Knight News Challenge

News Challenge on open gov launches Feb. 12

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:37:41 -0500

Photo credit: Flickr user Ed Schipul

The Knight News Challenge on open government will run from Feb. 12 to March 18. It’s an opportunity to win part of the $5 million we’ll use this year to support innovative projects.

We expect the News Challenge to generate proposals to improve the way citizens and governments interact. Projects could help parents evaluate schools, make weather data more usable, identify best routes from one town to another, or identify pork in the federal budget.

Just as we do with “news,” we’re defining “open government” broadly. Wikipedia says it “holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight.” The OpenGov Foundation says it’s about “making it easier for people to access and use as much government information as possible.” In their book Open Government, Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma describe it even more broadly as “transparency, collaboration and participation.”

One of our goals for the News Challenge is to involve more people in the use of technology to solve community problems. “Dozens of developers looking at each other in conference rooms over pizza is never going to lead to making lives better…without the active involvement of real residents expressing real needs and advocating for software that makes sense to them,” wrote Daniel O’Neil of the Smart Chicago Collaborative recently. We hope to help extend the spirit of open gov beyond those conference rooms, and to catalyze partnerships between hackers, civic innovators, governments, journalists and others. As a social investor, we feel the time is right to help advance the field.

We are looking for more than just applicants for this challenge; we’re looking for participants. The challenge will open on Feb. 12 with an “inspiration” phase where anyone - journalists, state and local officials, citizens, community foundations, schools, others - can share problems they’d like to see solved and success stories they’d like to see accelerated. We hope they’ll continue to participate with their comments as applicants start submitting project entries on Feb. 19. We’ll announce the winners in June.

With this News Challenge, we’re building on a number of existing and past Knight Foundation investments in the field — leaders like Sunlight Foundation, Code for America, Open Knowledge Foundation; information and data projects like TurboVote, EveryBlock, The State Decoded, Poderopedia; and projects working to make it easier for citizens to engage with government, like Recovers.org, Textizen and Local Data. And projects built on open data are among the most popular at leading news organizations like the Texas Tribune and ProPublica.

Catherine Bracy (who worked with us on the News Challenge in 2011) recently described why she’s decided to work on open gov at Code for America:

“…government is us. We get out of it what we put in and, as citizens, we don’t have the luxury of being able to write government off. The only way for us to make it better is to engage with it. Technologists have so much potential to fix what’s broken about democracy and it’s vitally important that we do.”

We’ll have more details when we launch on Feb. 12 and will also hold open office hours at 1:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, Feb. 7. Stay tuned to @knightfdn and #newschallenge for more details.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, leave them here in the comment field, or hit me up at bracken@knightfoundation.org.

By John Bracken, director/journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation

Eight mobile ventures win $2.4 million in funding via Knight News Challenge

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:23:00 -0500

Wikipedia to be more mobile and global with Knight Foundation funding

Winners present projects via Web stream Friday, Jan. 18 at knightfoundation.org/live

Releated Links

“#newschallenge mobile winners exemplify the rate of innovation globally” by Chris Sopher on Knight Blog

Watch live video stream of winners ‘lightning-style’ presentations on Friday Jan. 18, 12:30 pm ET at Knightfoundation.org/live

Download photos of winners here:
http://flic.kr/s/aHsjDyjDdv

PHOENIX – (Jan. 17, 2013) – Ranging from projects that turn no-frills mobile phones into radio stations to applications that help newsrooms manage a deluge of incoming mobile content, eight media innovation ventures received a total of $2.4 million today as winners of the Knight News Challenge: Mobile.

Many of the projects focus on using mobile to get news and information in developing countries. Among them: Wikipedia, which will develop new tools to allow people to access articles and knowledge via text message in multiple languages. The project is part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s efforts to offer access in the developing world to its site without prohibitive data charges.

“In 2013 the number of Internet-enabled mobile devices is expected to be greater than the number of computers for the first time. These eight Knight News Challenge projects, and the innovators behind them, are helping to stretch the ways people around the world are engaging with information and using it to shape their communities,” Michael Maness, VP for journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation.

The challenge, one of three launched in 2012 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, accelerates projects with funding and advice from Knight’s network of media innovators. For the third round, Knight Foundation sought ideas that harness mobile technology to inform and engage communities.

The winners of the challenge will present their projects via live Web stream at 12:30 p.m. ET/ 10:30 a.m. MT Friday, Jan. 18, live from a gathering on the future of mobile media at Arizona State University. (Follow #newschallenge on Twitter.)

In addition to Wikipedia, the winners include:

WITNESS: Helping newsrooms authenticate the deluge of photos and videos emerging from news events by creating an app that automatically stamps the content with identifying information, including the location where it was taken. The project is lead by the human rights organization WITNESS in partnership with The Guardian Project.

Digital Democracy: Enabling residents of the Peruvian Amazon to document the effects of mining and oil drilling by creating a mobile tool kit they can use to collect and share data.

RootIO: Piloting software that will connect basic mobile phones with a transmitter to turn them into micro community radio stations. The effort is being tested in Uganda.

Abayima: Creating an app that turns a SIM card into a storage device for news and information. The app will be particularly useful in crisis situations, allowing journalists and others to safely transfer information when communication networks are compromised or disabled.

Textizen: Expanding the ways governments can collect citizen input by enabling it through text. Piloted through Code for America, Textizen works by placing survey questions in physical places like parks and bus stops where residents will encounter them and can text in their opinion.

TKOH: Creating a more natural tool for recording oral histories with an app that prompts people to tell stories when they see pre-selected photos or videos.

Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation: Connecting small farmers in developing countries with advice and feedback via a platform through which they can ask questions and have them quickly answered by farmers in other communities. In the pilot, a Kenyan farmer received advice on frost control and tips on raising rabbits.

Full project descriptions and winner bios follow.

Knight Foundation, the nation’s leading funder of journalism and media innovation, is committed to promoting democracy by supporting informed and engaged communities. Founded by newsmen John S. and James L. Knight, the foundation launched the Knight News Challenge in 2007 to find the next generation of innovations that help communities get the information they need.

The News Challenge took place three times in 2012, with the first two rounds announcing projects that focused on the topics of networks and data. In 2013, Knight Foundation will hold two challenges. The first, on tools for open government, will open in February.

Over the challenge’s six years, Knight Foundation has reviewed more than 13,000 applications and funded 88 projects for more than $32 million. Winners include leading Internet entrepreneurs, emerging media innovators and traditional newsrooms.

Their projects have been adopted by large media organizations and are having an impact. DocumentCloud, which helps journalists analyze, annotate and publish original-source documents, is being used by more than 650 news organizations nationwide, and its open source code is among the most-watched on GitHub, a recent report found.

Find out more about the winning mobile projects during the 12:30 p.m. ET/ 10:30 a.m. MT Web stream on Friday, Jan. 18 at knightfoundation.org/live,

Knight News Challenge: Mobile Winners

Winner: Abayima

Award: $150,000
Project Lead: Jon Gosier, Philadelphia, Pa.
Twitter: @jongos, @abayima

Video: http://kng.ht/UjXMIB

The majority of mobile phone users around the world use simple feature phones which, unlike smartphones, do not have advanced storage or secondary communication options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Abayima wants to build an open source application that people can use to store information to SIM cards – effectively turning the cards into storage devices and their mobile phones into e-readers. This app is particularly useful for sharing news and information in countries where communication networks are unsafe to use due to surveillance or where authorities or other circumstances have shut off access to the Internet altogether. The team has successfully piloted a program with Ugandan activists during the country’s 2011 elections, while all SMS traffic in the country was monitored for voices of dissent. With challenge funding, Abayima plans to build the kit as an open source, full service, easy-to-use platform which enables publishing to SIM cards.

Bio: Gosier is a software developer and technologist working at the intersection of open data and global development. In 2008 he founded Appfrica, a company focused on building Africa’s tech ecosystem. In 2011, in response to repeat attempts by oppressive governments to use electronic communication channels against citizens and activists, he established Abayima to help protect human rights and free speech around the globe.

Winner: Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation (CPF)

Award:$260,000
Project Leads: Kady Murphy, Claire Rhodes and Kenny Ewan, London, UK
Twitter: @we_farm; @TheCPFoundation

Video: http://kng.ht/V9PbsX

Smallholder farmers in developing countries have limited access to support and best practices. The Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation, which designs projects to support small-scale farmers, will use mobile to address this need by building a platform allowing farmers to ask questions and share knowledge about any farming topic, have it translated by volunteers, answered by farmers in other communities and returned to them via basic SMS messages. Knight funds will enable the project, called WeFarm, to expand on successful pilots in Kenya, Peru and Tanzania, where farmers exchanged more than 4,600 SMS messages, an average of more than 70 per user, on topics such as frost control and animal husbandry.

Bios: Rhodes is the foundation’s general manager. She joined in 2009, attracted by the foundation’s goal to be an organization led by smallholder farmers for smallholder farmers. Previously, Rhodes worked with a number of international organizations to promote the leadership of smallholder farmers and grassroots communities within rural development processes. This has included seven years with the US-based nonprofit Ecoagriculture Partners, coordinating a program to enable smallholder farming communities across the world to share knowledge with each other, as well as consultancies with the United Nations Development Program, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and UK Department for International Development. Rhodes holds a Masters in Environmental Technology (2001).

