Everyday, the events that shape our world are covered by thousands of media sources Tens of thousands of bloggers and right now we don't a good way for drawing these together we also don't have a good way for taking those across the language boundaries Meedan can do that We envision Meedan as a resource for people who want to get local understanding of the global events that shape our world On the Meedan system everyday we have a team of editors and translators working to sift through the most relevant of the western and Arab media translate that and make it available to our users If you want to understand an event that happened in Amman, Jordan you go to Meedan to see a translated copy of that day's story in Amman, Jordan's leading newspapers you can also pivot to see bloggers who publish near Amman users on our site from Amman This is a way of sorting for local knowledge Meedan has very clear ambitions of improving the state of the art of Arabic - English machine translation over time This is going to enable not only better access to media but better access to knowledge across the web With IBM Research we hope to fundamentally forward the cause of creating more collaborations across this language pair on the Internet Meedan's approach to translation is unique We are taking a combination of state of the art machine translation and enabling translators on our system to improve all those translation outputs and create feedback loops into the system so the system actually learns over time With 1.3 billion users online and soon to be 4 billion mobile handsets in use the world ought to have systems for sharing knowledge for sharing conversation and for creating a shared understanding Meedan is that hope.