Herdict Commons aims to serve as a haven for discussions that go beyond the comments section of the Herdict Reporter; as a place to answer the “what” and “why” of an inaccessible report.

Take www.maktoobblogs.com, a blogging platform, for instance.  The site has been reported inaccessible in Saudi Arabia a number of times, but almost none of the reports have comments attached, and nobody knows why the site is blocked.  Or maybe non-Arabic speakers don’t know what the site is.

Enter Herdict’s Discussion Board…From the Herdict report, you can click a link to be directed straight to existing reports on the subject (or if there are none, a new report opens up for you):

Once you’ve arrived at the Board, you can make a report, like the one shown below.  Reports and tags can be added in any language.

Other users can add comments and replies to the original post.  For example, users can translate comments if they have the skills!

We think the Herdict Discussion board can be useful for all kinds of folks – activists might use it to find out more about Herdict Reports they see, and Herdict users around the globe might use it to discuss their experiences with filtering.  Anything goes!

Shep the Sheep, mascot of Herdict and star of the video, even has localized names.  In Italian, our dear sheep is La Pecora Bianca, while in Arabic he goes by the name of Khalil.

We can’t wait to add more voices to the repertoire!  We’re currently working with our Russian and Luganda speaking friends, but if you know anyone in the Cambridge area who speaks a unique language, let us know!  We’re always happy to add more voices to the herd.

Thanks to: Firuzeh Shokooh Valle (Spanish), Yvette Wohn (Korean), Hamza Daoui (Arabic), Corinna di Gennaro (Italian), Vandana Aneja (Hindi), Lova Rakotomalala (Malagasy), Leonard Chien (Chinese), and of course, Jonathan Zittrain (English), for providing the many voices of Shep the Sheep.