Murphy is the foundation’s fundraising coordinator. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a master’s in Spanish and Business Studies before moving into international development fundraising. She has worked for African street children’s charity Retrak and humanitarian agency CARE International UK before joining CPF in 2011. When she isn’t writing funding proposals, she volunteers with Crossworld, a charity for refugees in South London and is trying to get to grips with Swahili noun classes.

Ewan is the foundation’s program manager, which includes managing this project. He obtained a degree in architecture in his native Scotland, before moving to Peru to work with ProWorld Service Corps, an international development NGO, as regional director for Latin America, working with isolated, indigenous communities across the region, and supporting local people to design and implement sustainable and practical development projects. These ranged from constructing schools and fish farms to facilitating enterprise development and training for grassroots youth and women’s groups. Ewan returned to the UK in 2009 to take up his role as program manager as part of the CPF start-up team.

Winner: Digital Democracy

Award: $200,000
Project Lead: Emily Jacobi and Gregor MacLennan, New York, N.Y.
Twitter: @emjacobi & @digidem

In remote parts of the Peruvian Amazon, where mining and oil drilling are impacting the environment, health and economies of indigenous communities, residents lack the tools to collect and report these events to the outside world. Digital Democracy, a nonprofit that builds community technology capacity in marginalized communities, will create and combine existing open software to produce a tool kit communities can use to share their stories and make informed choices. The team will work with local partners in the Peruvian Amazon to deploy and test the tool kit and train residents in its use.

Bios: Jacobi is co-founder and executive director of Digital Democracy, a New York-based nonprofit that works globally to empower marginalized communities addressing human and environmental rights. Beginning her career as a youth journalist at 13, Jacobi reported from Havana, Cuba. She has since worked media and technology projects with marginalized communities around the globe, including migrant workers, women’s groups, refugee youth and indigenous people. Jacobi has written extensively on the use of technology for civic engagement, and has presented on the intersection of technology and human rights to the U.S. Congress, the State Department, the United Nations, and numerous universities and technology conferences.

MacLennan has worked on indigenous rights and environmental issues in the Peruvian Amazon for more than 10 years. Co-founder and advisor to the nonprofit indigenous rights group Shinai, he spent seven years living in Peru working with indigenous communities to defend their territory from incursions by illegal loggers and petroleum companies. MacLennan has extensive experience in participative territory mapping, facilitating communities to draw maps of their territory and use GPS and satellite technologies to turn hand maps into detailed geographic representations of indigenous land use. Prior to joining Digital Democracy to lead the Remote Access initiative, MacLennan worked for the US-based campaign organization Amazon Watch as Peru Program Coordinator.

Winner: RootIO

Award: $200,000
Project Lead: Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Jude Mukundane, Los Angeles, Calif.
Twitter: @RootioRadio, @csik

Radio continues to be a powerful tool for community information, and the RootIO project amplifies it by mixing its power with new mobile and Internet technologies. RootIO is an open-source toolkit that allows communities to create their own micro radio stations with an inexpensive smartphone and transmitter, and to share, promote and collaborate on dynamic content. The project will be piloted in Uganda in partnership with the Uganda Radio Network, UNICEF Uganda and UNICEF Innovation Unit.

Bio: Csikszentmihalyi is a technologist, humanist, designer, and artist. His work is focused around designing information and communications technologies for communities to mitigate the negative aspects of globalism. He is currently helping to start a new program around design for social change at the Art Center College of Design, where he is a professor of media design. Prior to that, he co-founded and directed the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, dedicated to developing technologies that strengthen communities. He also founded the MIT Media Lab’s Computing Culture group, which worked to create unique media technologies for socio-cultural and political applications.

Mukundane is a software developer and technology enthusiast. His work mostly involves development of distributed applications communicating over IP networks. He is currently working with Uganda Telecom as head of VAS and Technology Innovations to devise innovative ways of harnessing telecommunication technologies for service delivery.

Winner: Textizen

Award: $350,000
Project Leads: Michelle Lee, Serena Wales, Alex Yule, San Francisco, Calif. and Philadelphia, Pa.
Twitter: @textizen, @mishmosh, @gangleton, @yuletide

Video http://kng.ht/UjYjKt

Textizen is building software to transform the citizen feedback loop. Across the country, a growing number of civic leaders are looking for new ways to connect with constituents. Neighborhood meetings are costly to run, and attendance isn’t always representative. By placing questions in physical places and inviting residents to respond from their mobile phones, Textizen creates new ways for meaningful civic participation. Started as a Code for America pilot project in Philadelphia, Textizen identified early best practices by experimenting with several types of campaigns. One, for example, asked for feedback on public transit changes by posing a text-to-vote question at a bus stop. Building on these pilots, the team will license the software to cities seeking to create new open, engaging channels for civic participation.

Bios: Lee is the chief executive officer of Textizen. She brings eight years of experience in user-centered design and research, most recently at Google where she created Google Forms and worked on Google Maps. Previously, she designed online trust and safety tools for eBay, cars for baby boomers, and studied human-computer interaction at Stanford University’s Symbolic Systems Program.

Wales is the technology officer for Textizen. As a 2012 Code for America fellow, Wales worked with the City of New Orleans to build Blightstatus, giving residents accurate and up-to-date information about their neighborhood. Previously, Serena worked at Purpose, Inc., building online campaign tools and web applications for nonprofits and corporations, and developed interactive projects for the High Museum of Art and the Davis Museum. Serena graduated from Wellesley College in 2009 with degrees in Media Arts & Sciences and History.

Yule is the chief operating officer for Textizen. Previously, Yule built interactive web mapping experiences on the Mapping Center team at Esri, an industry leader in Geographic Information System (GIS) software. Alex graduated cum laude from Middlebury College with a degree in Geography. An avid writer and photographer, his technical skills include application planning and design, web development, data analysis, and visualization.

Winner: TKOH

Award: $330,000
Project Leads: Kacie Kinzer, Tom Gerhardt, Caroline Oh, New York, N.Y.
Twitter: @kaciekinzer, @tomgerhardt, @carolineyoh

Current tools for recording oral history, such as video cameras and professional audio equipment, can be difficult to use and hamper the social nature of a conversation. This project will ease the process by building a simple application that enables users of all experience levels to create rich audio/visual stories that can be archived and shared easily with groups of people, ranging from immediate family members to the extended user community, depending on the user’s preference. By making it easy to record and share stories amongst generations and communities, the project will make it possible to preserve the stories of target groups, including rural ranchers in New Mexico whose lives reflect a disappearing culture of endurance and gifted storytelling, before the app launches more broadly.

Bios: Oh, project co-founder, is a graphic and interaction designer working at the forefront of innovation in the digital humanities. She has acted as Lead Designer of award-winning installations and apps for clients including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Smithsonian Channel and New York Public Library for the studio Potion. Oh is a Design Fellow for the Center for Urban Pedagogy, creating tools to empower local communities, and is also working to develop the Global Action Project’s first digital curriculum in partnership with Mozilla’s Hive Learning initiative. Oh holds a Graphic Design MFA from CalArts and a Film BA from the University of Michigan.

Gerhardt, project co-founder, has worked as a software engineer developing interactive tools and experiences for clients including the National History Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the Museum of Science and Industry. Currently, Tom is a co-founder of Studio Neat, a consumer product company that has launched numerous successful products including hardware and software tools for mobile devices, and recently co-wrote a book on independent capitalism and design entrepreneurship in the 21st century. Tom is an adjunct professor at ITP, where he teaches hardware and software design and usability. Tom holds a master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

Kinzer, project co-founder, works to create rich and playful technologically mediated experiences that change our relationships with everyday contexts and each other. Her project, the Tweenbots, is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Kinzer has taught as an adjunct professor for the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU, and as a teaching artist at the MoMA. As a producer and interaction designer at Potion Design, Kinzer helped create interactive projects for clients including the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian, and Bell Labs. Kinzer is currently a doctoral student at NYU where her work focuses on narrative and informal learning.

Winner: Wikimedia Foundation

Award: $600,000
Project Lead: Kul Takanao Wadhwa, San Francisco, Calif.
Twitter: @wikimedia, @wikipedia

As mobile technology is increasingly the primary opportunity for billions of people around the world to access the Internet, the Wikimedia Foundation is working to remove the two biggest hurdles to access free knowledge: cost and accessibility. News Challenge funding will help create software to bring Wikipedia to lower-end, more basic phones - the kinds the majority of people use to access data outside of the West. Specifically, efforts will be focused in three areas: developing features to improve the mobile experience regardless of how feature-rich the device is – including new ways to access Wikipedia via text; increasing the number of languages that can access Wikipedia on mobile; and improving the way feature phones access the platform.

Bio: Takanao Wadhwa, head of mobile and business development, joined the Wikimedia Foundation when it launched in 2007. He leads the foundation’s efforts to increase access to Wikipedia, with a focus on developing countries.

Winner: WITNESS

Award: $320,000
Project Lead: Sam Gregory and Bryan Nunez (at WITNESS) and Nathan Freitas and Harlo Holmes (at Guardian Project), New York, N.Y.
Twitter: @SamGregory, @Tech_wit, @N8FR8, @Harlo

In situations of conflict or civil unrest, where ordinary people are using their mobile phones to create and share media, news organizations and others have trouble authenticating the origins of photos, videos or audio. In collaboration with The Guardian Project, the international human rights organization WITNESS seeks to solve this problem by launching the InformaCam app. The mobile app allows users to incorporate key metadata in their video (who, what, where, corroborating identifiers), watermark it as coming from a particular camera, and share it in an encrypted format with someone the user trusts. News outlets, human rights organizations and everyday people could use the app in a variety of ways - for a breaking news story using first-hand video from a citizen journalist, sharing evidence of war crimes from a conflict zone, or to verify the images of a fender bender that someone could take to small claims court. Alongside this, WITNESS is advocating for the incorporation of a “citizen witness” functionality based on InformaCam into other platforms and apps.

