Collaborative text written by Bernardo Parella, coordinator of GVItalian, and Eleonora Pantò, revised by Lucie M. Dorion.
While attending the recent Berkman@10 at Harvard, Bernardo Parella had the chance to talk with several people about the importance of spreading over the GLobal Voices On Line citizen media model to Italy, which still lacked its own Lingua group. So he proposed himself as coordinator for that project, then discovering that Lucie (already involved with French Lingua and currently living in Italy) was also looking for other people to start an Italian Lingua group. Next, Eleonora Pantò accepted Bernardo’s invitation to collaborate with us, and pretty soon several other volunteer translators joined the new Italian Lingua team. Right from the beginning, everybody helped each other and we enthusiastically started publishing translations of some really interesting articles and posts found on the main Global Voices on Line web site.
We 'informally' launched our group about a month ago, attracting good media coverage and (more importantly) people’s interests. We now have about 10 translators and publish at least two new posts every day.We soon learned that GV was already well known and appreciated in the local online environment, as well as and in the media world. We hope to build upon GV’s good standing to develop a dynamic, motivated community (and reach the many Italians spread out throughout the world), and foster a productive relationship with everybody involved in Lingua and GVO.
Bernardo Parella is a freelance journalist, translator and activist living in the US, covering digital culture issues (mostly) for a variety of Italian media outlets and involved in a variety of grassroots projects. Among his many translations are books by Turkle, Norman, Lessig, Stallman, and Jenkins.
Lucie M. Dorion is a Canadian freelance translator now living in Tuscany where sheteaches English and French. She makes full use of today’s e-learning tools with her students, teens and adults, starting with streaming audio and video podcasts to instant messaging and blogs. She also firmly believes in the integration of web-based material in the learning process as it offers access to a variety of content, both academic and general, but often a bit less mainstream and non conventional.
Eleonora Pantò works in Torino as Knowledge Community Manager in a Research Organization called CSP, dealing since 1992 with projects related to ICT and education. She also published books and essays on the impact of ICT on education and work environments. Actively involved in promoting Open Education Resources, she also strongly supports the Global Voices’ initiative in Italy as a tool to revitalize the (often too biased) Italian media system.
