A message from the Global Voices board

Originally published on Global Voices

Dear Friends, Partners, Readers, and Supporters of Global Voices,

Today, with bittersweet feelings, we are announcing that Global Voices’ Executive Director Ivan Sigal will be leaving Global Voices and transitioning to a new chapter later this year. 

Ivan has been a transformative, innovative, and compassionate leader over the more than 15 years he has headed Global Voices, an international, multilingual community of writers, translators, and human rights activists who leverage the power of the internet to tell stories that build understanding across borders.

Under Ivan’s leadership, the Global Voices community has grown in size, ambition, and impact. A shortlist of Global Voices’ achievements in that time includes:

• Empowering local, underrepresented communities that want to tell their own stories using participatory media tools
• Breaking some of the most important stories of the last 15 years, such as the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011, and Russian global disinformation operations, from 2008-2016
• Building a stronger multilingual newsroom, with reporting by people whose voices and experiences are rarely seen in mainstream media
• Expanding translation by our Lingua volunteers, making Global Voices’ stories available in dozens of languages, to ensure that language is not a barrier to understanding
• Advocating for digital and human rights online, especially for those who speak out in the public interest
• Monitoring media environments in parts of the world where censorship and disinformation are used to sway public opinion about political outcomes
• Innovative research into the impact of narratives on information ecosystems, which undergird coverage of local events around the world, providing analysis of and insight into local conversations

Global Voices was created in 2004 by Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman as a global network of bloggers, sharing insights and ideas with each other and with the wider world. An enormous amount of Global Voices’ subsequent success is due to Ivan’s leadership from early in the project’s lifetime, and to the extraordinary team he has led.

Throughout his tenure at Global Voices, Ivan has drawn on a rare blend of skills, experience, and emotional intelligence to strengthen a sense of community within Global Voices. He has encouraged ever better journalism and more effective advocacy, supported local and indigenous  communities that face systematic impediments to online participation, and created original and innovative participatory research projects about civic technology, documentation of threats to online expression, and investigations into the functioning of information ecosystems. We are deeply grateful for all Ivan has done, and we and the entire Global Voices community will miss him.

Fortunately, Ivan is not leaving immediately and we have time to recruit new leadership. We have launched a search for a new Executive Director—see the job announcement below:

With gratitude and warm regards,

The Global Voices Board

Written by Global Voices