Knight News Challenge Round 2

News Challenge on open gov launches Feb. 12

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:38:06 -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 17:24:00 -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

Highlighting the 2%: the Knight News Challenge: Data finalists

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:29:04 -0400

This morning, we announced the winners of the Knight News Challenge: Data.

We’d also like to share the 15 finalists. While we weren’t able to fund all of them, we enjoyed getting to know more about the people and ideas behind them, and hope to see them come to life in the months ahead.

We’ve heard that it’s valuable for people to see the original applications for the projects that rose to the top, so gathered them them all in one place. If you want to learn more about each of the finalists and the winners, check out the links to each of their original submissions (an asterisk notes a News Challenge: Data winner).

Census.IRE.org (*)
Joe Germuska, John Keefe, Ryan Pitts, Investigative Reporters & Editors

Community Health Analytics: Making Community Health Data Useful
Scott Lee, Harvard University

Computer Assisted Text Analysis for Journalism
Gary King, Harvard University

Data Toys
Heather Chaplin, Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, The New School

The Internet of News Things
Matt Waite, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Hyperaudio Pad
Mark Boas, Happyworm

LocalData (*)
Alicia Rouault, Prashant Singh and Matt Hampel, Amplify Labs

Mapping LA API
Ben Welsh, The Los Angeles Times

New tools for OpenStreetMap (*)
Eric Gundersen, Development Seed Inc.

Open Elections (*)
Derek Willis, The New York Times;
Serdar Tumgoren, The Washington Post

OpenIR: Mapping Your Environment in a New Light
Arlene Ducao, MIT Media Lab

Pop Up Archive (*)
Bailey Smith and Anne Wootton

Safecast Radiation & Air Quality (*)
Sean Bonner, Safecast

Sentiment Analysis Engine for Chinese Social Media
David Wertime, Tea Leaf Nation

Social Bots
Nicolas Della Penna

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

Winners of News Challenge: Data

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:25:00 -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.

Announcing Knight News Challenge: Mobile

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:08:00 -0400

Photo Credit: Flickr user girl_onthe_les

We’re excited to announce the theme for the third Knight News Challenge of 2012: mobile. We hope to learn about new approaches for using mobile to inform and engage communities, and build the foundation for others to do more in the future.

We will open the contest on Aug. 29 and will close at noon EDT Sept. 10, on newschallenge.org. We plan to announce the winners early next year. As with the two prior News Challenge contests this year, on networks and data, we will keep the application light, limited to 500 words and a few questions.

Why mobile? With 6 billion devices worldwide, according to the World Bank, the world will soon have more mobile phones than people. The mobile device is so much more than a “phone”— Jeff Jarvis, among others, has argued that we need a better term for the device. “Mobile is my personal bubble. It is enhanced convenience, putting the device and the world in my hand,” he says. We saw this personal tinge to tech last week in the NASA Curiosity Command Center where staff, while landing a robot on Mars, were updating their friends and family via their phones (according to an interview with Bobak Ferdowsi.)

Despite these trends, and the presence of several mobile projects in our own portfolio (including winners from Knight News Challenge on Networks PeepolTV, Behavio and Watchup), we realized how much we have to learn about this fundamental shift. For many of us around the world, mobile has become an important tool for learning what’s going on around us, and for sharing details about our lives with friends, neighbors and strangers. We know that we (and our kids) have grown attached to our mobile devices, but we have less clarity about the ways people are using them, or might use them, as citizens, content producers and consumers to tell, share and receive stories.

We’ve focused the News Challenge this year on big opportunities in news and information - networks, data and now mobile. In some ways, mobile represents both the greatest need and greatest potential for individual citizens and news organizations.

Last week, we saw social media companies (Zynga and Facebook) and fast food franchises (Chipotle) struggling to make sense of mobile. Despite the opportunities, news publishers like Huffington Post and News Corp are learning, according to Ad Week, that “the tablet publishing market isn’t the runaway success many envisioned.” On the other hand, a police shooting in New York’s Times Square on Saturday was widely covered by passersby using their phones.

So, send us your ideas for harnessing mobile to improve news, information, communities and democracy. For more details about the application and the questions that will be asked, check back in when the challenge officially launches on Aug. 29. On Sept. 20, we’ll announce the winners of the previous News Challenge, on data, at the Online News Association convention in San Francisco, Calif.

You can contact us anytime at newschallenge@knightfoundation.org or on Twitter at @knightfdn using #newschallenge.

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

An update on Knight News Challenge: Data

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:54:53 -0400

Based on the comments from our team of advisers who helped review the apps and our internal own review, we’ve selected and are in the process of contacting 16 finalists in the Knight News Challenge: Data. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be doing in-person interviews or video chats with each of them them. We’ll announce that list of finalists, and the winners of the contest, in September.

This morning, we’ve also sent an email to the remaining 765 letting them know that they will not be receiving funding via the the News Challenge. One of the great things about the News Challenge is that it exposes us (and everyone else who reads the entries) to ideas and people. While we can fund only a fraction of the ideas that come through the News Challenge, we have other means for funding promising initiatives. For example, last month, we announced a grant to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to fund an idea that originally came to us through the News Challenge on Networks. And our new prototype fund allows us to test ideas quickly - we announced some that will receive funding last month. We’ve begun to reach out to some News Challenge applicants to explore whether their ideas might fit this program, and we plan to announce some prototype grants soon.