Bios: Freitas is a long-time mobile technology innovator and global human rights activist and trainer. Through his work in support of the Tibetan independence movement over the last 13 years, Nathan came to understand the promise and peril of applying new technology to activists in high-risk situations, and in response founded the Guardian Project in 2009. Freitas also teaches “Social Activism using Mobile Technology” at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program. He is currently on a six-month research trip in India, Nepal, Thailand and Burma, tracking adoption of low cost smartphones and 3G networks throughout the region.

Gregory is the program director for WITNESS. He is an internationally recognized human rights advocate, trainer and video producer who helps people use the power of the moving image and participatory technologies to create human rights change. As program director he focuses on empowering millions of people to use video effectively, safely and ethically. In 2010, he was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident on the future of video-based advocacy, and in 2012 he was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. He teaches on human rights and participatory media as an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Holmes is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist. As research fellow with The Guardian Project, she primarily investigates topics in digital media steganography, metadata, and the standards surrounding technology in the social sciences. She harnesses her multifaceted background in service of responding to the growing technological needs of human rights workers, journalists, and other do-gooders around the world. Holmes is currently based in New York City.

Nunez is the technology manager at WITNESS where he oversees the development of projects like the Hub, the first website dedicated to citizen human rights media, and the Secure Smart Cam, a suite of camera-phone apps for human rights activists. Prior to WITNESS, he was a technology strategist and consultant on a variety of projects ranging from online banking to interactive television. He is an alumnus of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and has a BA in anthropology from UC Berkeley.

About Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

Photos: http://kng.ht/13EqXLm

Contact

Andrew Sherry, Vice President/Communications, (305) 908-2677, media@knightfoundation.org

Winners of News Challenge: Data

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:30:32 -0400

Knight News Challenge: Data Winners from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Today we’re excited to share with you the winners of the Knight News Challenge: Data.

First, some background: We ran the contest for three weeks, ending June 20. And we sought ideas to help make the large amounts of data we’re creating more useful and informative. We received 881 applications, which we reviewed with the help of a group of advisers. We identified 50 proposals to discuss further, and in July we brought to Miami a group of reviewers to advise us. We listened to their advice, had internal conversations, and conducted interviews and due diligence with 15 applicants.

As we announce the below winners, we’re in the midst of reviewing applications for the News Challenge: Mobile, and later this fall we’ll begin planning our first News Challenge of 2013, on tools for open government.

Knight News Challenge: Data Winners (Full project lead bios are here)

Census.IRE.org
Award: $450,000
Winner: Joe Germuska, Chicago; John Keefe, New York; Ryan Pitts, Spokane, Wash.

Despite the high value of Census data, the U.S. Census Bureau’s tools for exploring the data are difficult to use. A group of news developers built Census.IRE.org for the 2010 Census to help journalists more easily access Census data. Following early positive feedback, the team will expand and simplify the tool, and add new data sets including the annual American Community Survey, which informs decisions on how more than $400 billion in government funding is distributed.

LocalData
Award: $300,000
Winners: Amplify Labs, Alicia Rouault, Prashant Singh and Matt Hampel, Detroit, Mich.

Whether tracking crime trends, cataloging real estate development or assessing parks and play spaces, communities gather millions of pieces of data each year. Such data are often collected haphazardly on paper forms or with hard-to-use digital tools, limiting their value. LocalData is a set of tools that helps community groups and city residents gather and organize information by designing simple surveys, seamlessly collecting it on paper or smartphone and exporting or visualizing it through an easy-to-use dashboard. Founded by Code for America fellows, the tools have already been tested in Detroit, where they helped document urban blight by tracking the condition of thousands of lots.

New contributor tools for OpenStreetMap
Award: $575,000
Winners: Development Seed Inc. / Eric Gundersen, Washington, D.C.

OpenStreetMap, a community mapping project, is quickly becoming a leading source for open street-level data, with foursquare, Wikimedia and other major projects signing on as users. However, there is a significant learning curve to joining the growing contributor community. With Knight News Challenge funds, Development Seed will build a suite of easy-to-use tools allowing anyone to contribute data such as building locations, street names and points of interest. The team will promote the tools worldwide and help contribute to the growth of OpenStreetMap.

Pop Up Archive
Award: $300,000
Winners: Bailey Smith and Anne Wootton, Oakland, Calif.

Today, media is created with greater ease, and by more people, than ever before. But multimedia content – including interviews, pictures and more – cannot survive online unless it is organized. Pop Up Archive takes media from the shelf to the Web – making content searchable, reusable and shareable, without requiring technical expertise or substantial resources from producers. A beta version was built around the needs of The Kitchen Sisters, Peabody award-winning journalists and independent producers who have collected stories of people’s lives for more than 30 years. Pop Up Archive will use News Challenge funds to further develop its platform and to do outreach to potential users.

Open Elections
Award: $200,000
Winners: Derek Willis and Serdar Tumgoren, Washington, D.C.

Elections are fundamental to democracy, yet the ability to easily analyze the results are out of reach for most journalists and civic hackers. No freely available, comprehensive source of official election results exists. Open Elections will create the first, with a standardized, linked set of certified election results for U.S. federal and statewide offices. The database will allow the people who work with election data to be able to get what they need, whether that’s a CSV file for stories and data analysis or a JSON usable for Web applications and interactive graphics. The project also will allow for linking election data to other critical data sets. The hope is that one day, journalists and researchers will be able much more easily to analyze elections in ways that account for campaign spending, demographic changes and legislative track records.

Safecast Radiation & Air Quality
Award: $400,000
Winners: Safecast / Sean Bonner, Los Angeles

Safecast, a trusted provider of radiation data in post-quake Japan, is now expanding with challenge funding to create a real-time map of air quality in U.S. cities. A team of volunteers, scientists and developers quickly formed Safecast in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, when demand for radiation monitoring devices and data far surpassed the supply. The project has collected more than 4 million records and become the leading provider of radiation data. With News Challenge funding, Safecast will measure air quality in Los Angeles and expand to other U.S. cities. Disclosure: Knight Foundation Trustee Joi Ito is an officer of the Momoko Ito Foundation, which is receiving the funds on behalf of Safecast.

This was the first News Challenge we’ve run with our new prototype fund in place. In the coming weeks, we’re likely to support as prototypes several projects that came to us through the News Challenge. We also found projects that we liked a lot but that fell outside our focus on data. We’re still exploring those projects and may fund some of them through other means. I expect we’ll see more of that in the future; the News Challenge is a means to get your project funded, but for us it’s also a way to uncover ideas, innovators and projects.

By Knight’s John Bracken, director/journalism and media innovation and Chris Sopher, journalism program associate.

Winners in Knight News Challenge: Networks

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:42:22 -0400

Four months after opening the Knight News Challenge on networks, I’m happy to announce the six winners. We selected them after reviewing 1,100 applications over the last three months.

For us at Knight, the fun part starts now. Over the next month, we’ll sit down with each of the winners to ask one question: “How can we help?” In fact, we’ve already started. Each project has different needs, but we’re talking with each of them about how to measure their progress, how to better communicate their work and how to handle back office tasks such as accounting and hiring.

Without further ado, the six winners of the Knight News Challenge on networks:

Behavio (formerly known as FUNF):
Nadav Aharony, Alan Gardner, Cody Sumter
$355,000 program related investment
Behavio will enable users to collect and anonymously share data from their mobile phones. It will collect data such as video, movement, location and available light. Users can then analyze, visualize and draw insights from that data.

My colleague Elizabeth Miller interviewed Nadav, Alan and Cody after they won the News Technologies Accelerator Competition that Knight Foundation sponsored at SXSW earlier this year. Some of what Nadav told Elizabeth highlights the open approach that we found appealing. “We intentionally give the freedom of configuration to the user and hope that they’ll tell us what works and what doesn’t,” said Nadav.

PeepolTV
Felipe Hausser, Jeffrey Warren
$360,000 grant
PeepolTV will build an interactive collection of every livestream on the planet, searchable by map, tags, semantic analysis and other attributes. The project aims to help users document events as they take place, for example by tracking a protest through a collection of livestreams shown on a map of the area.

In an email, one of our external reviewers called PeepolTV a “big, ambitious project” that could become “a channel guide for the entire Internet…having a directory to find out what’s live on the web right now would be invaluable.”

Last year, Jeffrey Warren and Felipe Heusser took home $2,000 for winning second prize in the MIT Knight Civic Media Conference Collaboration Contest. This year, their project (originally called Streaming Screaming) will receive a $360,000 grant. Warren is a co-founder of 2011 News Challenge winner Public Laboratory; Felipe is an Ashoka fellow and a Berkman fellow at Harvard and founder of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente.

Recovers.org
Alvin Liang, Caitria O’Neill, Morgan O’Neill
$340,000 grant
After a tornado roared through their home of Monson, Mass. last year, sisters Caitria and Morgan O’Neill decided to dive into disaster recovery. Caitria, Morgan and their CTO Alvin Liang (whom they met at a poker game) are building tools to help communities get back on their feet more quickly and effectively after a disaster. They’ll be working on a recovery dashboard that will help coordinate volunteers, physical donations, monetary donation with community needs and to improve communication among local governments, aid groups and others who want to help.

