In the three days leading up to the Global Voices Summit, around 160 authors, editors, translators and others involved in the daily operation of Global Voices will be gathering in private for an internal meeting. We're an online community of hundreds of people, and while we enjoy working together virtually, meeting face to face every two years is priceless. We're bringing as many people as we can representing more than 60 countries.

Different parts of the team will be reporting on the latest developments for Global Voices Advocacy, Rising Voices, Lingua, and the Global Voices newsroom. And we'll also be facilitating discussions about some of our key strategic goals.

What is the future of our rapidly expanding online translation community? How do we manage growth in our organization and still maintain interpersonal communication between us? And what should be our advocacy strategy for an internet that enables free speech?

These are just some of the questions we'll be exploring. For the first time this year we've kickstarted the conversation well in advance of the meeting in a series of online working groups proposed by community members. Around 50 groups were joined by people from across the community and they have been using email, online surveys, chat rooms, Google docs, and various online tools to begin defining the direction of discussions.

One of the cool things about Global Voices – and the reason the Summit is so important to our work – is that the organization and newsroom is led by the community and the initiatives of so many hardworking volunteers and citizen media enthusiasts. Looking back to notes from a previous Summit in Delhi in 2006 by Rebecca MacKinnon we can see how many of the ideas that were suggested then, eventually became reality. Sometimes it's hard to measure exactly where new ideas will spring from, but we know the Summit is always a catalyst and an enabler. Together, we work on so many things, and inspire each other to develop ideas that reverberate in our home countries too.

Once our internal meeting is done, we'll be fired up and ready for the public Global Voices Summit 2012. That's when we really start talking about global citizen media around the world and look forward to learning from you too!

Check out our updated program of events.