Here are a few of the insights we took from last week’s review session:

A need for partners. We saw many projects with promising concepts or products, but that need partnerships with news organizations or others to test their use cases and find social impact. There’s a need for better partner matching in the media innovation space.

Data standardization. A segment of applications dealt with the need for standardization of data.

Designing for user experiences. The strongest projects were those that joined compelling uses of data with an experience carefully designed for a well-understood group of users. Many data projects are taking the next step from availability to effective presentation and interaction.

Longitudinal thinking. As more, and better, data becomes available, there’s more thinking on how to tie datasets together to track trends and find long-term ideas and insights.

Where humans end and machines begin. Machines still have limits on their ability to process data, though those limits are quickly lessening. We saw explorations of new types of machine learning and natural language processing, allowing machines to complete higher order tasks with data.

The importance of maps. A new generation of projects are using maps, satellite imagery and data visualization for a range of applications, from news to environmental analysis.

Also, a reminder: we’ll be running a third News Challenge this fall. Stay tuned for an announcement on the theme and dates.

By John S. Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation and Christopher Sopher, journalism program associate

Advisers gather to review apps in Knight News Challenge: Data

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 09:27:15 -0400

Today in Miami, we’re gathering 17 journalists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to help us review the applications in the latest Knight News Challenge, on data.

By the end of the day, we hope to have 10-12 finalists that we’ll examine more deeply over the next few weeks. We expect to bring about five of those forward for consideration by Knight Foundation trustees at its September meeting and to publicly announce the winners shortly thereafter. (If you are one of those finalists, you can expect to hear from us by next week.)

We’d like to thank the following people who have taken two days to join us:

Blaine Cook
Aziz Gilani/DFJ Mercury
David Haskell/New York Magazine
Hilary Hoeber/IDEO
Elise Hu/NPR
Scott Klein/ProPublica
Laura Kurgan/Columbia University
Andrew McLaughlin/Tumblr
Colin Maclay/Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Shazna Nessa/AP Interactive
Greg Osberg/Philadelphia Media Network
Aron Pilhofer/New York Times
Juliana Rotich/Ushahidi
Dan Sinker/Mozilla
Kio Stark/NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program
Maribel Wadsworth/Gannett
Milo Yiannopoulos/The Kernel

We closed the Knight News Challenge: Data in June with over 881 applications and have blogged about some of the themes we noticed.

Policy Data

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:20:35 -0400

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

We propose to gather data to keep score regarding the hundreds of cases that are decided and released each day.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

Using our information on judicial qualifications, we will apply data to a variety of civic and criminal cases so the public can measure what happens and what effect these cases have. Now, there is not “data”- just words, a few stories, but nothing that draws the picture or invites comparison.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

Nothing measures cases. We will create categories, such as damages, sentencing and other outcomes. Academics create some of this data every few years; we will do so every few days.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

We have already built databases of M&A agreements for corporate lawyers. We have used sophisticated proprietary text mining software. By creating a robust, accessible, and current database, we will create a scorecard of the justice system. Like stats for baseball players, our data summarizes critical, objective aspects of judges and provides simple, comparable, actionable data for the public, government officials and the media. Given the public nature of the cases, we can assemble the raw data for analysis. We will focus on state and federal cases, and various states and significant cities, depending on availability.

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

We will use the Policy Data Institute staff. These include a software programmer and a researcher.

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

We have built databases for the judicial system in Chicago and Philadelphia. We have created text-mining software for contracts. We have been testing the software on cases, and require resources to better complete the technical aspects of the data collection and analysis.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]

The funds would be divided between software programming (open source or custom) and non-technical research, such as contacting courts, scraping information from the Internet, and building systems for storing and retrieving the base text files. Some funds might be used to lease space in a subsidized technology incubator in Chicago.

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

First, we are in the process of obtaining grants and foundation funding. Our non-profit has been organized, and we are seeking 501(c)(3) certification. Second, we are contracting out text-mining research projects using our software to augment the foundation giving. We could charge a fee to attorneys for highly technical information.

Requested amount: $100,000.

Expected number of months to complete project: Phase I: 4 months.

Total Project Cost: $200,000. We have other source of funds that will be used to supplement the funds from the Knight Foundation.

Name: Suzanne Carbon

Twitter: N/A

Email address [optional]: scarbon@policydata.org

Organization: Policy Data Institute

How did you learn about the contest? Internet

Factlink

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 10:04:44 -0400

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

Build a crowd-sourced data-graph that provides a real-time updated connection to what others know about what we’re reading on the web.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]
Factlink builds a trust-graph reflecting what knowledge users have, on any specific subject they interact on with other users. Similar to Wikipedia, it is a collective perspective but then implemented as a layer that works on any web page so it provides a frame of reference to readers of online articles. If people know a piece of the puzzle, they can immediately add it and share what they know.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

Existing solutions are typically editor driven or implemented as a specialized destination where users can exchange knowledge. There is no layer over the web that empowers users to know what others with expertise know about what they’re reading, providing a frame of reference and curbing misinformation by visually indicating credibility.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

Data is generated by users that respond to and interact with other users in their social and email networks. Factlink is inherently social, a conversation between people that discover relevant facts in a stream and contribute what they know. It is driven by strong personal motivations of users that can accumulate authority and stature but also support ideas they believe by endorsing and adding further arguments.