Tor Project
Andrew Lewman, Karen Reilly
$320,000 grant
Tor has been protecting Internet communications worldwide for the last 10 years.
The Tor community, and the open-source tools it develops, promotes free speech by seeking to ensure that we communicate more safely online. People use Tor to protect themselves from harassment and surveillance by governments and non-state actors like organized crime. Tor will use News Challenge funds to develop open source software designed to protect journalists. It will adapt some of its secure Web browser and design a set of tools with and for journalists working in dangerous zones.

Earlier this year, we unveiled the Kni ght Enterprise Fund as a means for investing in commercial start-up ventures. Two of the News Challenge: Networks winners are being funded through this vehicle. Both also happen to come from veteran entrepreneurs. They are:

SignalNoi.se
Mohamed Nanabhay, Haroon Meer
Nanabhay built a reputation for news innovation during his eight years running the interactive newsroom at Al Jazeera. (Mohamed spoke about his work at Al Jazeera at last year’s Civic Media conference.) SignalNoi.se, his first venture since leaving Al Jazeera, is a collaboration with Haroon Meer. They’re building a dashboard that will make it easier for newsrooms, and potentially consumers, to understand how stories emerge and spread.

Watchup
Adriano Farano, Jonathan Lundell
Watchup is an iPad app that helps users find, collect and interact with video news content. Watchup is the latest venture from Adriano Farano, who previously founded and ran European news sites OWNI and Cafe Babel. Adriano is also a former Knight Fellow at Stanford and served in 2010 as a reviewer on the Knight News Challenge. His co-founder is Jonathan Lundell, a hardware and software engineer with 30 years of experience. (and they’re hiring!)

Those six projects represent about .5% of the nearly 1100 applications we received. As I anticipated when we closed the contest in March, to get to these six we had to leave a lot of exciting, worthy projects by the wayside. We are funding other News Challenge entries through our new prototype fund — my colleague Chris Sopher has the details here. You can apply for the Knight prototype fund now.

I want to thank the 43 people who helped us review the applications. Knight Foundation selected the winners, but we would not have been able to conduct the contest without the help, counsel and criticism of the people who hopped on Google hangouts, fielded late night questions over email and IM, flew to Miami to meet with us and conducted in-person interviews with us. Three of those reviewers shared thoughts on the experience, Ryan Jacoby, Raina Kumra and Ar on Pilhofer.

We have another cohort of reviewers standing by to start reviewing entries in the current Knight News Challenge, on data, once it closes at noon ET on Thursday, June 21.

We’ll be awarding a share of $5 million to another set of winners in about three months. You can check out the entries and apply here. For people with last minute questions, hit us up at newschallenge@knightfoundation.org and on Twitter at @knightfdn using #newschallenge.

By John Bracken, director/journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation

Our next week: Hacks, stories and winners

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 10:17:00 -0400

Photo Credit: Flickr user Andrew Whitacer

The next week is a big one for us here at Knight Foundation.

Over the next few days, you may notice a couple of hundred of people moving towards the MIT Media Lab for The Story & The Algorithm, the 2012 Civic Media Conference. Knight Foundation and the Center for Civic Media at MIT collaborate on the conference. It’s an important occasion for us to gather friends, colleagues and new people - and to announce some news. Here is a list of conference participants on Twitter; we’ll be using #civicmedia and are also live streaming the conference.

In concert with the its theme, we will precede the conference with a day of coding and an evening of storytelling. On Saturday, our partners at Mozilla will hold a hack day, featuring “an all-star cast of developers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and media thinkers.” Their goal, according to Dan Sinker, is to “move the convergence of data and story into newer places still.” You can see what they’re work working on. On Sunday evening, we open the full conference with storytelling, brought to us by The Moth and PRX.

Monday morning, Media Lab director (and Knight Foundation trustee) Joi Ito will kick off the conference. In addition to the rock stars who run the Center for Civic Media, we’ll see have discussions moderated by Emily Bell, Susan Crawford, Benjamen Walker and Christina Xu. On Monday afternoon, we’ll announce the winners of the first Knight News Challenge of the year, on Networks. We’ll be live-tweeting the winners using #newschallenge. Michael Maness, vice president of journalism and media innovation at Knight, will talk about new funding tools we’re implementing.

Tuesday includes a conversation about what has (and has not) worked with Open Government with Mark Headd of Code for America, Mike Norman from Wefunder and Chris Vein, Deputy CTO in the White House. A noon presentation will feature comic artist Michael Kupperman and a final panel focuses on “some of the more unexpected and provocative directions news and civic media may be taking in the future.”

The theme for the conference - the story and the algorithm - grew out of conversations I heard at last year’s NewsFoo, the un-conference organized by Google, O’Reilly and Knight. NewsFoo’s goal is to convene journalists and technologists to “share projects and ideas, and tackle challenging problems together.” I saw conversations between bit wranglers like Matt Cutts and storytellers like Julie Shapiro of the Third Coast International Audio Festival about how the two areas can benefit each other. Brian Boyer, recently hired at NPR, captured this moment on Twitter:

In planning for this year’s conference, we realized that mixing code and storytelling is core to what we’re trying to accomplish. My hope is that by the time the conference concludes, we will have provoked conversations and developed relationships that improve both.

Lastly, next Thursday at noon ET marks the deadline for our Knight News Challenge: Data. We are looking for the most innovative ideas that help make data more useful, by collecting, processing, visualizing or otherwise making it available, understandable and actionable. Just eight questions - and 500 words - gets you a shot at a share of $5 million. If you’ve questions, send them our way @knightfdn or newschallenge@knightfoundation.org.

By John Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation

FireSeed Up-cycling Waste to Fine Arts Project

Thu, 31 May 2012 16:46:42 -0400

FireSeed Eco-Art Collaborative brings together local artists and volunteers in a multidiscipline and multicultural exploration of consumption. The art created will come from the discarded materials of our industrial landscape and will perform the function art has always played: to be a part of everyday life, and therefore elevate it and bring beauty and balance to it.

Out the Window

Thu, 31 May 2012 16:09:01 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

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To engage 500,000 of LA’s neediest daily with artists’ videos about preventive health on 4000 TVs throughout Metro bus system

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

Our project is uniquely utilizing media in this fashion, through this delivery system to address health and wellness issues. Others use print or other one-way media.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

The network consists of: (1)Transit TV’s 4,000 monitors on 2,000 buses; (2)on-screen text questions (bilingual) to which riders respond via text message; (3)auto-replies to text messages generating call and response with potentially 500,000 daily low income riders; (4)GPS banners indicating health services in the vicinity. All components duplicated on Web.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

The L.A. bus population of 500,000 daily riders is largely poor and of minority ethnicity – a prime population to reach with preventive health messages. OUT THE WINDOW uses existing technology to transform daily commutes into opportunities for reaching this population through creative, culturally appropriate, relevant media. Partnerships between local community health organizations and artists will expose Los Angeles’ most marginalized citizens to compelling programming that addresses community health concerns. It also provides locative information enabling more informed health and wellness access for a very low-income, underserved constituency. (Prior, non-health iteration at out-the-window.org)

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

Freewaves is the primary administrative and artistic organization, handling coordination between health/wellness providers and artists, and the screening of videos on the buses. U.C.L.A. REMAP (Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance) will be the technical consultants. Five media artists (Pedro Joel, Ann Kaneko, Hayk Makhmuryan, Lisa Marr, Mohammed Wells) will work with five preventive health centers (A Place Called Home, Peace Over Violence, East L.A. Community Corporation, Community Health Council, Heal The Bay) to produce appropriate health related videos. Two Getty Summer Multicultural Interns will implement the marketing and evaluation process.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

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Freewaves and its partners have already produced a year and a half of programming on the buses, primarily exhibiting situation-specific videos by professional media artists and students from 2 regional community art centers. Freewaves web site (out-the-window.org) has been functioning as a constantly evolving, interactive archive for the bus-based videos, as well as media resources and riders’ responses. The interactive texting prototype has been designed and beta tested in the 2011 iteration of the project. A survey of riders was designed and implemented, with favorable feedback, to assess the (non-health related) prior version of OUT THE WINDOW.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

The pilot project will provide evidence of the efficacy of this media approach to connect health providers and clients which should lead to non-profit and for-profit financial support for sustainability beyond our past art funders: L.A. City and County, The Irvine Foundation, and a one-time MacArthur Foundation grant.

