Knight News Challenge

The Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information. Winners receive a share of $5 million in funding and support from Knight’s network of influential peers and advisors to help advance their ideas.

Throughout 2012, innovators from all industries and countries are invited to participate in three challenge rounds, each with focused topics on emerging trends.

Round 1 - on networks - is closed, and the winners will be announced June 18.

Round 2 - on data - will be open May 31 - June 21. We’re looking for new ways of collecting, understanding, visualizing and helping the public use the large amounts of information generated each day. Winners will be announced in late September.

Details on Round 3 will available later this year.

Anyone, anywhere can apply for the challenge - whether for-profit start-ups or non-profit ventures. For more information on a variety of topics - from guidelines for for-profits, on intellectual property licensing, open source software and more - visit our FAQ.

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Knight News Challenge Update

Winners in Knight News Challenge: Networks

Hypothes.is - An annotation layer for the web

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Hypothes.is - An annotation layer for the web

1. What do you propose to do?

We are building a global, community-moderated platform for journalists, scientists and citizens to annotate the web.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different?

Nearly 50 efforts over the last 15 years have attempted this. Our approach targets previous flaws and brings key new innovations, world-class partners, and a powerful launch strategy.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work.

The web is our network.

We’ll enable the broad annotation of the web by enabling a rich, trusted annotation layer on top of Internet-connected media. For the first time, Internet users will be able to link directly into passages, and create either private or public, community peer-reviewed annotations that they can share with others.

4. Why will it work?

We’re combining a proven team, together with a mature standards movement and thorough analysis of previous efforts.

We’re addressing what we believe are five central reasons previous efforts have failed:

Failure to understand that linking inside documents, in addition to annotation, is a key pathway to utility and therefore broad adoption
Lack of an effective reputation model
Lack of an annotation standard and the right partnerships
Not open source and non-profit
Ineffective launch / cold start strategies

5. Who is working on it?

We’re part of the Open Annotation Collaboration, focused on delivering a W3C standard for the annotation of digital documents.

We’re working with the Open Knowledge Foundation to extend their open source AnnotateIt plug-in framework.

Some of the world’s leading authorities in online reputation modeling are helping to think through key challenges. [video]

The Internet Archive will store annotations and assist with the versioning of documents.

We are:

Dan Whaley, who built the first online travel reservation system.
Randall Leeds, an Apache CouchDB committer who has worked extensively on big data projects.
Keith Binkly, staff and recent graduate of USC / LSE.

6. What part of the project have you already built?

Over the last month we’ve begun rapid development on our initial prototype. We are currently extending the AnnotateIt framework to implement the Open Annotation specification, the creation and discovery of multiple annotations on a page, a heatmap interface for visualizing annotation density and sentiment, account creation and other elements.

In April we’ll begin development of the community moderation and meta-moderation model that came out of the recent (Feb 22-24) reputation model design workshop that we had here in San Francisco.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires?

Short term we’ll rely on foundation and individual funding. Though it is key that hypothes.is remain a non-profit organization, there are a range of commercial offerings that can be built on top of the platform. We’ll either license or develop these internally to generate sustaining revenues.