Key building a sustainable data- and trust-graph is the ability of third parties and researchers to use the data for their own research, investigate exactly how calculations are implemented, detect potential issues in the continuous changing data-set (like attempts to spam/scam), and suggest potential ways of improving algorithms.

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

Factlink is a team (https://factlink.com/p/team) of very dedicated talent and a group of established advisors and collaborators that includes people from LinkedIn, Yahoo, O’Reilly, and PowerSet/Bing. CEO and founder Merijn Terheggen (http://www.linkedin.com/in/merijnterheggen) has founded two previous successful startups: a text analysis company and a photo album search engine. The combination of talent and expertise and building web scale products helps the team at building a product and service that scales and is sustainable. We’ve been working for the last year and have build a real-world working version that’s currently being used by a group of several hundred people. Factlink uses and contributes to over 20 Open Source projects.

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

We’ve build the core engine, including API, and build a web application on top of it that helps users curate the news using their personal stream (analogous to a stream as used on services like Facebook), discover relevant information, and contribute what they know. The backend is based on a very scalable and distributed NoSQL setup as used by today’s leading internet services and can be scaled to handle large volumes of users. The data model is designed to support distribution over many servers so there’s no inherent limits to growth. An introduction video can be found at https://factlink.com.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]

The Knights Challenge grant would be used to focus on building a substantial community of researchers that cooperate on trust ranking and credibility of the methods and calculations used. Factlink has a lot of focus on creating a user interaction experience that works really well and lets anybody add what they know. Adoption of the underlying data model and public scrutiny on the calculations is something that is of key importance to bring trustworthy data to users. The successful implementation of the initial application now justifies spending resources on bringing the data models to the next level.

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

The current implementation has gained the interest of large online publishers that can use Factlink to offer their readers an additional frame of reference and increases engagement. Factlink has sufficient funding for 18 more months of operation and can be self sustaining based on current customer interest within that timeframe.

Requested amount: $ 450,000

Expected number of months to complete project: 18 months

Total Project Cost: ~$1,500,000. The amount can get increased based on future successes.

Name: Factlink

Twitter: @factlink

Email address [optional]:

Organization: Factlink Inc.

City: Alameda, California

Country: United States of America

How did you learn about the contest? Through the advisory board, https://factlink.com/p/team

OurSchool

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:59:28 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]
Launch interactive, bilingual platform to promote and accelerate school-family-community leadership around empirically-based action model for strengthening public schools.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]
In a sea of school data, OurSchool Platform will zero in on leverage-point data, best practices and change strategies. The platform will deliver clear content through an interactive, seamless, bilingual (Spanish-English) platform that Local Action Teams can use to assess contexts, develop action plans, and benchmark and measure results.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]
Existing databases emphasize accountability or school selection, not partnership and action to improve schools. Our project delivers data around a tested action model, via a platform that enfranchises partners.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]
The portal we designed for Texas has been used in over 100 sessions and three geographic regions as the centerpiece of regional planning. In communities such as Socorro ISD, a predominantly Hispanic district in El Paso, parents used the portal to identify weaknesses in the high school math program, then conducted surveys that located problems in pedagogy, class size and remediation. With this information, school officials revised professional development priorities and local remediation policies. Success has been replicated in other communities. The portal tested well with focus groups with families; usergroups.com and assessment by graduate students in UT-Austin’s IT programs.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]
The platform design team is led by Dr. María Robledo Montecel, a national expert in school system reform, with a doctorate in research and evaluation from the Urban Education program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and includes: Dr. Abelardo Villarreal, director of IDRA’s national field services programs, and former director of the Regional STAR Center, which innovated technology for service delivery in schools; Mr. Hector Bojorquez, developer of IDRA’s OurSchool Portal, with expertise in bilingual education, and interactive data and portal design; Ms. Laurie Posner who manages technology integration at IDRA, with an emphasis on networks and engagement strategies.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]
The OurSchool Portal has already been built as a bilingual stand-alone tool, providing data on every Texas secondary school, survey tools, and an “ourschool portfolio” to track and share data. Data is being added that links high school preparation, college readiness and participation. It is built on a scalable open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform, chosen for the relative ease of upgrading and the low cost of maintenance. The portal also uses CakePHP and JQuery. Tools and resources on best practices have already been produced, including award-winning podcasts, articles, videos and tested guides.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]
Funds will support increasing interactivity and development from a Texas based portal to a scalable platform. Interactivity will include benchmarking user-defined goals, collaboration tools and video sharing. Platform development will allow users to populate their portal with data from state databases to provide comprehensible information framed through IDRA’s change model.

8. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]
Use of the platform will be integrated into the IDRA’s organizational work with school districts and CBO capacity-building, including technical assistance through IDRA’s federally-funded South Central Collaborative for Equity, serving a five state region and through foundation-funded initiatives in Texas and other states.

Requested amount: $175,000

Expected number of months to complete project: 16

Total Project Cost: $250,000

Name: María Robledo Montecel, President and CEO

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/IDRAedu

Email address [optional]: robledo.montecel@idra.org

Organization: Intercultural Development Research Association

City: San Antonio

Country: United States

How did you learn about the contest? Laurie Posner, via Pauline Turner Strong, Director, Humanities Institute, UT Austin

What's In Your Thought Bubble?