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $125,000
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 1 year
Total Project Cost: $143,000 annually

Name: Anne Bray
Twitter: freewavesanne
Organization: Freewaves
Country: USA

Digital Schoolhouse: A Window Into Classrooms Around The World

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:47:28 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Join classrooms around the world under one “digital roof,” so that students may learn together across cultures, borders, and boundaries.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

While several virtual classrooms and online learning organizations exist, there are no organized global efforts focused on uniting children of very diverse backgrounds through online exchange, learning, and play.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

Global Playground has existing brick and mortar schools in five countries. We reach thousands of diverse children in both developing and developed nations. Now we just need a way to connect them all. Through our Digital Schoolhouse, teachers will be able to link their classrooms and their students together online.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

Children are inherently curious, about each other, about the world. However, they are infrequently exposed to news, information, and contact from sources outside their immediate community. Teachers would love to facilitate these interactions, but often have little time to develop them. The Digital Schoolhouse provides immediate access to appropriate content and collaboration tools, helping teachers offer their students a window into other parts of the world. Facebook, Twitter, and other existing platforms need to be culled and filtered so teachers can reliably employ their advantages in the classroom. This portal is designed specifically for these teachers and their students.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

We have Teaching Fellows and their collaborative teams placed locally in several countries. We have teachers in the US signed up and eagerly anticipating joining their classrooms with the Digital Schoolhouse. A team of technologists, teachers, learning scientists, and instructional designers has constructed curricular content and teacher trainings to optimize the value of the Digital Schoolhouse. Now, a team of web designers and developers are assembled and preparing to build a portal to connect our current network with teachers around the world through their preferred platforms.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

The physical schools have been built. The connections with many more schools have been established. Preliminary content was collected, captured, and organized in an initial version of the portal; a pilot program has been coded and is soon to be tested by a handful of teachers both in the U.S. and abroad. The current version can pull in data from Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr. The future version will be able to push data, manage many more user accounts, and distribute news, information, curricula and games in real-time (or asynchronously) to classrooms around the world on their preferred/available platforms.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

 After the initial development, all content will be user generated. Global Playground will source content from abroad through its Teaching Fellows and domestically, through its connections with 200+ teachers. As our user base grows, we will rely on existing and new donors to cover server maintenance and web support costs.

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $175,000
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 3 Months to Launch, 12 Months to completely self-sustaining
Total Project Cost: $300,000

Name: Adam Lupu
Twitter: @GlobalPlay
Organization: Global Playground
Country: United States

Announcing the next Knight News Challenge: Data

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:41:00 -0400

Photo Credit: Flickr user Koen Vereeken

The Knight News Challenge is being offered three times this year, in short, focused rounds to better mirror the pace of innovation. Winners of Round 1, which focused on networks, will be announced June 18. Here, Journalism and Media Innovation Program Director John Bracken gives a preview on the upcoming Round 2.

We’re excited to announce that the next Knight News Challenge will focus on data.

Starting May 31 through June 20, we’ll be looking for ideas that help unlock the power of data, by collecting, processing, visualizing or otherwise making it available, understandable and actionable. Applicants - whether for-profit startups or non-profit ventures - will have 21 days to submit their projects.

We had planned to make the second round a completely open call for innovative news ideas. But we received feedback from the advisers we gathered last month to review News Challenge applications that themes encourage sharper proposals and better ideas, and we decided to take their advice.

So, why data?

The world has always been complex, but we are now challenged with making sense of the rapidly increasing amounts of information that we are creating. According to IBM, nine-tenths of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. Cisco predicts that information generated by mobile devices will hit 130 exabytes in 2016 - that’s the equivalent of 520,000 Libraries of Congress in one year. A report from McKinsey anticipates that the amount of data we generate will increase 40% annually. Facebook users alone add a billion pieces of content every 24 hours.

Knight News Challenge: Data is a call for making sense of this onslaught of information. “As data sits teetering between opportunity and crisis, we need people who can shift the scales and transform data into real assets,” wrote Roger Ehrenberg earlier this year.

Or, as danah boyd has put it, “Data is cheap, but making sense of it is not.”

The CIA, the NBA’s Houston Rockets, startups like BrightTag and Personal (“every detail of your life is data”) — they’re all trying to make sense out of data. We hope that this News Challenge will uncover similar innovators discovering ways for applying data towards informing citizens and communities.

We’re looking for digital-age versions of Red Blaik— the College Football Hall of Fame coach who mentored 20 future head coaches, including Vince Lombardi. In his biography of Lombardi, David Maraniss wrote:

“Blaik’s signature talent was using all this data to create something clean and simple. He had what Lombardi called “the great knack” of knowing what offensive plan to use against what defense and then “discarding the immaterial and going with the strength.” All the detailed preparations resulted not in a mass of confusing statistics and plans, but in the opposite, paring away the extraneous, reducing and refining until all that was left was what was needed for that game against that team.

We need help making things “clean and simple” and “paring away the extraneous” if we are going to remain aware of and engaged with what is transpiring around us. What are the implications — ethically, economically, socially — of having access to so much information? How can the flood of data best be channeled to make us better citizens? What stories can we tell? How will we act differently based on what we learn? What tools and products can we create out of this raw material? How do we consume data responsibly and healthily?

It is a big topic. My colleague Michael Maness and I will be fielding questions about this next News Challenge in a Google Hangout at 11 a.m. EST May 22 on the Knight Foundation page. You can also learn more here or by reaching out to us at newschallenge@knightfoundation.org, at @knightfdn, or in the comments below this post.

Here are a few things to remember as we go into Round 2 on data:

Who can enter? Anyone, anywhere of any age. The challenge is open to nonprofits, for-profits or individuals of any age, anywhere in the world.

What are the guidelines for for-profits? There are several funding options including grants, PRIs and equity investment. More here.

What if I don’t want my idea to be public? We believe ideas improve when they’re publicly available. But we’ll accept a closed application. Write your project, name and phone number in the subject line of an e-mail. Paste the answers to our application questions in the body. Send to kncclosed@knightfoundation.org and we’ll add it to the pile.

What are the News Challenge IP terms? If you win, you’ll own copyright on your intellectual property. But under most funding options, you’ll be required to release what you build as open source. More details: Grants to nonprofits have a strict requirement: any software developed with grant money must be made open source under a GNU General Public License. The same is true for grants to for-profit companies. The business receiving a grant agrees to bind itself to the open source license it owns as if it were a licensee. If a Program Related Investment is made, only the initial release must be open source, and future versions can be licensed in different ways. At the end of the funding period, the company can pay back the funds it received or Knight can take a stake in the company. An Enterprise Fund equity investment has no open-source requirements.

I applied in previous challenges but didn’t win. Apply again, as long as your project fits the data theme.

Answers to more questions are in our FAQ.

Innovating philanthropy while innovating media: thoughts from the Knight News Challenge review

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:25:00 -0400

Raina Kumra, CEO of Juggernaut and co-director of innovation for the BBG (along with Robert Bole), was one of 19 readers who helped decide which of the 52 projects moved to the next round of the Knight News Challenge on networks. Here, she provides her thoughts on trends that emerged from the entries considered.

Knight’s News Challenge is one of the few events in the foundation world that I can think of that makes foundation funds accessible to real people with big and small ideas. This was my first time as a reviewer for the News Challenge (its sixth one to date) and I walked away with an appreciation for each of the ideas put forth, as well as the design of the challenge itself.

This challenge had over 1,000 submissions. That’s an indication alone that there are few mechanisms in the foundation world that are as widely publicized and instantly accessible for those looking at apps that help media help people. The reviewers were made up of an impressive and diverse group of journalists and other media-centric folk including: Olivia Ma from YouTube, Ethan Zuckerman from MIT’s Center for Civic Media and Harvard’s Berkman Center and Dan Greene from the Gates Foundation to name a few. Lucky for us, the Knight team along with another group of advisors whittled down the entries to about 50 for us to review before the full day session began.

Since the focus of this round of the challenge was networks, a variety of themes emerged from the proposals we reviewed:

· Truth and Verification were big. Many entries proposed solutions to a long standing and increasingly relevant issue with digital sources and distribution.

· Another more mature problem that many newsrooms need to tackle is that of the social media dashboard, and there were a slew of entries on that topic. Many of these ideas were well developed, and some had great commercial potential.

· There were some solid entries looking at sensor based networks and automated data gathering for the news, and for community monitoring of public services or the environment. All very cool and so good to see the arduino being referenced so heavily in so many pitches.

· Countering homophily was another frequent and interesting topic this year, and there were some great suggestions on how to make news less biased and the curation of news more balanced.

· A few entries approached the theme of networks in the more traditional way: looking at demographic slices of people i.e. women, environmentalists, or residents of a single city and pitching tools that help strengthen these networks, to collaborate and communicate more effectively.

Working at an international media agency, I am on the constant hunt for projects that can be deployed globally - but there were so many compelling, hyper-local entries that it was really refreshing to think about single community impact without its potential for scale. With my consultant hat on though, I could see so many new startup ideas having their first walk down the aisle. Nascent teams and seedlings of relevant and useful ideas that could eventually grow to scale were given an early debut. There are few arenas for ideas - outside of Kickstarter and the crowdfunding platforms that followed it - that offer pre-flight funding and support like the News Challenge does for ideas that don’t necessarily fit into a typical grant framework.

Knight Foundation also designed the News Challenge to be a feeder for other types of capital and funding, including small and large investments, which I think is smart since philanthropy can only go so far on its own. The News Challenge seems to be a really interesting feeder to some of Knight’s successful investments such as Snag Films, Next Drop and Front Porch Forum.

The News Challenge also informs other aspects of Knight’s journalism grantmaking. Projects like Voice of San Diego, MinnPost.com and The Texas Tribune, although not News Challenge winners themselves, were funded in part because in the second year of its challenge, Knight saw a large amount of entries proposing community news sites. Although the projects weren’t innovative enough to fund through the challenge, the foundation felt there was a definite need for them in local communities and decided to find the most promising models to support.

After a day and a half chatting with my fellow reviewers, I’m even more certain the solutions that newsrooms need won’t be coming from the newsrooms themselves. The News Challenge’s meta theme of networks has provided a smart first funnel for innovation in news and philanthropy, by creating opportunities for news consumers, thinkers, tweakers and hackers to help media evolve.

