(Photo courtesy Patrick Philippe Meier)

The public part of the Global Voices Summit is over, and the blog posts about it are piling up around the web. But the meeting continues for GV project participants, website contributors, editors, and others who are actively involved with our growing citizen media community. We're nearing Day 1 of two days of internal planning and brainstorming meetings in which we try to figure out where to take the project in the future. Ethan has a great post about the techniques David Sasaki, Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen have devised to unearth ideas and foster discussion amongst this multi-cultural, multi-lingual group.

I was almost brought to tears yesterday during the first panel, devoted to work by members of the Rising Voices project. Led by David Sasaki, Rising Voices is funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. It gives micro-grants to promote blogging among groups of people who are - for various reasons, cultural, economic, linguistic, gender - not taking advantage of the opportunity to express themselves online. After Global Voices was created, there has always been concern by many people in our community that blogospheres in most countries are dominated by wired elites - and that unless we conduct more active outreach, Global Voices is really "Global Elite Voices."  Rising voices it our first stab at addressing that problem. Ethan writes that he is "blown away" by the work being done by Rising Voices grantees. Click here for summaries of all the projects and here to watch videos of all the projects. Also see the RV Introduction to Global Citizen Media. But before you click on any of those links, watch this video: