacy, and accessibility of information.
Geographic Areas Served
- India
- South Africa
- East Africa
- Nigeria
- Kenya
- United States
- Tunisia
- Mexico
- Latin America
- Zimbabwe
- NAWA region
- Western Sahara
- Philippines
- Lebanon
- Syria
- Yemen
- Egypt
Timeline
Pop-Up Newsroom - Chisinau, Moldova
SXSW: Nutrition Labels for News - Austin, Texas
Computing Week - Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
Computing Week - Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
Google News Initiative Summit - Google HQ, Silicon Valley, California
Tech & Check - Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Internet Freedom Festival - Valencia, Spain
International Journalism Festival - Perugia, Italy
Pop-Up Newsroom: US2020 - Washington DC
SwitchPoint - Saxapahaw, North Carolina
Mexico on Rails - Mexico City, Mexico
Stockholm Internet Forum - Stockholm, Sweden
New Delhi, India
Rights Night 1st Amendment: David Kaye Book Launch - Los Angeles Central Library
Ethics and Computing - Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
Ethics and Computing - Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
Rights Con - Tunisia
Rails Girls Salvador - Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
Global Fact 6 - Cape Town, South Africa
The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) - Florence, Italy
Media Party and Media Party Hackathon - Buenos Aires
Kenya Census Workshops - Nairobi
Online News Association annual meeting - New Orleans
Data Trusts Workshop - Cambridge, UK
Riba de Âncora, Portugal
Turth and Trust Online - London, UK
Misinfocon London - London, UK
International Multimodal Communication Centre - Oxford, UK
Mozilla Festival - London, UK
20 Norwegian journalists & editors with Berkeley J-School - San Francisco, CA
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology - Onna, Japan
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) - Hong Kong
MediaThon - Lima, Peru
Bread & Net - Beirut, Lebanon
Open Tech Fund Summit - Taipei, Taiwan
WikiConference North America 2019 - Boston, Massachussetts
Google News Initiative APAC Summit - Singapore
The History of Meedan - Oakland
2. In Numbers
Here are some important numbers that show how our year went:
Check
Check combines smart checklists, workflow integrations, and intuitive design to make digital newsgathering an efficient and collaborative process. Invite your team and online community in a secure environment to work together to validate breaking news content. Then, quickly show the work to your audience on social media or your news site.
List of top things added to Check in 2019
- Enhanced functionality of open source verification toolkit Check
- Check integrated with other tools including scrapers, archiving tools, mapping platforms, and visual analysis toolkits
- Check localized into Filipino and 5 other languages
- Improved open-access tools and technical infrastructure for independent actors in the Global South to curate, check, verify and debunk claims, links and media shared online, and to produce alternative content that helps countering mis-information
Claims and Memes Database
We created a unique international dataset of claims and memes drawing from our diverse international partners. We collected the dataset from Egypt, Mexico, the Philippines, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Lebanon and Tunisia in more than 13 worldwide languages including Sawhili, Tagalog, Indian, French, Arabic, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu.
Media and Communications
3. What are people saying
We are humbled by these quotes from our partners using Meedan’s tools in 2019.
It has been really great using and learning about Check, it is an awesome tool for fact checkers and researchers and individuals working in other fields.
Achol Deng Bark Kenya Check TeamCheck was the platform we used to collaborate on election day. We had our own CMS and our own platform, but it was lacking in terms of managing live fact checking. I think that was solved by Check. Without that I cannot imagine how we could have worked.
Dhyatmika Check Indonesian PartnerPress
Stories covering Meedan’s work in 2019.
Additional coverage
Checkpoint Tipline was launched to address the issue of fake news during Lok Sabha elections in India, April 2019. It allowed WhatsApp users to submit uncertain information or rumours they have received on Whatsapp. It supported Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Malyalam in addition to English. It helped fact-checking rumors in the form of pictures, video links and text messages.
Checkpoint project has been mentioned in Forbes, WSJ, Globo, Times of India, Reuters, and CNN Business.
The WhatsApp tip line called Checkpoint lets the service’s 200 million users in India send messages, photos, links and videos in four Indian languages and English to be fact checked at a verification center that will declare them to be true, false, misleading or disputed. Checkpoint was unveiled the day after a long story in The New York Times described a flood of fake posts and hate speech in India that has already led to violence and risks disrupting elections.
Jill Goldsmith Forbes“The goal of this project is to study the misinformation phenomenon at scale,” Proto’s founders Ritvvij Parrikh and Nasr ul Hadi said in a statement. “As more data flows in, we will be able to identify the most susceptible or affected issues, locations, languages, regions, and more.” The new service, dubbed Checkpoint Tipline, can receive messages in the form of images and video as well as text in English and four regional languages, it added. Checkpoint is a research project commissioned by WhatsApp.
Sai Sachin Ravikumar ReutersWhatsApp said the tip line initiative would “help contribute to the safety of the elections … and deter people from sharing rumors that have no basis in fact,” it added. “It would also create a database of rumors to study misinformation during elections” the company added.
Rishi Iyengar CNN4. Financials
We are pleased to share our financial report for 2019.
Revenue