Pilhofer: Definition of news and journalism interpreted more broadly than before

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:36:00 -0400

Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news at the New York Times, was one of the 19 readers for the 2012 Knight News Challenge projects moving on to the next round. Here, he provides his thoughts on the entries the committee considered.

The folks at Knight asked me to jot down a few thoughts about some of the common themes and interesting trends that emerged from this year’s crop of News Challenge applicants — a task that ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Going back over the 50-plus entries the committee considered to move forward in the challenge, it finally dawned on me that the one unifying theme of this year’s challenge is that there was no unifying theme.

Applicants were entrepreneurs, academics and technologists, pitching projects that touched every imaginable form of digital communications I could have imagined. Remote sensors? Drones? Mesh networks? I can only hope jet pack journalism isn’t far behind. As in the past, there were very few applications overall — and only a handful of folks heading into the final round — emanating from “traditional” newsrooms. And even those proposals were more about getting information directly into the hands of citizens than they were about improving the toolset available to working journalists.

In short, the News Challenge has changed quite a bit since 2009 when my project, DocumentCloud, was fortunate enough to win a grant. Now, it is less about the future of newsrooms, and more about the future of news. It is less about who is providing the critical news and information people need, and more about how.

For the record, I think this is a very good thing.

You could see this beginning with the 2011 crop of winners, which included organizations that (I’ll admit) I raised an eyebrow to at first. But only at first. For example, the nonprofit NextDrop won a grant to create an SMS-based service to notify residents in Hubli, Karnataka, India when water is available. But if you are living in a part of the world where fresh water is available for only a few hours at a time, and a simple SMS network could save hours of frustration waiting for the next delivery — that’s news.

Looking at this year’s crop of finalists, I think it’s safe to say we’re seeing the definition of news and journalism interpreted even more broadly than before. And needless to say, I am very much looking forward to seeing which of these projects make it through.

Experts meet to review next round of #newschallenge apps

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:15:00 -0400

Photo Credit: Jose Zamora

Today in Miami, 19 experts are reading and voting on the projects moving on to the next round of the News Challenge on Networks.

We’d like to thank the following people who are dedicating their time and energy to helping us with this process:

Hannah Eaves/LinkTV

Cody Elmore/University of Nebraska

Seth Flaxman/TurboVote

Brooke Gladstone/WNYC

Daniel Greene/Gates Foundation

Hilary Hoeber/IDEO

Elise Hu/NPR

Raina Kumra/Agency for Holistic Branding / Juggernaut

Melinda Lee/Uncensored Interview

Scott Lewis /voiceofsandiego.org

Olivia Ma/YouTube

Colin Maclay/Berkman Center

Aron Pilhofer/NYTimes

David Porter/Video Journalist

Nick Reville/Participatory Culture Foundation

David Rosenberg/Foursquare

Dan Sinker/Mozilla

Karen Wickre/Twitter

Ethan Zuckerman/MIT Media Lab

Our goal is to leave today’s meeting with 10-15 projects that we will explore even more deeply over the next couple of weeks. We expect to bring 4-6 of those for consideration by Knight Foundation trustees in mid-June, and publicly announce the winners at MIT on June 18.

Themes, surprises and outliers from 1000+ #newschallenge apps on Networks

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:27:00 -0400

Earlier today, Knight Foundation announced the 52 projects advancing to the next round of the News Challenge on Networks. Here, consultant Ryan Jacoby, a former business designer at IDEO, reflects on trends he sawwhile reviewing this year’s entries.

I had the distinct pleasure and daunting challenge of reviewing all 1000+ entriessubmitted for this year’s Knight News Challenge on “Networks.” As I reflected on what I read, my goal was to look for themes, surprises, and outliers. I also gave some thought to areas that might have been overlooked.

Without question, networks are powerful constructs. As John described, today’s networks not only allow us to reach people with information, but they also allow us to create direct connections amongst people, resources, and ideas. New connections yield new solutions. Today’s networks reduce friction and transaction costs, allowing people to coordinate and mobilize with relative ease. Distances can be overcome and boundaries can be spanned. Barriers can be avoided and modest resources can be amplified. In essence, networks allow us to accomplish more together than any small group can do on their own.

Based on your entries, here are ways (in no particular order) that you sought to leverage the power of networks:

Creating new “network knowledge” by amplifying weak signals, distributing analysis, creating metadata, and data mining
Giving a voice to underrepresented groups of people
Educating people; providing them with new skills, critical health information, perspective on current events, and information about their environment
Credentialing, authenticating, and validating network participants and information
Challenging conventional wisdom and overcoming unilateralism
Creating “safe” and “private” networks that escape scrutiny
Encouraging civic engagement
Monitoring and maintaining the quality of shared resources, especially ecological resources such as water
Organizing marketplaces, especially for journalism
Mobilizing and coordinating people for particular events, whether it be for disaster-recovery efforts or covering a timely news story

In many submissions, you envisioned augmenting the power of networks and people by introducing additional technology into the mix. For example, some ideas relied on active and passive sensors, many relied on algorithms, and one even relied on semi-autonomous drones. In other submissions, you relied on proven technologies, such as SMS and radio, to serve and reach groups of people.

Looking forward, could we we go even further? What might have we overlooked? What new scenarios and technologies might suggest new possibilities? Here are some provocations to get you thinking.

Interacting with a connected environment: With Internet-connected devices, “pinned” locations, digital archives, and cloud storage, we are able to associate data to objects and places. In this world of the “Internet with Things,” the challenge becomes how to create new valuable knowledge and engage with it in a productive way. How can we interact, be informed, and learn in this hyper-connected world to benefit our communities?

Crowdsourced big data analysis and synthesis: Algorithms will be unleashed on “big data,” yet human insight and effort has a role to play. Could activation of the populace uncover new connections, provide higher level analysis of issues, or solve small critical parts of big problems? How might we all help to “paint” our environment with new knowledge and information?

Re-distribution, syndication, and time-shifting of information: Cheap storage and the web leads to persistent and accessible archives of information. How might networks help content creators leverage back-catalogs to serve the information and journalistic needs of global communities? How might we better serve diasporic communities?

Adjacencies and intersections: Innovation is amplified by diversity and is the product of adjacent ideas and communities. What perspectives and value can be created by connecting disparate networks together? How would technologists and scientists reinvent journalism?

What themes and possibilities do you see?

Knight News Challenge on networks - moving to the next round

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:17:00 -0400

Photo Credit: Flickr user Thomas Hawk

We just finished selecting the 52 proposals that will go to the next round of the Knight News Challenge on networks. (You can see 49 of them listed below; one was a closed entry we don’t have permission from the applicant to share.)

Included in this 52 are the five applications that generated the most chatter on Tumblr: Amauta; Cont3nt, the Unconsumption Project, MediaReputations.com and PreScouter.

This week, 19 experts are reading and voting on those final 52 in preparation for an all-day gathering at our office on Friday. Our goal is to leave that meeting with 10-15 projects that we will explore even more deeply over the next couple of weeks. We expect to bring 4-6 of those for consideration by Knight Foundation trustees in mid-June, and publicly announce the winners at MIT on June 18.

Consultant Ryan Jacoby has a summary of the trends he saw in reviewing all of the 1,078 applications we received. I’ll just add that the review process was a difficult one - we’ve had to decline a lot of promising ideas. Each application was read three times, many were read more. However, I am excited about this final batch and confident that we’re going to end up with some exciting projects.

I want to say thanks to all who applied, as well as to the extraordinary group of people who reviewed the review of the entries with us:

Joaquin Alvarado, Brian Boyer, Steve Buttry, Blaine Cook, Amanda Cox, Jake Dobkin, Kate Gardiner, Josh Greenberg, Julie Moos, Catherine Orr, Julie Shapiro, Hari Sreenivasan, Kio Stark, Elena Rue, Kristen Titus, Sarah Rich, Jeremy Mims, Tim Hwang, Eric Rodenbeck; Andrew Golis, Amanda Lenhart, Ryan Jacoby, Max Ogden and Benjamen Walker.

Here’s who is moving forward in the challenge:

Amauta (Eric French)

Asia Beat (Jeffrey Wasserstrom/Angilee Shah)

Bridging the Big Data Digital Divide (Dan Brickley)

Change the Ratio (Rachel Sklar)

CitJo (Sarah Wali/Mahamad El Tanahy)

Connecting the global Hacks/Hackers network (Burt Herman, Hacks/Hackers)

Connecting the World with Rural India (Brian Conley)

Cont3nt.com (Anton Gelman/Daniel Shaw)

Cowbird (Jonathan Harris/Aaron Huey)

Data Networks are Local (Erik Gundersen, Development Seed)

DifferentFeather (Elana Berkowitz/Amina Sow)

DIY drone fleets (Ben Moskowitz/Jack Labarba)

Docs to WordPress to InDesign (William Davis, Bangor Daily News)

Electoral College of Me (John Keefe/Ron Williams)

EnviroFact (Beth Parke/Chris Marstall)

Funf.org: Open Mobile Sourcing (Nadav Aharony/Alan Gardner; MIT)

Global Censorship Monitoring System (Ruben Bloemgarten, James Burke, Chris Pinchen)

Google News for the Social Web (Sachim Kandar, Andrew Montalenti, Parse.ly)

Hawaii Eco-Net (Jay April, Maui Community Television)

Hypothes.is (Dan Whaley/Randall Leeds)

IAVA New GI Bill Veterans Alumni Network Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (Paul Rieckhoff)

m.health.news.network (Marcus Messner and Yan Jin)