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 10:30:23 -0400

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]
Educate audiences on current issues through curated/original motion graphics; Thought Bubbles, enhanced with interactive social/news feeds and opinion polls.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]
We’ll spruce up these current-issue motion graphics with relevant news and social feeds showing the latest data and conversations on the topic, and profile of the user’s online activity and data consumption through interactive polling and a facebook/iOS app that will display what they fill their ‘Thought Bubble’ with.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]
We fill our “Thought Bubble” (or brains) with online content everyday. We’d inspire a new way of consuming socially-relevant content, providing feedback that profiles users’ own “Thought Bubbles”.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]
Everyone wants to have a better understanding of the world and the significant issues we’re faced with. They want the whole story; explanations behind different events, backgrounds, and deconstructions of complex topics. Most socially relevant videos, articles and campaigns are separated from one another even if they cover the same topic. This forces viewers to have to piece the story together on their own, based on content that may be outdated or incorrect. We’d do the leg work, bringing real time information supported by the best cause-based videos and gamify the experience through the use of our facebook/iOS app.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]
Smart Bubble Society is a non-profit motion graphic studio that creates socially relevant motion graphics for a growing, dedicated audience, that wants to be educated. We call these motion graphics Thought Bubbles. They represent a philosophy that we have the power to choose what to fill our minds with, or what to fill our Thought Bubble with. We’ve been producing motion graphics for several years, and have the industry experience, talented employees, contacts, and ambition to push the field further, bridging it with interactivity in a way that will strengthen its function as a visual information tool.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]
We have a website with a few hundred unique daily visitors, and a YouTube channel with over 5000 loyal subscribers. Our videos have been viewed over 4,000,000 times, and our fan base loves what we do, often requesting more, and thoroughly embracing the Thought Bubble philosophy. Our audience wants to see this happen, and craves a cohesive shift in online motion graphic content, and the way we consume it. We also create a weekly Thought Bubble (animation) for a YouTube series called Crash Course World History, through which we’ve seen the power of education through this form of visual data.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]
We would re-design the thoughtbubble.org website to release and curate this type of content, and incorporate interactivity with the use of Mozilla’s popcorn.js – an open source HTML 5 video-focused interactive language. We would also create the supportive facebook/iOS app that map’s one’s ‘Thought Bubble’.

8. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]
Similar to other successful curator models, www.good.is, funnyordie.com, and motionographer.com we would grow a returning, devoted audience. Clients will see a huge incentive to purchase their issue-based Thought Bubbles through our studio, and curated ‘Thought Bubbles’ from around the web will ensure a large library of content.

Requested amount: $360,000
Expected number of months to complete project: 8 months
Total Project Cost: $400,000 to $500,000
Name: Jonathon Corbiere
Twitter: @thoughtbubbler
Email address [optional]: jon@thoughtbubble.org
Organization: Smart Bubble Society
City: Toronto
Country: Canada
How did you learn about the contest? Knight Foundation Website

Senior Scam Data

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:38:05 -0400

1. WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE TO DO? (20 WORDS)
Create dramatizations for media, using timely data to enlighten vulnerable senior population about scams to prevent their victimization.

2. HOW WILL YOUR PROJECT MAKE DATA MORE USEFUL? (50 WORDS)
Data about current scams will be scripted into user-friendly content and presented by a well-known celebrity spokesperson, thus will be given better attention. Messages will be delivered through comprehensive, customized, frequently updated delivery systems, made accessible and available on website, free app’s, U-tube, power point, public service announcements.

3. HOW IS YOUR PROJECT DIFFERENT FROM WHAT ALREADY EXISTS? (30 WORDS)
Currently, scam scenarios and alerts are in print, having minimal impact. Our outreach, using media formats, leveraging existing software and technology, combining audio and visual, will be more effective.

4. WHY WILL IT WORK? (100 WORDS)
Professional communicators acknowledge the influence of receiving information from a respected actor or known spokesperson, especially when delivered in non-threatening manner. New media formats provide opportunities to transmit scam data differently ; we will adapt methods whenever technology changes. Consultants will advise about how we can use data most effectively to alert the seniors. Focus groups will help guide our presentation decisions. Targets will either be adept in using the technology or trained to be comfortable with it. Qualitative reports will bring data about success of reception ; this data useful, too, for public agencies and those working with seniors.

5. WHO IS WORKING ON IT? (100 words)
Scam Spotlight project initiators: Deborah Hoffman, retired attorney and community activist; Joseph Adler, Producing Artistic Director, GableStage; and Max Rothman, Director, Alliance for Aging; Miami-Dade County. The development consulting team includes: Michael McKeever, Playwright, Actor, and Director; Fabio Iannelli, Director of Interactive Media, Advansis company, Adjunct Professor in Communication, University of Miami. At outset of creating Scam Spotlight concept, initiators met ,and will continue to consult with, representatives from the State Attorney’s Office; US Postal Inspector; and Consumer Fraud/Consumer Protection office. Additionally, other persons will assist with marketing and promotion, act as facilitators for focus groups, and make related presentations.

