Some good news came the other day that is symbolic of the hard work fledgling nonprofit news organizations are doing to put their digital newsrooms on more stable footing. The story came in the form of an official report on grant from Boston University’s New England Center for Investigative Reporting. The center is one of the nonprofit news organizations Knight has supported as we helped partners experiment with different models for replacing at least some of the “missing journalism” communities need to be informed and engaged.

You can see the story in the pie charts. The investigative center, which reports important stories throughout New England, is now pulling in more than $340,000 a year from non-foundation sources. This means its “earned revenue” triples, mostly through a high school journalism training program. That’s good – what you want is a pie chart with a lot of fat slices. In the details below, look at is how deliberate the center is: It tries a lot of different revenue ideas, since different things work in different community media ecosystems. It quickly evaluates each new attempt, dropping the ones that fail and doubling-down on the ones that work. It brings in professional development staff and business consultants as needed.

Above: Miami students receive free laptops through the One Laptop Per Child program

Today, Knight Foundation announced it is joining Charlotte’s philanthropic leaders in supporting Project L.I.F.T, a five-year, $55 million initiative to improve student achievement in West Charlotte schools.

Knight is not an education funder, so why would we invest in this effort? We do care about access to technology and  engagement, however, and the two grants, totaling just over $4 million, support our interest in “informed and engaged communities.”

One grant will put laptops designed for children into the hands of all kindergarten-through-fifth grade students in seven LIFT schools – that’s about 3,200 laptops.

These One-Laptop-Per-Child laptops will come loaded with a child-oriented Wikipedia, books and other learning tools that the teachers will decide upon.  Internet access in West Charlotte is only about 20 to 40 percent of the community, and it’s something parents asked for. We hope these laptops and training will provide our students with the digital skills needed for 21^st century life.

Earlier this month as part of its Technology for Engagement Initiative, Knight Foundation gathered thought leaders to talk about the best ways to use new tools and platforms to bring communities together around important issues. Attendees were asked, where is this nascent field going, and what issues should we be exploring?  Here, Project for Public Spaces' VP of Digital Placemaking Daniel Latorre introduces the Tech for Engagement Manifesto his work group started.

A few weeks ago we were all face to face with laptops down and smartphones mostly in our pockets. An amazing feat for a highly wired group. Asked to lead a manifesto break out group towards the end of our unconference, the civic activist in me gladly accepted such a happily ludicrous task to attempt to do in 30 minutes. What you see below is the product, let's call it an alpha, of five attendees' hack at synthesizing the values we heard at the summit along with some input from the wider summit group over email afterwards.

Update: Live from TEDGlobal, organizers announce the TedPrize will raise its grant awards for The City 2.0 by 10 fold - to $1 million.

A man who plans to turn thousands of plastic water bottles into an amusement park for children is one of the first recipients of the City 2.0 TED prize, which includes $10,000. 

Ruganzu Bruno Tusingwire, a 29 year-old eco-artist from Uganda, first started exploring his idea while studying at Kyambogo University. He'll use the prize money to grow his local TEDx community, help sustain a local eco-artist loan program supporting women to develop their business ideas and expand the amusement park from its existing single plane-shaped sculpture into a permanent park.

Early this year, TED unveiled the details of its annual prize in support of “one wish to change the world.” This year, the award went not to a single person, but instead to an idea: The City 2.o – the city of the future. 

With Knight Foundation support, the platform, www.thecity2.org, allows people everywhere to help create their own future city. Residents are able to propose – and lead – projects to upgrade their own cities on issues important to them – from transportation to public housing, recreational space and more. 

As part of the site, TED held an open call for new projects with plans to divide the $100,000 TED Prize into ten $10,000 awards for the best projects which represented "inspiring ideas worth spreading," (TED's mission). 

Four other winners have also been announced including Jason Sweeney, whose web and smartphone based platform allows people to crowdsource and geo-locate quiet spaces in their community. Another winner aims to help democratize the design movement by helping people build their own homes using locally-sourced materials and open sourced design. The remaining five winners will be announced monthly.

