Meedan
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 | |
| Formation | 2005 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Ed Bice |
| Type | Non-Profit Organization |
| Legal status | 501(c)3 non-profit |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
Executive Director | Dima Saber |
| Ed Bice
Jon Corshen Lea Endres Leah Wang Quinn McKew | |
| Website | meedan.org |
Meedan is a technology not-for-profit that builds software and programmatic initiatives to strengthen journalism, digital literacy, and accessibility of information online and off.[1]
Meedan builds an open-source software platform for fact-checking and content annotation[1] and runs a service that brings together public health professionals to provide expertise and summaries of challenging public health concepts on-request for journalists, fact-checking organizations, and media outlets.[2] Meedan also runs a project to improve digital literacy, community-building and political engagement skills for citizen journalists, activists, journalism students, civil society organizations and human rights defenders through training, programming and research[3][4]
Meedan, whose name means "gathering place" or "town square" in Arabic, began as a project to model boundary (language, culture, ideology) crossing "dialogue and collaboration" as the key to creating "understanding and tolerance" between different communities online and offline. A fundamental premise of the organization is that social technology on the web can play a part in enabling information equity and media literacy between the peoples of different regions, thereby helping to improve cross-cultural understanding. Meedan's vision is thus to "create a more equitable internet."
Meedan was founded by Ed Bice in 2005 and incorporated as a nonprofit charitable organization in 2006. Bice, who was formerly the Executive Director of The People's Opinion Project, retired as CEO in November 2025 and currently serves on Meedan's board of directors alongside Jon Corshen, Julie Owono, Lea Endres, Leah Wang, and Quinn McKew. Meedan's current Executive Director is Dr. Dima Saber. [5]
In 2024, Meedan received a Skoll Award for Social Innovation in recognition of its work with over 50 newsrooms and fact-checking organizations and its support of 18 election and public health coalitions worldwide, including partnerships with organizations covering topics ranging from disaster response to the 2024 elections in Mexico, India, and the United States.[6]
Current Projects
Meedan's Check software creates tiplines for fact-checking on encrypted platforms. This open-source software allows users of WhatsApp and other platforms to forward suspicious messages to misinformation tiplines operated by fact-checking organizations.[7][8] Check's first major use was for Electionland, a 1,000-person collaborative reporting project led by ProPublica that tracked claims of voting issues on Election Day 2016.[9]