MediaReputations.com (Anton Gelman/Daniel Shaw)

Mesh Potato 2.0 (Steve Song/David Rowe)

Mobile Publishing for Everyone (David Jacobs/Blake Eskin/Natalie Podrazik)

NOULA (Tayana Etienne)

Peepol.tv (Eduardo Hauser/Jeff Warren)

PreScouter (Dinesh Ganesarajah)

Prozr (Pueng Vongs/Sherbeam Wright)

Rbutr (Shane Greenup/Craig O’Shannessy)

Recovers.org (Caitria O’Neill/Alvin Liang)

Secure, Anonymous Journalism Toolkit (Karen Reilly)

Sensor Networks for News (Matt Waite, University of Nebraska)

Shareable (Seth Schneider and Neal Gorenflo)

Tethr (Aaron Huslage/Roger Weeks)

The PressForward Dashboard (Dan Cohen/ Joan Fragaszy Troyano, George Mason University)

ThinkUpApp (Gina Trapani/Anil Dash)

Tracks News Stories (David Burrows, designsuperbuild.com)

Truth Goggles (Dan Schultz)

Truth Teller (Cory Haik/Steven Ginsberg, Washington Post)

Unconsumption Project (Rob Walker/Molly Block)

UNICEF GIS (Joseph Agoada, UNICEF)

Watchup (Adriano Farrano/Jonathan Lundell)

Water Canary (Sonaar Luthra/Zach Eveland)

A Bridge Between WordPress and Git (Robert McMillan / Evan Hansen)

In the Life (Joe Miloscia, American Public Media)

Get to the Source (Joanna S. Kao/MIT)

Farm-to-Table School Lunch (Leonardo Bonanni, Sourcemap)

Partisans.org (Michael Trice)

Protecting Journalists (Diego Mendiburu and Ela Stapley)

News Challenge on Networks wants your likes and reblogs

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:59:00 -0400

We announced last week that the five News Challenge applications that receive the most support from the public will advance to the second round of consideration along with the 100 or so projects identified by our review process. Some applicants have expressed confusion by what we meant by public support, so I wanted to clarify our plans.

First, as I mentioned in the previous post, we’ll be selecting those five based on the total number of likes and reblogs on Tumblr. In addition, in our evaluation of the proposals, we will take into account the conversations taking place on the Tumblr comments page and on Twitter. Tracking more than that is difficult for us. However, if you feel like there are other conversations happening on other networks, please mention and link to them in the comments of your application page - we’ll take them into consideration too.

We’ll stop counting the Tumblr likes and reblogs on midnight, March 29. We’ll continue to follow the online conversations throughout our evaluation period in April.

I hope that helps - as ever, please hit us up if you’ve any additional questions.

By John Bracken, director/Journalism and Media Innovation at Knight Foundation

Choose how to get news and tips about applying for the Knight News Challenge:

• Follow us on Twitter #newschallenge

• Like us on Facebook

• Join us on Google+

News Challenge Networks is closed, discussion continues

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:02:00 -0400

2011 News Challenge entries on Tumblr

Over the weekend, we stopped accepting entries in the Knight News Challenge on networks.

The challenge closes with more than 1,000 applications - a number higher than we expected. About two-thirds of those were submitted in the last 48 hours of the contest, which was expected.

Among the applicants are some recognizable names, as well as ideas from people you may not have heard about before, such as PressLab Uganda, Project W, CASH Music and the Open Watch Project. Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) submitted five entries, besting former News Challenge winner and current MIT Media Lab student and Knight Mozilla fellow Dan Schultz, who only managed to submit four times.

Most - or 88% - were posted on our Tumblr. Through March 29, you’ll be able to comment and like the ideas you see there. The five applications that receive the most support will move into a second round of consideration, along with 95 or so others.

The challenge on networks is more competitive than in years past. This year, we’re running three contests, which means that instead of 12-15 winners per contest, we plan to select four or five. As a result, we will only be funding about ~~.05%~~ .5% of applications before us. (By comparison, last year Harvard admitted 6.2% of the applicants to its freshmen class.)

An inherent part of our job is to say “no” more often that we say yes, and we’ll be doing a lot of that in April. And we’ll do our best to make sure that the four or five projects that we unveil in June will be the strongest in the bunch. But it’s safe to assume that among the projects we will decline are some great ideas from some awesome people. That’s quite a resource - more than 1,000 projects, 9/10ths of which can be accessed and commented on by anyone. Our hope is that at least some of those will be improved, accelerated and actualized as a result of public discussion over the next couple of weeks.

Here are our plans from now until June 18, when we’ll announce the winners at the MIT/ Knight Civic Media conference.

This week, we begin reviewing the applications. (And, of course, you can read most of them, too.) We’ve enlisted about 20 field leaders to serve as readers with us. (We’ll share their names at the end of the process.) Each application will be read at least twice, many will be read three times, some will be read more. By early April, we will select about 100 proposals for a second round of review. As I mentioned earlier, included among those 100 will be five projects that you will help to select through your Tumblr likes and re-blogs. We’ll also be following #newschallenge discussions on Twitter. In mid-April, we’ll convene a smaller group of reviewers at our offices in Miami to help us select a group of ten or so finalists. Knight staff will spend the rest of April interviewing and conducting due diligence on that group. We’ll propose a group of winners to our board of trustees at its next meeting in mid-June.

Thanks to everyone who applied, and to everyone who has contributed to the public discussion. I look forward to following what you have to say in the coming weeks, and that you’ll help to ensure that we have five awesome project up on that MIT stage in June.

By John Bracken, director/Journalism and Media Innovation at Knight Foundation

Choose how to get news and tips about applying for the Knight News Challenge:

• Follow us on Twitter #newschallenge

• Like us on Facebook

• Join us on Google+

latakoo Makes Video Simple: Send, Share, Collaborate, Network with Video Content

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:41:09 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Speed up, simplify, economical sending and sharing of large video files from anywhere to aid journalists and others.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

Slow or expensive methods of video delivery exist, but latakoo is fast and inexpensive. We speedily send, share, download, and transcode large video files and provide public and private distribution.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

latakoo interfaces with all manner of social media and video management companies. latakoo pushes video to Facebook, YouTube, and Box. We are also building ways to directly interact with CDN’s and secure file transfer management systems. It’s faster to use latakoo, instead of uploading directly to any of those systems.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

Escalating video usage online and through smart phones creates need for simple video sharing and management. According to a forecast by Cisco, two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016. latakoo works on smart phones, tablets, and pc’s. Storing video on dispersed personal devices without search function is frustrating. latakoo offers centralized storage of all videos with easy search function. And, with social media proliferation, sharing video comes with concerns about privacy. latakoo offers private or public sharing, allowing users to choose. latakoo is an end-to-end video platform that also transcodes files to several editable formats.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

Journalists and technologists created latakoo. The founders, both journalists, are passionate about giving content producers ways to disperse and monetize video. Paul Adrian, a former television investigative reporter, left his job to return to school at Harvard. Adrian’s goal was an entrepreneurial solution for the business of journalism. Jade Kurian was among the first to join a pioneering television network that broadcast international news content in full high-definition. Leading development is Ben Werdmuller, one of the world’s top social media experts. All three are passionate about journalism and want to give everyone an easy way to use and leverage video.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

We have already built a web-based video management system, but we are just developing integration into other web-based systems and file-based networks, laying the groundwork for latakoo as a video platform. We have developed an upload tool (software) that users download onto their computers to convey their video files fast and in high quality. latakoo’s web service allows users to share video through e-mail, Facebook, YouTube, and Box, to download video in a variety of editable formats, to create collaborative folders, to add notes, to comment, and to attach files to video.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

We expect to grow revenue quickly as we unveil an incentive-based marketing campaign. Our freemium model rewards users who introduce latakoo to more users, helping us to build audience and revenue. We have also raised funds through investments, and latakoo is already used by paying television customers throughout the country.

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $500,000

Expected amount of time required to complete project: 6 Months for full Integrations, although a working and montetized service already exists.

Total Project Cost: $ 4 Million (1.3 Million already Raised Email: paul@latakoo.com for investors page password)

Name: Jade Kurian
Twitter: @latakoo
Organization: latakoo, Inc.
Country: USA

Bias map - a community driven, social data-gathering tool, which maps expression and acts of prejudice and bias against minorities.

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:39:47 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Bias map - a community driven, social data-gathering tool, which maps expression and acts of prejudice and bias against minorities.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

Currently, there seems to be no resource that utilizes community input to map prejudice, hate speech and hate crimes in real-time. Biasmap specifically addresses the gap in this area.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

BiasMap uses Ushahidi platform to file reports using twitter, facebook, sms and email. Existing smartphone apps and community stewards will reach out to digital immigrants and people without computer access. Collected data is shared on facebook, twitter and google+. Raw data is made publicly available to researchers, journalists and to activists.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

Community ownership: Biasmap is a collaboration between many stakeholders and the public. Partnerships with organizations will produce a single set of massive data Epidemiology: Drawing on techniques used by epidemiologists, biasmap offers a unique visualization of the crisis of hate and prejudice and allows for strategic responses and interventions biasmap will be the largest and most complete collection of data of this sort. The data will include official reports, verified accounts as well as unverified citizen reports. In this way bias map seeks to capture the 40% to 60% of incidents, which go unreported.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

Ian Pollock: Creator of Biasmap, New Media Artist/Educator, has been teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in new media arts and development the US and the Middle East. His interests include digital media fine art, citizen journalism, activism, social learning strategies, connectivist learning, social capacity building, web design/development, ux/uix, video and audio production, government 2.0, education 2.0, and curriculum development. Ian Pollock teaches at the University of SF and the CSU East Bay.