Photo Credit: Flickr user hackNY

Earlier this month as part of its Technology for Engagement Initiative, Knight Foundation gathered thought leaders to talk about the best ways to use new tools and platforms to bring communities together around important issues. During the summit, a group considered the future of hackathons. Three of the group's participants, Eric Gordon, diector of the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College, and Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood, co-founders and co-chairs of the Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, share their insights.

Perhaps no event in the young, Gov 2.0 movement has generated as much excitement, built as many connections, or led to as many alpha versions of apps as the hackathon.  Often more sprint than marathon, these one day or one weekend development sessions have united developers around specific challenges, new data and the lure of pizza.

With a few years of hackathons in the rearview mirror, however, it is useful to reflect on how this platform for engagement and creation can be enhanced to better meet the challenges that cities and their citizens face today. 

Too often, these hackathons have not led to solutions that address the biggest challenges of our day – issues such as the educational achievement gap, health disparities, and economic inequality.  Too rarely have the good app ideas started through these sessions been taken across the finish line and sustained after the weekend has ended.  And, too many of the leanings and too much of the code from these sessions is forgotten or not shared with a broader audience.

During the recent Knight Foundation summit on Technology for Engagement, a group of us considered how the hackathon could evolve to build off its success and address these concerns. 

The conversation centered on the interest in shifting the hackathon away from developers building quick products in response to general guidance.  Instead, hackathons could become opportunities for developers to learn about civic issues by engaging deeply with community groups and, in turn, enable community groups to learn about what’s possible in terms of technology by engaging with developers.

The group suggested four ways to advance that approach.

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.

Photo Credit Flickr user: Brad Flickinger

On Saturday, June 23, Knight Foundation's Program Director in San Jose/Silicon Valley, Judith Kleinberg, is participating in a discussion around what digital literacy means at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Anaheim, C.A. The following, written by Renee Hobbs, a professor in the Harrington School of Comunicaton and Media at the University of Rhode Island gives a preview. It is crossposted from the Media Education Lab's blog.

What is digital literacy? The term has been rising in visibility since 2009 but it has been used quite differently by a variety of stakeholders including policy makers, educators, and business and technology professionals. At the American Library Association’s annual conference, I’ll be moderating a discussion about four distinct but interrelated definitions and uses of this important term. Sharing ideas with me will be Judith Kleinberg of Knight Foundation, Roseanne Cordell, a librarian at Indiana University South Bend, and Laurel Felt, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Depending on what group of people you talk to, the term ‘digital literacy’ might suggest one or more of these meanings. Which of these definitions are most (and least) useful to your work? For school, academic or public librarians, which of these terms is most relevant? For those in K-12 education, which do you focus on? And for technology educators, where do you focus? Funders and policymakers, which ones are most likely to resonate with decision makers in local, state and national government?

Computer Skills and Access Issues. Having broadband access and knowing how to use the Internet enable full participation in society. For some, basic keyboard and mouse skills are essential skills while others may benefit from a greater understanding of file management and browsers. For example, websites like DigitalLiteracy.gov emphasize the value of using the Internet to find a job, create a resume and for career exploration.

Issues of Authorship. People are creating and sharing more than ever. The concept of digital literacy reflects the growing importance of user-generated content and the changing role of authorship in a digital age. Digital literacy programs like YouMedia empower people with easy access to powerful tools of expression and communication using social media, images, language, music, sound, and interactivity.

Above: A video documentary on turaround efforts at a Chicago school 

As more and more non-traditional actors take the stage in providing news and information in local communities, it’s valuable to get past the either-or journalist-vs-citizen journalist argument and look at who actually creates value. A new report for The Chicago Community Trust offers significant evidence that information providers outside mainstream media have much to offer.

