About us

About Us

We are living in interesting times.
The world is goiing through a huge transformation.
Old powerstrucures are gone, and we need new models and solutions.
We and you are part of this.
We are part of the change.
We love to transform fear into curiousity.
The desire to connect is much bigger as the old desire to divide the world.

Couscous Global is a platform to discuss and debate for teenagers and young adults world wide.
The first generation growing up with technology,in global social networks, and on line.
Also the first globalized generation with lots of mixed identities, more than ever before in human history.

CouscousGlobal wants to use the online platforms to connect you with your opponnent, so there will be a true debate on line. Social networks are used to find friends, people who think like you and like the things you like. This is sóóóó boring. Connecting opposites is much more thrilling.
We film the debates with opponents or help you to get them filmed, subtiteld and uploaded.
We are the technological version of Voltaire:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. "
or
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."Noam Chomsky

The media are very biased about youth. We like to give people a voice and a face who are not heard or seen in the main stream media.
We learn the most by connecting with our beloved enemy. It is with talking to him or her that we start to open up to the world. Youth culture worldwide is a great tool to do so.

How do we do that:
We are running this website for a year from august 2008-july 2009. We are developing innovating tools to detect your opposite on line.This “ nomadic application” will be ready in may 2009. After that we do not know. We are up for adoption;) and are currently exploring new possibilities to continue this project.

Our goal:
To make it easy and fun for everyone to participate and put their opinions, debates, movies on this site.
Are you someone who wants to organize a debate?
Do you have questions or a plea to the wold?
Are you an aspiring social filmmaker who needs a platform? Send us an email at couscousglobal@gmail.com

Short history:
Maartje Nevejan was the director of the BNN TV-series Couscous and Cola which was broadcasted worldwide on Al Jazeera in 2007 and nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. We received so many emails from around the world of kids who wanted to participate that we decided to build this platform.
Nevejan runs this site with two guys Erik Punt and Tarik El Fehmi. We film, organzie, edit, subtitle and webmaster this project.
Our website and YouTubechannel are on line since 8-8-8. In these last months we made 235 movies, who were seen by more than half a million people from 78 countries. 14 countries are participating.
We have a community of 200 global members. Lots of them are active in debates. We are also active on Facebook/Vimeo/Myspace/BeBo etc.
We have been invited as beginning changemakers on filmfestivals (Cannes, IDFA-Amsterdam, Fajr-Teheran) and summits(IVOF, International Refugee summit)and have been offered a performing arts lab: PALLAB from London.
It is an organic process and we do not know where it is taking us.
The Chinese say when a new baby is born: “ May you live in interesting times”. We do. We absolutely do.