I recently attended a round­table hosted by the Asia Pacific Foun­da­tion of Canada for a 25@25 dis­cus­sion. The dis­cus­sion emerged from the 25@25 video com­pe­ti­tion as a forum for par­tic­i­pants and part­ners to share their expe­ri­ences and exam­ine future ways to engage youth in pro­mot­ing Canada-Asia relations.

The video com­pe­ti­tion was a huge suc­cess and what I thought to be a really cre­ative way of engag­ing youth to think about issues about Canada-relations. The issues that came out of the con­test, har­ness the col­lec­tive capa­bil­ity and genius that would spur growth and research direc­tion of the foun­da­tion. Some of the themes that emerged included: Peo­ple as a resource, rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the media, self-identity and green tech­nol­ogy exchanges.

“Capa­bil­i­ties to develop new kinds of rela­tion­ships, sense impor­tant devel­op­ments, add value and turn nascent net­worked knowl­edge into com­pelling value are becom­ing the bread and but­ter of wealth cre­ation and success.”

- Wiki­nomics, Don Tapscott

On a another level, it was a great learn­ing oppor­tu­nity for me to step into an area and net­work of which I was not really con­nected to, all because I stepped out of my net­work cir­cle. It reminded me a great TED video by Ethan Zuck­er­man on Lis­ten­ing to Global Voices. He spoke about how even though the web con­nects the whole world, we really end up being stuck in our own web bub­ble rather than lis­ten­ing to what the world has to share.

So in the spirit of col­lab­o­ra­tion, here are my favourite sites on lis­ten­ing to global voices:

1) OpenIDEO: An online plat­form where peo­ple col­lab­o­rate to design bet­ter for social good. It’s a won­der­ful dynamic resource on tack­ling global resources and I’m going to sub­mit a solu­tion to one of their prob­lems soon!

2) World Pulse: A global net­work that broad­casts and unites women’s voices from all over to cre­ate a pow­er­ful voice for change. What I love about this is not only is it a print and web mag­a­zine but it’s also an inter­ac­tive com­mu­nity newswire, PulseWire, where women can col­lab­o­rate and con­nect to solve global problems.

3) Global Voices: An inter­na­tional com­mu­nity of blog­gers who report on dif­fer­ent global issues with top­ics rang­ing from arts to pol­i­tics. It’s an amaz­ing resource and my fav fea­ture is the dif­fer­ent lan­guages that you can read the web­site in. (I occa­sion­ally flip the switch over to Indone­sian, just cause! And it’s so inter­est­ing to read the same arti­cle both in Eng­lish and in another language!)

4) paper.li: This is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than the above three plat­forms as it really is more a snap­shot of the things/links that you tweet about, but I love the cre­ative for­mat and I find it super inter­est­ing the way it picks up on the dif­fer­ent things I’m browse through online. Below is a snap­shot of what it looks like and I thought I’ll share this one just for fun!

So..what global voices have you been lis­ten­ing to?