The Chicago Community Trust’s Local Reporting Awards project provided 31 small grants last year to “produce a burst of impactful, relevant coverage of, by and for” low income communities on the south and west sides of the city. Award winners included a mix of traditional and non-traditional information providers, journalists and non-journalists. Topic ranged from race and class to tax and health care policy to cyberbullying and other youth issues.

The evaluation by Janet Coats of Coats2Coats, found that journalistic quality was high across the board.

“We were blown away by the quality of the work,” Coats said in her report. “Across the board, the sourcing in this work is strong. There is an appropriate blend of the institutional and the grassroots in the sources the award winners used. We saw very little 'he said/she said’' structure in the coverage; sources are used to speak from their areas of experience and expertise, without a false confrontational construct. We also were pleased by the number of sources the award recipients used in their work. Even in professional reporting, it is all too common to see single- or two-source stories.”

Some credit goes to The Chicago Reporter and the Community Media Workshop in Chicago, which greatly improved editorial quality and distribution of the work, the report said. Still, it’s interesting that the efforts of the non-traditional sources were so highly rated.

This week, Knight Foundation announced it will support a new data project to visualize the amount of time Iraq and Afghanistan veterans wait for VA services, including healthcare and education benefits. The effort is an example of the kind of projects Knight is seeking to fund through the Knight News Challenge: Data, which accelerates breakthrough ideas that use data to inform and engage communities. The deadline for the challenge is noon ET Thursday June 21. Here, Dana Morrissey, chief engagement officer of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America talks about the project.

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans filing a disability claim in Northern California have to wait 320 days for a ruling, according to a local congressman. That’s a backlog of a nearly a year for veterans seeking help for the back pain, post traumatic stress disorder, ear ringing and other conditions suffered through service.

While the problem is particularly acute in California, veterans across the United States have shockingly long waits for a variety of Veterans Affairs (VA) services, including mental health care – with 51 percent of veterans seeking help having to wait 50 days on average for a full evaluation.

Thanks to support from Knight Foundation, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) will hold the VA accountable by creating an interactive online tool that crowdsources and visualizes the true wait times for three VA services: mental healthcare, disability claims processing and new GI Bill application processing.

Verified veterans will input their personal wait times, to help visualize the backlog by benefit and geographic region. Additionally, the tool will track the problem over time – noting progress and worsening conditions. This iteration focuses exclusively on the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, though it may be expanded in the future to capture data from veterans of all generations.

Over three days, the innovators and thought leaders at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference talked about data and drones, opengov and algorithms, and even ventured into the possibilities robots might have for the future of news.

In the closing session, Michael Maness, Knight's Vice President of Journalism/Media Innovation, wrapped up how these conversations explored the intersection of where data meets a compellig narrative. 

 “These are not my moments of profundity," Maness said. "They’re based on all of you, and on conversations we’ve had over the past several days.” 

In the video above, Maness pulls out the following 10 takeaways from the conference:

1. Is the fury of collecting, are we dismissing the story? In the rush to gather, share and analyze data, are we leaving the story by the wayside? Are we at risk of losing the narrative as we focus on archiving and documenting everything?

2. Fingerprints are all over data. Data isn't neutral. It's created by humans with a specific purpose in mind, and subject to our biases. 

3. Wrestling authenticity and the rise of trust networks. With the increasing streams of information, who has authenticity, objectivity and credibility in journalism and storytelling? How do you go about building that trust? At the same time that people are wrestling with determining where authenticity lies, it's human nature to create trust in your own networks - online and off. We're beginning to see this rise of trust in networks when it comes to issues around reporting and news. 

The following interview with Adriano Farano, whose app Watchup won a 2012 Knight News Challenge grant, is crossposted from knight.standford.edu.

Adriano Farano, a former Knight Fellow, has won a Knight News Challenge grant for Watchup, an iPad app that aggregates high-quality news videos. 

The award was announced today (Monday, June 18th) at the MIT Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston. The award is the first of three Knight News Challenge grants to be bestowed this year, rather than an annual event, to more closely match the pace of innovation. 