Javed Ali: Founder/Publisher, ILLUME. One of the world’s 500 most influential Muslims. Awards: NPF, RTDNA, SAJA. Soliya Network Fellow - Conflict Resolution via storytelling. CAP Member, KQED.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

January 1: Biasmap launched. Twitter messages hash tagged #biasmap automatically collected and converted into reports. Approximately 220 islamophobia reports waiting to be verified and released.

March 15: Negotiations with community partners to get. Android mobile apps ready to be deployed to allow for input via sms and mobile Internet.

End of 2012: bias map will hold information published in reports as far back as 2000 concerning hate crimes against minority communities as well as legislations enacted which target the minority communities in the US. Identify an recruite community participants/facilitators from 3 or more faith communities and the LGBT community.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

The project will be hosted by one of more organizations and derive funding for hosting from page views. Fundraisers, donations and grants in each represented community will be aggregated to cover the costs associated with data verification, training and outreach.

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $150K
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 1 year
Total Project Cost: $150K

Name: Ian Pollock & Javed Ali
Twitter: @biasmap
Organization: http://biasmap.org/map/index.php
Country: United States

OpenInnovations

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:34:37 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Create a content aggregation and collaboration workspace where problem-solvers can post and remix the components of high-impact innovation.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

This project builds on the sociality of tools like Storify and Kickstarter and on the successes of cross-discipline partnerships to build a network of problem-solvers—citizens, researchers, and practitioners—tackling pressing issues.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

The project relies on several network layers. The data layer relies on existing open-source software to make information tag-able, searchable, and social. The interface layer allows users to share and remix data, media, and processes. The people layer exists online and off so that sustainable innovation can truly be unleashed.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

Good ideas, expertise, and data abound. However, institutional practice and different fields can make it challenging for grassroots innovation to reach organizations and vice-versa. This project lower the transactional costs of navigating this divide by focusing on partnerships. This model has already proven successful in areas such as crisis mapping and violence intervention. This project builds on these successes, bringing experimentation and evidence-based rigor to innovations in governance and democratic processes. The project has received seed funding from the Kauffman Foundation to develop the content aspects of the model so that research and case studies are better positioned to be actionable insights.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

The project team consists of entrepreneurs and researcher-practitioners working at the intersections of business, technology, and social innovation. They are Adam Hasler, senior editor for the MIT Press journal Innovations: Technology | Governance | Globalization; Mark Stoughton, programmer and online media start-up veteran; Colleen Kaman, M.Sc., media strategist and graduate of CMS-MIT; Dharmishta Rood, M.Sc., user experience specialist and fellow, MIT Center for Civic Media; Jon Payne, M.P.H., Partners in Health manager specializing in the use of technology to coordinate communities of practice; Laura Neuhaus, M.A., organizational change specialist and Harvard graduate.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

The project team has identified the pilot users that will help build the workspace. The journal Innovations has built a global network of social entrepreneurs, scientists, and problem-solvers. This project will rely heavily on this community of readers and contributors. In addition, the team is in touch with the Boston-based organizers of innovation competitions and international development practitioners-researchers as additional pilot users. The project requires minimal technical development, which will primarily focus on adapting and harmonizing existing open-source software such as community review and content management software and content aggregation tools.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

This project will build a self-sustaining network of problem-solvers and entrepreneurs. It is also exploring licensing and subscription-based funding.

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $150,000
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 12 months
Total Project Cost: $180,000

Name: Adam Hasler
Twitter:
Organization: Innovations / OpenInnovations
Country: USA

YBlog - A web information platform inspiring youth innovation in Ghana through peer-to-peer networks.

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:34:34 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Web platform that allows young Bloggers(12-18yrs) to share news on the work of innovative young Ghanaians and positive urban trends.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

What we are offering is truly unique. In Ghana young people have no such outlet where they can have access to youth-interest stories. This is a fresh urban network concept.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

Google Ghana is expected to provide technical support for this project. We expect to have a telecom service provider as partner to provide internet access to our new contributors. Well established music, arts, business and technology bloggers/journalists will provide mentoring. The burgeoning tech community in Accra will be fully integrated.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

We have come to a conclusion that specialized web news content for this important urban target demographic group is simply unavailable. It’s a niche market of thousands of technology-savvy, young and active social media users which is simply untouched. It’s an opportunity waiting to explode!

This is likely to be a big hit because of the current dynamics of Ghana’s urban youth population. Conventional media holds very little appeal to them. Building a network platform that coordinates a systematic peer-to-peer sharing of real time news updates via social media stands a real chance of succeeding.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

Currently, this project is at seed stage. Team members are part-time, committing an average of 20-hours/week each. The team is made up of 3 young professionals with diverse backgrounds and one student volunteer. The lead coordinator is a development professional with core competencies ranging from proposal/grant writing, research, project planning, monitoring and evaluation as well as marketing. There’s a Recruitment Consultant with a highly placed international HR Agency. There’s also a development research professional with extensive knowledge in project planning and research. We’ll soon be receiving technical support from Ghana Blogging, a network of established bloggers.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

One of our key achievements so far has been the progression of our concept into the final stage of the Playing for Change Social Entrepreneurship Competition in Ghana out of a total of 933 concepts submitted. We are confident of making it to the final and ultimately winning. We’ve initiated partnership talks with some very relevant stakeholders. We’ve also secured the support of Hekimax Solutions Ghana, a mobile based solutions provider who will provide a mobile content sharing interface for our project. We are also having talks with several organizations that have expressed interest in supporting the initiative.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

The potential revenues from advertising is massive. Online marketing and advertising for this niche market of thousands of young active social media users is simply untouched. Once these young bloggers start sharing interesting material on their web pages, we can trade on visitor traffic to sell advertising to ensure sustainability

Knight News Challenge

News Challenge on open gov launches Feb. 12

Eight mobile ventures win $2.4 million in funding via Knight News Challenge

Releated Links

Knight News Challenge: Mobile Winners

Winners of News Challenge: Data

Winners in Knight News Challenge: Networks

Our next week: Hacks, stories and winners

FireSeed Up-cycling Waste to Fine Arts Project

Out the Window

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $125,000 Expected amount of time required to complete project: 1 year Total Project Cost: $143,000 annually

Name: Anne Bray Twitter: freewavesanneOrganization: FreewavesCountry: USA

Digital Schoolhouse: A Window Into Classrooms Around The World

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $175,000Expected amount of time required to complete project: 3 Months to Launch, 12 Months to completely self-sustainingTotal Project Cost: $300,000

Name: Adam LupuTwitter: @GlobalPlayOrganization: Global PlaygroundCountry: United States

Announcing the next Knight News Challenge: Data

Innovating philanthropy while innovating media: thoughts from the Knight News Challenge review

Pilhofer: Definition of news and journalism interpreted more broadly than before

Experts meet to review next round of #newschallenge apps

Themes, surprises and outliers from 1000+ #newschallenge apps on Networks

Knight News Challenge on networks - moving to the next round

News Challenge on Networks wants your likes and reblogs

News Challenge Networks is closed, discussion continues

latakoo Makes Video Simple: Send, Share, Collaborate, Network with Video Content

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

Expected amount of time required to complete project: 6 Months for full Integrations, although a working and montetized service already exists.

Total Project Cost: $ 4 Million (1.3 Million already Raised Email: paul@latakoo.com for investors page password)

Name: Jade KurianTwitter: @latakooOrganization: latakoo, Inc.Country: USA

Bias map - a community driven, social data-gathering tool, which maps expression and acts of prejudice and bias against minorities.

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $150KExpected amount of time required to complete project: 1 yearTotal Project Cost: $150K

Name: Ian Pollock & Javed AliTwitter: @biasmapOrganization: http://biasmap.org/map/index.phpCountry: United States

OpenInnovations

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $150,000Expected amount of time required to complete project: 12 monthsTotal Project Cost: $180,000

Name: Adam HaslerTwitter:Organization: Innovations / OpenInnovationsCountry: USA

YBlog - A web information platform inspiring youth innovation in Ghana through peer-to-peer networks.

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $25,000Expected amount of time required to complete project: 1 YearTotal Project Cost: $35,000

Name: William Edem Senyo Twitter:@ACMusicLoungeOrganization: Accra Music LoungeCountry: Ghana

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $125,000
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 1 year
Total Project Cost: $143,000 annually

Name: Anne Bray
Twitter: freewavesanne
Organization: Freewaves
Country: USA

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $175,000
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 3 Months to Launch, 12 Months to completely self-sustaining
Total Project Cost: $300,000

Name: Adam Lupu
Twitter: @GlobalPlay
Organization: Global Playground
Country: United States

Name: Jade Kurian
Twitter: @latakoo
Organization: latakoo, Inc.
Country: USA

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $150K
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 1 year
Total Project Cost: $150K

Name: Ian Pollock & Javed Ali
Twitter: @biasmap
Organization: http://biasmap.org/map/index.php
Country: United States

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $150,000
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 12 months
Total Project Cost: $180,000

Name: Adam Hasler
Twitter:
Organization: Innovations / OpenInnovations
Country: USA

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $25,000
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 1 Year
Total Project Cost: $35,000

Name: William Edem Senyo
Twitter:@ACMusicLounge
Organization: Accra Music Lounge
Country: Ghana