6. WHAT PART OF PROJECT HAVE YOU ALREADY BUILT? (100 WORDS)
We’ve consulted with consumer fraud and senior service agencies. We have developed a list of agencies and organizations which we will contact, seeking ways to collaborate with them so that their constituents can benefit from the Scam Spotlight output .
We’re now in the process of formulating our Business Plan, including: Organization chart; Budget; technology development goals ( website, apps, U-Tube, power point, etc.); production needs (scripts, casting, filming videos); timetables for implementation; strategies for outreach and public networking ; strategies for surveying and collecting qualitative data from recipients and rating usefulness and effectiveness of Scam Spotlight’s approach.

7. HOW WOULD YOU USE THE NEWS CHALLENGE FUNDS? (50 WORDS)
Funds would be applied towards costs for technical development*; production of educational content; outreach for public service; marketing and promotion; technical maintenance and updates; coordinator salary; generation of reports about outcome and success of project to spotlight scams; provide statistics to agencies. (*add interactive component in second stage)

8. HOW WOULD YOU SUSTAIN THE PROJECT AFTER FUNDING EXPIRES?(50 WORDS)
Seek funding from our collaborating organizations as well as foundations, national and local governmental sources ( agencies, departments) where elder issues are their key concerns or an issue high on their agenda is attacking the high rate of victimization of elders from scams.

Requested amount: $30,000
Expected number of months to complete projects: 6 months
Total project cost: $55,000
Name Deborah Hoffman
Twitter: @DebiHoff
Email address: DebiHoff@aol.com
Organization: Scam Spotlight,Inc.
City: Miami
Country: U.S.
How did you learn about the contest? Through a Knight e-newsletter

Two Way Investigative Reporting

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:34:24 -0400

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

Expand distribution of investigative reporting, aggregate micro local news and build revenue potential through a new community news network.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

A network of hundreds of community news outlets will distribute in-depth content and data produced by KPBS public media and Investigative Newsource, a data-driven journalism nonprofit. In return, the outlets will share micro local content with KPBS for vetting, tagging and aggregation through a mobile application based on location.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

There is no interactive news delivery and aggregation system in San Diego County, let alone one that delivers mobile news by neighborhood location.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

As people are bombarded with information, they seek easy ways to receive and organize information they care about, most frequently news close to home. We’ll use Publish2 News Exchange, a proven and award-winning aggregation tool, to push investigative content out to the news outlets and to pull in their local content. KQED in San Francisco has offered to collaborate in sharing code from their Get Lost mobile application that tracks location. KPBS and Investigative Newsource produce in-depth content to share with community outlets. The local content producers have location-specific content desired by consumers. Widely distributing all of this content can mean greater mobile app advertising dollars.

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

Lorie Hearn, executive director of Investigative Newsource, Carrie O’Connell, media studies graduate student at SDSU with a specialty in social media; Tammy Carpowich, KPBS Director of Interactive Strategy; Jim Tinsky, KPBS Interactive Technology Manager

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

We are constructing a database of more than 150 community news outlets and contact information, and have begun organizing them across Twitter categories based on geography, niche market and political districts in preparation for an outreach campaign. We have researched Publish2 and have had conversations with KQED about sharing the Get Lost app code. We have identified key roles necessary to build the network, vet the content and launch the aggregation tool.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]

$250,000 for network and mobile app development, copy editing, aggregation and geo-locating; $15,000 training; $15,000 for publishing fees, $8,000 community news outlet partner outreach and hospitality.

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

The mobile application has potential for advertising revenue for KPBS, Newsource and the community outlets. In addition, KPBS has a history of securing three-year funding commitments for project-based initiatives with a 90 percent renewal rate. Current projects include one that was jointly funded as part of the unique KPBS-Newsource partnership.

Requested amount: $288,000
Expected number of months to complete project: 12
Total Project Cost: $288,000
Name: Tom Karlo (KPBS) and Lorie Hearn (Investigative Newsource)
Twitter: @kpbsnews and @inewsource
Email address [optional]:
Organization: KPBS and Investigative Newsource
City: San Diego
Country: USA
How did you learn about the contest? The Knight challenge is legendary

Panoptyx

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:30:27 -0400

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

Create an Online News Portal using a sophisticated organizational engine to better distribute meaningful, original news/content to the public.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

Highly organized with a Dewey-decimal style system so that news and content from around the globe will be easier to find and organize than using any other current means. It will save users significant time, give news more relevance and meaning, and provide for a higher quality level of journalism.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

It is a portal of original content (not simply aggregating existing sources) that is organized in a highly sophisticated manner unlike anything currently online. Furthermore, it generates revenue for newsrooms.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

This project is founded on a sound business model with revenue streams identified to provide sustainability right from the start with plenty of room to grow and expand. Another strong point is a well-developed marketing strategy. This is a technology-based news service that better meets the needs of the general public, businesses and newsrooms alike along with its unique journalist rating system and is sure to become the new standard in the industry with broad acceptance. We also have an excellent founding team supporting every aspect of this project.

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

Tanya Thibodeau, Lead Innovator (CEO); Pam Jones, Financial Advisor (CFO); Steve Sills, Lead IT (CTO). We are an informal partnership not yet incorporated. We also have informal Advisors in place with Alan Callan, Founder/Chairman of Criteria Media Exchange Plc from the UK/Monaco; Guy Huntingford, Publisher of Calgary Herald; Chris Haldane of iMining in Toronto.

