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Future of News/Cooperation Competition

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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

Proposals

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, choose your issues, and you will get a tweet when your representative is slated to vote on a bill, along with the rep's phone number.

See the prototype we made last night at http://www.tweetbill.com

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

Oakland Breathe Easy: Geo-mapped air quality community map

Description: This Oakland Air Quality mapping project pulls data from air quality databases (EPA, Berkeley Citizens’ Project) and displays it in interactive maps. A linked wiki supports visitor/member annotation and self- organizing calls to action. Users can subscribe to mobile alerts that report air quality levels On site email tools allow citizens to send messages to city government, air quality board.

Background: Oakland Breathe Easy will be an interactive, geo-tagged map that complements Oakland Local's focus on environmental justice, air quality, and pollution issues. This map willl complement an ongoing investigative reporting series on environmental pollution and issues in Oakland conducted by OAKL partners Spot.us and Newsdesk.org. Future stories in this series will be published on Oakland Local.

Team Members: Susan Mernit, Chris O'Brien, David Cohn Susan Mernit is the founder of Oakland Local, a hyperlocal news & community hub for Oakland funded by a J Lab new voices grant, and a former Senior Director of Product Development at Yahoo. David Cohn is a journalist and the founder of Spot.us. Chris O'Brien is a Bay area journalist and former Knight winner based in Oakland, CA.

WordPress Distributed Translation Plugin

Description: A WordPress plugin which extracts and divides text and meta-text from blog posts into segments that are delivered to The Extraordinaries smart phone application so that bi-lingual users can volunteer five minutes while waiting in line at the supermarket to help translate news articles and blog posts. The plugin would also reassemble the translated segments into a single blog post and, optionally, give credit to all involved translators.

Background: Global Voices is the largest volunteer translation community in the world, both in terms of volunteers and the number of working languages. (New York Times article here.) On a daily basis the community translates independent media between Indonesia, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Malagasy, Dutch, Portuguese, Swahili, Serbian, Macedonian, Arabic, Farsi, Bangla, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew, Russian, Albanian, and more. Developing a mobile interface to social translation would allow Global Voices and other organizations to recruit volunteer translators who don't have regular access to a desktop internet connection.

Team Members: David Sasaki, Jacob Colker

The Wormhole Network

This project will establish a network of video/speakerphone portals in neighboring communities, and simultaneously broadcast conversations, announcements or editorials to a wider geographical region via radio. This transforms the traditional notion of radio as being a centralized hub that aggregates information, to a dispersed platform of community networks affording diverse self representation.

This audio-visual approach is appropriate because of its accessibility to even semi-literate and illiterate populations that do not have access to technological tools of any sort, ie. cellphones or computers. Individuals need only come to the portal to participate. All recordings will be archived and indexed for future retrieval.

Our focus community is currently in North India, but the technology and ideas are applicable anywhere else as well.

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 prompting other news organizations to "revive" dormant information from their archives, while crowd-sourcing the management of historical records.

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


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 and technology innovation 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

Data can make compelling news art

The web has huge potential to deliver ideas and stories visually. But art schools don’t teach much data viz to graphic artists, and journalism hasn’t used much data-based art until very recently. So the challenge is to get artists and data folks interested in representing data visually, and to get them the tools to do it.

Aaron Presnall has won a challenge award to create a streamlined system to make data visualization easier to do for artists and citizen journalists. Philip Hilts at The Knight Science Journalism Fellowships has been planning a contest to draw graphic artists into doing more data-centered art, by sponsoring a contest to create the most compelling visual storytelling from data.

The idea is to combine the two: to follow Aaron’s project with the contest, thereby multiplying the effect of new tools in the hands of the graphic artists and citizen journalists.

Team Members, Aaron Presnall and Philip Hilts


Visualizing Video Votes

The Open Media project enables community members to determine the programming schedule of their local access tv station through SMS and web voting, translated through a complex algorithm that takes other variables into account such as genre or topic. In an effort to make the functionality of this algorithm more understandable and transparent, we will integrate Aaron Presnalls Drupal visualization module into the open media install profile so voters can more easily see how their paricipation translates into a tv schedule.

Team Members: aaron presnall and tony Shawcross

Populous, Now With Facebook Application Publishing

Populous is in the process of developing a turnkey open source web publishing platform for collegiate newspapers; basically, making a free and powerful, content management system specifically tailored to the needs of typically cost-sensitive collegiate publications. As part of its KF research grant to study the engagement of young people in news in social networks, NewsCloud created a Facebook Application framework to run news-based communities inside Facebook, already running two collegiate news publications (MnDaily and In:Site, see Experimental Facebook Use Rewards News Readers). Populous and NewsCloud will collaborate to provide seamless, integrated publishing from the Populous CMS tool to NewsCloud's Facebook application framework. Any college that adopts Populous will not only get a great CMS and Django-based website, but also a fully functional, simultaneously mirrored Facebook news community application. The Facebook news community application will provide an extended platform from which to reach their college audience.

Team Members: Dharmishta Rood and Anthony Pesce (Populous) Jeff Reifman (NewsCloud)

Facebook News Community Application for Sochi Olympics

As Alexander's launch of the Russian Sochi Olympics site nears, NewsCloud would work with him to launch a parallel Sochi Olympics Facebook News Community Application with its KF-funded framework to offer additional ways for Russian residents to learn about issues related to Sochi and to participate in the discussion. While Sochi is a moderate sized city without a large Facebook presence, nearby Moscow has a much larger installed base of Facebook readers. An enhanced presence on Facebook along with NewsCloud's Facebook push and stream integration will help drive increased participation in the overall Sochi project mission. On an unrelated note, Russia's Digital Sky Technologies recently invested $200M in Facebook.

Team Members: Alexander Zolotarev (Sochi Olympics) and Jeff Reifman (NewsCloud)

PubIt

Printcasting is democratizing perodic print publishing, such as magazines, newsletters and newspapers, using content that comes from RSS feeds. Knight Drupal Initiative grantee Funnymonkey's Collaboration Aggregator simplifies and lowers the barrier to entry for like-minded local organizations to collaborate round areas of common interest.

Together, Printcasting and Collaboration Aggregator will give local organizations a powerful suite of freely available tools to publish everything from a weekly newsletter to a crowdsourced book. We can also leverage Printcasting's contacts with "cloud" print-on-demand services to make printing and delivery a one-click process.

Team Members: Bill Fitzgerald, Dan Pacheco