Immigrants around the world will benefit from using customized Web sites to preserve and enhance the story of their diaspora; connect and share information with each other; engage in commercial exchange; and access news and information being created by immigrants.
Our first diaspora media innovation is the creation of Digaai.com, a site for the Brazilian diaspora that will launch in early 2009.
Digaai is a niche online social networking portal that allows Brazilian immigrants to create a collective web presence, manage their identities, and stay connected to their friends, families and other Brazilian immigrants. It provides free and open access to community generated text, audio and images that document the Brazilian immigrant experience. The content of the site is produced by Brazilian immigrants living throughout the world and by our digital recording of Brazilian immigrant-produced newspapers, magazines, articles, etc.
Digaai’s mission is to encourage transnational civic participation among Brazilian immigrants while sustaining and preserving their many memories and individual testimonies. We believe that an important way of building community equity is by investing in the recording of countless unique stories about our everyday lives.
Using a powerful metaphor, the “diaspora map,” Digaai will, overtime, reflect the real map of the Brazilian diaspora as it encourages Brazilian immigrants to connect with each other across multiple geographies. The Brazilian diaspora’s social structure will emerge organically.
Digaai was begun in Boston in 2008 by Alvaro Lima. The idea was to create a platform that would link the Brazilian diaspora across the world, at the same time that it would provide opportunities for individual expressions and connections with friends and families. The goal was to create a transnational conversation among Brazilian immigrants.
Digaai will strive to be the portal to the transnational Brazilian community. To do so it will collect, store and publish online all information produced by Brazilian-immigrant newspapers and magazines. It will also provide links to articles and books about the Brazilian immigration and community and link academics working on topics related to the Brazilian diaspora.
| 
