Mark Jones, the Global Community Editor for Reuters, writes about our new initiative:

A couple of bloggers in the past few days have been considering what the blogosphere can do for Darfur.

Our friends at Global Voices tipped me off to the We Blog for Darfur initiative. And Google Blogoscoped asks the question: “Is there anything that we can do - with our knowledge of means and methods of communication - to get world leaders to act, finally, to prevent the death and suffering of millions of people?”

One of the issues facing bloggers is whether it is best to start new initiatives or to focus on boosting existing ones.

I think Mr. Jones should’ve read the header more clearly. No initiative currently exists to bring awareness to a specific region. Most have to do with donations, or are UN-funded activities. We are neither. We simply wish to inform, and to fix the misconceptions that people have about this conflict. We can’t boost another campaign when this initiative takes on a completely different turn, and aims to bring awareness to people who aren’t paying attention due to lack of coverage and resources within the Arab world.

We aimed for something different, because it was time to wake people up through other means. Furthermore, no other initiative focuses on actually educating the readers on what’s going on - they list certain figures but never analyze beyond those statistics. Mideast Youth’s co-editor, Drima, has been working on changing that by re-writing the facts of this conflict in a simple manner in order for people to understand what’s going on. It is not just due to the lack of reporting that made us start this initiative, but rather, the inaccuracy in reporting. We’re not a funded group. We’re not a donation group, where you donate a dollar and you feel as if you’ve done your part. We aim to inform and to increase awareness amongst a specified group of people - and we would love it if this initiative makes people who aren’t within our sphere aware, but we did specify a target in order to make our aims more achievable. It helps us maintain a stronger strategy.

A routine search on Youtube for ‘Darfur’ gave me nearly four hundred videos including several covering September’s ‘Day for Darfur’ protests, advocacy networks targeting politicians — Genocide Intervention Network — and TV executives — beawitness.org.

What has struck me, however, is the shortage of material coming from Darfur itself. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about the UN envoy’s extraordinary diplomacy blog, and Sleepless in Sudan was for a while a riveting eyewitness account of reality on the ground.

But there isn’t much else. And my question for bloggers is this: what, if anything, can be done to encourage more bloggers from the scene to give us the reality of life in this conflict?

Doesn’t this initiave answer this question? It is exactly the question we asked ourselves - and this campaign is our answer. It is the perfect tool to use in order to gain people’s much-needed attention at a time where the problems seem to be escalating in Darfur, with no hope in sight.

Dear readers, before dismissing this campaign as yet another Darfur campaign, think of this as a much more specific project where we not only hope to increase general awareness, but we also hope to influence the Arab media in order to cover the Darfur conflict more often and with accuracy, too. We don’t ask for your money, we ask for your attention so that you will be educated as to what’s actually going on in Darfur. Our co-editor (and the main contributor of this campaign) feels very passionately about this conflict and has been working hard on gathering more information in order to re-tell the story in a simpler way so that readers of all backgrounds can understand. In the coming weeks, this will be his main focus, and we, together with our friends at Good Neighbours, will remain staunch supporters of this campaign. We are already putting a lot of effort into this. Once the basic research is out of the way, we will ask for more participants, and eventually the campaign will get bigger and we can start discussing possible solutions together with the rest of the members and supporters of this needed initiative.

Never claim that a small group of people can never contribute to change or influence it. We started this campaign with confidence, and we will lead it with confidence.