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

The conceptual designs and features are well into the planning stages and the initial conceptual draft is more than 80% completed. We are ready to commence development to move the project forward but lack the funding to hire the necessary teams and implement testing platforms.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]

To hire programmers for creating the initial beta version. To hire a sales team to begin negotiations with advertisers and newsrooms. To purchase the basic equipment needed to get these two teams started.

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

The project is designed to support multiple revenue streams with a unique advertising model being the primary one to start with. Part of the business model is to align the advertising right from the very beginning – even during the beta testing.

Requested amount: $500,000

Expected number of months to complete project: 12
Total Project Cost: $40,000,000
Name: Tanya Thibodeau
Twitter: @tanyathib
Email address [optional]: gazette.tanya@gmail.com
Organization: Gateway Gazette / Panoptyx
City: Calgary, Alberta
Country: Canada
How did you learn about the contest? Twitter

Audience Central

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:49:00 -0400

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

To assist media companies worldwide, by creating robust, market-by-market audience landscapes. Audience research would be aggregated and made searchable and mappable.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]
In order to pay for journalism content, publishers need to understand their audiences better. Potential advertisers are demanding publishers impart user profiles. The database would provide multi-faceted views of news consumers, market-by-market. These data also would inspire targeted news products based on a better understanding of user needs and habits.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

Audience Central seeks to be an exhaustive, searchable and mappable repository of audience data for as many markets as possible. No such market-by-market audience mosaics exist today.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

Media companies are motivated to create lucrative revenue streams in order to monetize their content. In order to attract digital advertising and fetch premium prices, media owners would provide prospective advertisers with Audience Central’s detailed data about their users, including demographics, psychographics, locations, incomes, spending, channel usership, time of day and engagement. Mario Diez, CEO of ad platform QuadrantOne, says publishers need to create a data strategy around their audiences. “Right now it’s unbalanced. Some may argue that the brand side knows more about a publisher’s audience than the publisher.” Publishers’ audience data can be interwoven with the market data.

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

World Newsmedia Network is a not-for-profit media research company with four people: CEO Martha Stone, editorial director Leah Mensching, business analyst Erina Lin and designer Jeff McMillen. We would partner with technology developer KipCast to design the searchable database, enable geo-tagging data and output to data-driven graphics. We will leverage Stone’s 2012/13 research fellowship at University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute by using graduate-student statisticians to help organize the data. We will scour the globe for audience intelligence research from academics and research companies, and we will secure permission to use it. We will add staff to assist, as needed.

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

We have produced the Global Digital Media Trends report for 7 years. GDMT includes 500 data sets and analysis about revenue and usage patterns for digital media, worldwide. We have maintained partnerships with more than 65 research companies that contribute to GDMT. Many of these research companies produce audience usage data. We also have multiple partnerships with university researchers and repositories of data, such as consumer spending data. These existing relationships are invaluable for this project. We also have worked closely with KipCast and recognize their expertise in technology development. We follow companies that weave audience data into their strategies.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words];

Funds would be used to pay for the development of technologies to enable audience research search by topic and geography, and uploading of audience data from the research community. The funds also would pay for the salaries of those reaching out to publishers, writing case studies and running the project.

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

After the data repository and search functions are built in Year 1, the new data will continue to be uploaded to the database. We would continue to promote the data to publishers with our expansive database of media executives. We would continue to write case studies of audience data successes.

Requested amount:

Expected number of months to complete project: 15 months
Total Project Cost: $400,000
Name: Martha L Stone
Twitter: WNMNorg
Email address [optional]: mstone@wnmn.org
Organizations: World Newsmedia Network and University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
City/Country: Chicago, USA, and Oxford, United Kingdom
How did you learn about the contest? E-mail list

Connect Every Fact in a New News Archive

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:40:00 -0400

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

Build a networked word-processor that stores and accesses news information via interconnected facts instead of documents and metadata.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

Machine-readable facts stored in full context represent a class of information we call Robust Data. By efficiently capturing reported facts within standard newsroom workflows, we’ll build an instantly accessible directory of all the knowledge collected by a news organization.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

The industry dreams that inaccurate text-mining robots will someday understand what we’ve written. We give writers tools that translate the intended meaning of text into statements machines can process.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

Because it already works. We are configuring existing technologies and standards (XML, RDF) into a “Fact Check” workflow tool that will become as familiar to reporters as their “Spell Check” is today. The challenge lies in designing a simple user interface that efficiently converts what a reporter knows into a collection of reusable RDF statements.

Blogging software didn’t invent web publishing. It made web publishing possible without knowledge of HTML/CSS. We’re working to give people the power to create and share machine-readable information. No special training required.

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

I’m Dan Conover, a 20-year newspaper veteran who has been deeply (and sometimes painfully) involved in pioneering on the digital edge of journalism since 2004. My wife Janet (a magazine art director and Drupal web designer) and I comprise Xarktopia LLC, which manages the intellectual property we’ve developed around the concept of semantic journalism. Over the past three months we’ve been working with a programmer/systems architect on the West Coast to develop a demonstration of the semantic word processor I’ve outlined.

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

My collaborator is nearing completion of a demo that we hope to use in explaining key functions (such as a Wizard that converts a writer’s knowledge into valid RDF markup) to potential investors. We view this word processor as the first component of an integrated product we generically refer to as a semantic content management system (SCMS).

