International aid agency Oxfam launched ClimateVoice last week, bringing bloggers from around the world to New York for the high level climate summit at the United Nations, Clinton Global Iniative, Climate Week NYC events.The Climate Voice project, - which part of the VoiceProject, was run in partnership with the UN Foundation, has attracted bloggers from highly trafficked environmental blogs like Treehugger.com and Grist.org to rising voices like Stephane Ramananiviro from Madagascar and New Yorker and Internet darling Julia Allison. They will be accredited to the climate summit as journalists, and will have the same access to presidents, prime ministers and business leaders as the rest of the press corps.
“As 100 heads of state head to the UN, bloggers will be there,” said Karina Brisby, Oxfam’s head of digital media. “Oxfam believes that empowering people to engage and take action is a vital part of making change happen. Blogging and social media tools are right at the heart of getting people involved in holding their leaders to account.”
The Voice project was founded by Oxfam to help new media voices gain access to international meetings and decision makers and to bring attention to climate change in the United States and beyond. The project will act as a hub for online reporting, from on-the-ground dispatches to digital media centers, from live video and twitter streams to aggregated blog feeds. The first VoiceProject event was the G20Voice at the London summit where 50 bloggers around the world gained access.
Support for the project came from Livesteam.com Tumblr.com and Blip.tv who are providing the tools to spread the coverage of the Voice project bloggers even further. Visit http://www.netsquared.org/www.tcktcktck.org/climatevoice to see the coverage
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For two years now Foko has been training journalists, activists, environmentalists, and everyday citizens in Madagascar how to use new media tools to spread greater awareness and provoke discussion about various social campaigns and causes.
As Foko co-founder Joan Razafimaharo recounts on the Foko project blog, their efforts have led to international recognition - both in some of the largest media outlets and also in the form of invitations to major international conferences on development, poverty, and the environment.
