Last Friday and Saturday, the members of the worldwide Global Voices community gathered in Budapest for the panels, conversations, and merriment of Global Voices Summit 2008.

Knight Foundation sponsored the 2008 Summit and funds the Rising Voices project within Global Voices.

Led by Director of Outreach David Sasaki, Rising Voices widens the already extensive reach of Global Voices, (which “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore,”) by finding, funding, and resourcing new communities and projects in underrepresented areas.

This video, shown Saturday morning at the Summit, shows projects from the first year of Rising Voices:

Six new health-related projects were announced on Saturday in conjunction with the Open Society Institute’s Health Media Initiative; details about these new projects are here.

For more on this year’s summit of leading thinkers, expatriate bloggers, and advocates, visit the archive of streamed video, the archive of liveblogged entries, and the tagged Flickr photos.

And find out why Global Voices founders Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca Mackinnon are “blown away” and “almost brought to tears” by the work Rising Voices projects are doing (as well as what “street theatre” is called in an area where there aren’t many streets).