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]

We would hire programmers to develop modules and plug-ins that extend the capabilities of an open-source web composition tool. Then we’d test it.

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

Two ways: 1. Submit the resulting modules to their relevant open-source community; 2. Use the results as an ongoing and expanding proof-of-concept to attract investors to our SCMS project.

Requested amount: $75,000

Expected number of months to complete project: Four months (three active development)
Total Project Cost: $75,000
Name: Dan Conover
Twitter: @xarker
Email address [optional]: dan@danconover.com
Organization: Xarktopia LLC
City: Charleston, SC
Country: USA
How did you learn about the contest? Two readers familiar with my essays and work wrote to encourage me to apply for this grant.

PageOneX

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:33:00 -0400

PageOneX. Prorposal for Newschallenge.

http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25948124783/pageonex

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

PageOneX: tool to visualize the evolution of stories on newspaper front pages, and to compare newspaper and social media coverage.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]
Newspaper front pages are a key source of data about our media ecology. Newsrooms spend massive time and effort deciding what stories make it to the front page. PageOneX makes coding and visualizing newspaper front page content much easier, democratizing access to newspaper attention data.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]
Communication researchers have analyzed newspaper front pages for decades, using slow, laborious methods. PageOneX simplifies, digitizes, and distributes the process across the net.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

The project team has already developed a desktop based method of using free software to rapidly produce compelling visualizations of newspaper front pages (examples and a description can be found at http://pageonex.com). This summer, we are building a prototype web-based version with support from Google Summer of Code. Support from the Knight News Challenge would allow us to take the project from proof of concept to beta release. We’ll use collaborative design with groups of potential end-users to ensure that the feature set and UI match the needs of people interested in doing this kind of visualization.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]
William Gamson, professor of Sociology at Boston College and co-director of the Media Research and Action Project.
Pablo Rey Mazón, Co-founder http://montera34.com/lab and meipi.org
Ahmd Refat, coder, thanks to Google Summer of Code program.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]
A semi-automated version of the tool has been tested, and we have produced several interesting examples: http://pageonex.com. The first version of the tool scrapes front pages from the web (kiosko.net) and builds the matrix of images that must be manually coded in inkscape. This summer, thanks to the Google Summer of Code program, we will be releasing a first version of the web based tool that will allow intercoder reliability and scrape from different sources.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]
We’ll spend the funds on a project manager, developer, and user interface designer to complete the beta version of the web based tool. We’ll organize workshops with different groups of potential users (researchers, journalists, and advocacy groups) to test it, provide feedback, and enable an iterative, collaborative design process.

8. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]
Once the beta version of the tool is released, we expect there to be significant interest and support from universities, journalists, foundations, and advocacy groups.
Requested amount: $150.000

Expected number of months to complete project: 9 months
Total Project Cost: $200.000
Name: Pablo Rey Mazón
Twitter: @numeroteca
Email address [optional]: pablo@meipi.org
Organization: montera34.com
City: Cambridge, MA
Country: USA
How did you learn about the contest? MIT Center for Civic Media.

What’s next in Knight News Challenge: Data

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 15:42:10 -0400

Whenever we open a contest, I always feel a little bit like when I throw a party: I’m never sure if anyone will show up, and am always relieved when they do.

We closed the Knight News Challenge: Data Thursday afternoon with 881 applications - 813 are openly visible on the NewsChallenge Tumblr, another 68 were submitted privately.

Knight staff, with the help of about 15 field experts, started the review process this weekend. It is way too early for us to have ideas about who the winners might be, but early indications are that we have a good batch. “Submissions this time around are really high quality,” wrote one of the reviewers this morning.

In my first quick perusal of the applicants, I noticed organizations like McClatchy, the Chicago Tribune, the United Way (St. Louis), Personal.com, Sunlight Foundation, Code for America, the AP, NPR, the Chronicle for Higher Education, the Guardian, Partners in Health and the cities of San Francisco and Chicago. I’ve seen entries from Argentina, Brazil, Ghana, Peru, Moldova, Georgia, Hungary, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, South Africa, Spain, England, Mexico, Canada, Romania, Hong Kong and Germany.

Among the themes we’re noticing so far:

display of and access to government data;
making obscure data more transparent;
helping people improve themselves or particular target populations;
analysis of money in politics and money in government;
tools to help journalists analyze information.

Over the next week, we’ll read each of those entries a minimum of three times. After the 4th of July holiday, we’ll be hosting about 15 advisers to help us settle on a group of finalists. Knight staff will have the rest of July to interview those finalists, conduct due diligence, and come up with a set of proposals to recommend to the Knight trustees. Those recommendations will be decided upon at its September 10 meeting. We’ll announce the winners shortly thereafter.

A note on public comments: For the Knight News Challenge: Networks, we weighed applicants’ ability to leverage attention and comments on their applications. We don’t have such a rule this time. As part of our consideration, we of course take note of what people are pointing and linking to online. This includes comments left on the Tumblr, using Disqus and comments on Twitter, Facebook etc. We will notice if particular apps garner a lot of discussion. Fundamentally though, we’re looking for ideas with the greatest potential for social impact.

