Future of News/Cooperation Competition

The Knight Foundation will give $6,000 in total prize money to a small competition held at the Future of News and Civic Media conference for conference attendees.


 * All projects need to be collaborative, team-based work.
 * Teams should formed of people who were not collaborating before. It would be great if team members met at the conference but this is not necessary!
 * Proposals should be either brand new ideas or projects to strengthen or coordinate work between attendees' existing projects.

On Friday morning, project proposals will each give short talks pitching their projects or collaboration. Subsequently, the group will vote on the project ideas using Selectricity, a Center for Future Civic Media sponsored voting technology that uses preferential decision-making to help small groups and organizations run elections. Prizes will given to the top three projects in the values of $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place projects respectively.

To submit a new project proposal, copy the template, edit this page, paste the template to the bottom of the page, and then and edit the template to include information about your project:

=== Title === Description Team Members: Names of Team Members

Solano County Military Heritage WIKI
Small town newspaper & local military museum retain volumes of text detailing local military history. The public has no easy access to these documents, and certainly no way to collaborate their stories. Thousands of local residents work at or have retired from Military service here and would love to help build a historically accurate record of the area.

Specific Areas covered: Benica arsenal, Mare Island Navel Shipyard & Travis Air Force Base, all in Solano County CA.

This project would expand the CMS UPLOAD UTILITY to support the mediawiki platform and setup a model for other news organizations to use, "reviving" dormant information from their archives.

Team Members: Benjamin Mako Hill, Joe Boydston

Crowd Source Parking Abuse in San Francisco
http://nyc.uncivilservants.org was created to track abuse of parking permits in New York City. David wants to bring it to San Francisco.

Team Members: Amanda Hickman (Yenta), David Cohn (in San Francisco), That Lady From Topp

TweetBill
TweetBill sends you notification via Twitter when a bill reaches the stage in the US Congress where it's useful for you to call your Congresscritter! Sign up, tell us where you live, and you will get a tweet when your representative is slated to vote on a bill, along with the rep's phone number.

Team Members: Pete Karl, Ryan Mark, Aron Pilhofer, Lisa Williams, Persephone Miel, Nick Allen

NewsCapsule/Quantum News
In the battle against he said / she said journalism, there's an easy way to find out which experts, sources, and pundits are wrong most often. Let's keep score.

NewsCapsule aggregates predictions made by national and local sources, pundits, and public officials, organizes them in terms of news trend/topic and location, and displays them chronologically. Users are able to weigh in themselves, and after a set period of time are reminded to come back to see what actually ended up happening. The accuracy of a prediction is determined by the crowd and forever linked to the person who made it.

Team Members: David Cohn, Dan Schultz, Ryan Sholin

Global Visualization toolbox
This initiative will enable journalists--both professional and citizen--around the world to take advantage of new tools to enhance their reports with data visualization. The Drupal tools, developed by Jefferson Institute, will include motion charts, time maps, tag maps, heat maps and other ways to bring data alive for communities across the globe. The International Center for Journalists' IJNet, will distribute the toolboxes in six languages to thousands of journalists, media managers and citizen journalists who routinely use this site for networking, training and valuable resources. IJNet will also find a journalist in each of the six languages to develop a pilot project that will generate 1) a concrete demonstration and 2) short case study of the power of visual data.

Team Members: Jefferson Institute, ICFJ

Circuit Rider Project
Community accountability via circuit-riding forensic accountant. Using Arizona and metropolitan Phoenix as a test bed and template, we will hire a forensic accountant. He or she will dig into state and regional governmental spending, with the help of crowd-sourced tips from citizens and bureaucrats, to spot any malfeasance (and to prevent it by virtue of watchdog deterrent effect). We will bring this person together with journalists and potential media partners -- while making findings open to all -- to promote coverage that members of the community will see and act on. This fills a growing gap in Arizona and, if this test works as envisioned, in other states, metro areas and non-metro regions.

Team members: Dan Gillmor (Arizona State University) and Bill Buzenberg (Center for Public Integrity)

Hacks and Hackers
The problem: Scattered through the worlds of journalism and technology live a growing number of professionals interested in developing technology applications that serve the mission of journalism. Technologists are doing more and more things that are journalistic; journalists are doing things that are more and more technological. These people don’t have a platform or network through which they can share information, learn from one another or solve each other’s problems. These people are scattered in organizations such as IRE, ONA, SND – and are in both academia and industry.

Proposal: Establish “Hacks and Hackers,” a network of people interested in Web/digital application development supporting the mission and goals of journalism.

This is NOT a new journalism organization (SPJ, ONA, IRE, ASNE, etc.). In fact we would call it a “DIS-organization.”

The goals of this network are:
 * Create a community of people in different disciplines who are interested in these topics
 * Share useful information (e.g., a tutorial on how to install Drupal)
 * Networking
 * Jobs
 * Professional development
 * Etc.

How this network will work:
 * We will establish an online network that will aggregate and link out to relevant information provided by members
 * Membership costs $0.00.
 * We will establish a system through which contributions to the network are rewarded – for instance, via some kind of points system that rewards members for, for instance, solving one another’s technical problem or creating a great tutorial.
 * We will seek to build bridges between journalism and academia, generating interest among computer scientists in the problems of journalism and media and among journalists in the opportunities presented by technology.

Team Members: Aron Pilhofer, Rich Gordon