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January 18, 2005
Grassroots Election Coverage in Iraq: From the Friends of Democracy Project and Spirit of America!
Another message from Spirit of America:
We've been helping the team at Friends of Democracy with their project to provide countrywide, ground-level news and information on Iraq's upcoming elections. The goal is to provide a more complete picture of Iraq's elections from the perspective of the Iraqi people. This effort is a direct result of the funds you helped raise in December. Your support made this possible.Friends of Democracy is creating a grassroots correspondent network that they expect will provide information about the elections from Iraq's 18 provinces. Friends of Democracy is also seeking information from the people of Iraq via blogs and email. This part of the project is described here.
The information coming from Iraq will be gathered and published in Arabic using the Arabic blogging tool Spirit of America developed and provided to Friends of Democracy. More on that here. The election information from Iraq - reports, photos and hopefully some video - will be available on the Web and will be presented at the National Press Club in Washington on Sunday, January 30 after the polls close in Iraq. We hope C-SPAN will cover the conference. (More here.)
We all expect that the major newspapers and networks in the U.S. and elsewhere will focus on the expected violence in certain areas of the country. Friends of Democracy seeks to provide a more complete picture. The elections are an historic event. Many Iraqis, Americans, Brits, Aussies and others have died to make them a reality. We think that people deserve more than the standard "if it bleeds it leads" approach.
We'd appreciate your help with this project. Here are a few things you can do:
1. Blog about this project when the English and Arabic websites are ready on Monday.2. If C-SPAN covers the Jan. 30 Washington, blog about the broadcast and encourage your readers to tune in.
3. Provide a pro bono blog ad for the next two weeks.
4. Help us find people we need (see below):
We need a site editor/producer for the English language Web site.
And, we are looking for people who can develop election coverage graphics for the FoD website and Jan 30th event. People with experience developing graphics for the web and for broadcast would be especially helpful.
Please let us know if you can provide a BlogAd for this project. Tell people you think can help to contact jim@spiritofamerica.net
[Chester adds: You can politely contact CSPAN and ask that they carry this coverage. The contact info is here. The Adventures of Chester has offered a free blogad to Spirit of America and recommends other bloggers to do the same.]
Posted by Chester at January 18, 2005 11:25 PM
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