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

The FOIA Machine

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:22:00 -0400

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

Create an international FOIA platform that allows people to automatically, simultaneously file and track multiple requests on transnational issues.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

Despite transparency trends, it is still necessary to formally request public records; FOIA Machine will enable more requests internationally, increasing the records available. Records will be posted as searchable structured data with applied entity-relationship model of built-in knowledge maps. Documents will be also shared over platforms such as DocumentCloud.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

No other platform automates international requests, allowing requests to multiple countries simultaneously, with a sophisticated system that guides users and creates a community. (A few websites automate national requests.)

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

Our extensive surveys of international investigative journalists and citizens found important needs it meets. The journalists lack knowledge about using FOIA in countries other than their own; the citizens were unfamiliar with FOIA laws. Our platform eliminates those barriers because it is designed so that anyone can create, schedule, send and track requests. Users don’t need to know who to ask, they just need to have an idea of what they would like to know. Our research also found citizen interest in and potential for crowdsourcing records requests and gathering, which we are factoring into the project concept.

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

* Djordje Padejski, investigative reporter and Knight Fellow at Stanford 2012, founder of Centre for Investigative Reporting in Serbia, part of investigative reporters network OCCRP, covered cross-bordering stories on corruption and organized crime

* T. Christian Miller, of ProPublica, an investigative journalist with a dozen years experience in international reporting and Knight Fellow at Stanford 2012

* Isaac Gateno, an Computer Science Graduate at Stanford 2012

* Dilli Raj Paudel, an Computer Science Graduate at Stanford 2012

In June 2012, the Center for Investigative Reporting from Berkeley, started talks about possible collaboration to become the project host. Google’s top engineers also offered support through advising.

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

A prototype, available for user-testing: www.foiamachine.org. (username: guest password: testfoia.) Software code is created as open source and is available on GitHub repository (https://github.com/igateno/foiamachine). It incorporates workflow for the FOIA requests and answer process for a few countries (United States, Serbia, Greece, Mexico) and the EU, a few topics (finance, global financial crisis, environment, international aid, drug trafficking) and agencies, but in this test form does not actually send the requests. We are introducing the prototype to potential users in the Stanford community and members of journalism organizations such as IRE and GIJN and collecting feedback.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]

To fund a 12-month development-to-launch process by a three-person, full-time team: a project manager, back-end developer and front-end designer. The funds will be used for salaries and in the final stages to launch, promotion and advertising.

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

The platform model is non-profit and it will gain revenues from individual donations and support from foundations. Individuals, civil society advocates, or journalists will pay nothing. However, the project has potential to charge fees to commercial users for premium services, such as priority processing, longer exclusivity periods or generating advanced datasets.

Requested amount: $ 350,000

Expected number of months to complete project: 12 months

Total Project Cost: 350,000

Name: The FOIA Machine

Twitter: @djordjepadejski

Email address [optional]: djordje.padejski@gmail.com

Organization: The FOIA Machine team

City: Stanford

Country: United States of America

How did you learn about the contest? online

API helps news sites deliver smarter content to readers

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:20:33 -0400

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

Create an API that allows news sites to tap into our custom ontology to add rich semantic data to content.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

Our project automatically categorizes articles into very specific subject areas. Sites will be able to sort and send the exact content that readers want, maximizing its value and reach. Readers will then be able to find stories on topics of interest without having to sort through thousands of search returns.

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

Our rule based classification system uses an ontology created by journalists to classify news content. It is more accurate than existing systems and accounts for regional language differences.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

News groups seek manual keyword tagging alternatives that are deeper, consistent and more accurate. Many have investigated programmatic solutions, but those come with high costs and often yield poor results.

We’ve invested three years and millions in a system that will greatly enhance the content of our 600+ contributors. It lets them:

—push content to tablet/mobile users based on customizable profiles;

—relate stories to keep readers engaged and create more connected links for SEO; and

—power their internal search engines to filter results for readers.

We plan development of a delivery system that requires little user effort.

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

A team of 10 editors is building the ontology that powers this ability to discover the “aboutness” of stories. As journalists, they understand how words work together and how their colleagues write news stories. We will continue to build the ontology and take input from outside journalists. If enough news sites use this markup, we will begin to see a standard classification emerge for news stories, making it easier for consumers to search across sites. In addition, our five-person IT staff has built, and continues to refine, custom software to apply the ontology to copy from any newspaper.

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

We have developed about half of the ontology, and we are already using custom-built software to send 150,000 stories a month through our system to create a product we call SmartContent. We sell this product to clients who are interested in niche news, so we have had commercial success with it. Now we would like to share this XML markup – and, by extension, its success – with all news sites. MCT contributors could use the API for only an initial setup fee; non-contributors would pay a one-time setup fee and an annual subscription fee.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]

We would use the funds to hire:

—an outside firm to build the API.

—an outside firm to educate customers on the advantages of using the API and to market and distribute it customers.

—additional editors to speed the ontology-building process.

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

Our IT department would work with API developers to learn how the API is built so they could support it. Revenue from setup fees, subscriptions and our SmartContent product would keep the project viable financially, and our strong brand among newspapers will help us implement the project among them.

Requested amount:

Expected number of months to complete project:
Total Project Cost: $800,000
Name: Evelyn L. Kent
Twitter:
Email address [optional]: ekent@mctinfoservices.com
Organization: McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
City: Washington, D.C.
Country: USA
How did you learn about the contest? E-mail