Farano is an entrepreneur in residence at StartX, a program to accelerate the development of Stanford’s top entrepreneurs through experiential education.

He first came to Stanford in 2010 as a Knight International Fellow from France. He was the co-founder of cafebabel.com, a multilingual pan-European news magazine and pioneer in collaborative journalism with more than 10,000 contributors. He also was a partner at OWNI.fr, a media startup focused on database and crowdsourcing journalism. 

We talked to Farano recently about his latest project, the legacy of his Knight Fellowship, and journalism today. 

Farano's Watchup, an app that lets you curate video news that you watch on your iPad

Q: First, tell us about Watchup, the proposal that won you a Knight News Challenge award. What does it do?

A: Watchup is an iPad-only app that lets you catch up on the news through high-quality video channels. With Watchup you can create a video playlist in a snap. Just tap the news videos that matter to you, press play and sit back to watch what’s up in the world. That easy!

Q: How does that help journalists or journalism?

A: From the journalism industry’s perspective, Watchup is going to fix the distribution problem on tablet devices. News organizations are producing an increasing amount of premium video content for digital consumption. The issue is that discovering that content is painful. With Watchup we have created the fastest interface ever to search out quality clips and create a video playlist.

You know, you could almost say that Watchup is like Hulu for news. But with three differences: We are focused on the news vertical (video only), we were born mobile, and we are an agile startup with a good dose of Stanford DNA.

KnightBlog is sharing data visualizations from this week's MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, focused on the future of news and information with the theme of "The Story & the Algorithm." For more, follow #civicmedia and @knightfdn.

People following and attending the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference yesterday posted more than 2,600 tweets with the #civicmedia hashtag. This chart shows the total number of tweets by hour. Clear spikes are evident during the opening “Turning Data into Narrative” panel and around 1:30 p.m., when the Knight News Challenge winners were announced: 

This version of the chart shows #civicmedia tweets by the minute, beginning at 9 a.m. The same spikes related to conference activity are evident. Sixteen tweets were posted at 1:32 p.m., for example:

University Park residents in Akron came out in force on Saturday, June 16 to involve members of the community in shaping an economic strategy for their neighborhood.

Over 350 neighborhood residents, engaged by the University Park Alliance, met to decide and prioritize the work and to contribute to the conversation on  how to bring in additional funding.

Residents overwhelming voted for a Special Improvement District as a financial tool that would assist the neighborhood in achieving its goals. University Park Alliance is a $10 million effort supported by Knight Foundation to create a 50 block live, work, play mecca in the heart of downtown Akron.

"When I gave the opening remarks, I was almost in tears," Eric Johnson, the executive director of the University Park Alliance, told the Akron Beacon Journal, which covered the meeting in "University Park Alliance shares ideas for neighborhood." The article notes that participants used interactive keypads and computers to answer questions about their priorities; the top three included crime and safety, "neighbors helping neighbors" and economic development. 

Yesterday was a busy first day of the MIT-Knight Civic Media conference. You can catch up via the conference liveblog. Highlights included first panel, Dan Sinker’s summary of the hack session, the announcement of the Knight News Challenge winners and details about Knight’s new prototype fund with Michael Maness and Joi Ito.

We’re going to keep the momentum going today with four more panels. Like yesterday, the #civicmedia will be livestreamed.

Things kick off at 9:00 a.m. ET with a discussion of Internet Native News Networks led by Christina Xu of the Awesome Foundation. Presenters include Hong Qu, of Upworthy, Ivan Sigal of Global Voices, Charlie Sennott of GlobalPost and David Wertime of Tea Leaf Nation.

At 10:30 a.m. ET, Susan Crawford will lead us through a discussion of Open Gov: What’s Gone Wrong, What’s Gone Right? Particpants will include Mark Headd of Code for America, Mike Norman of Wefunder.com and Chris Vein, Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation.

The prevalence of games in people’s lives is undeniable. Nearly three-quarters of all American families play computer and video games. Increasingly, businesses, nonprofits, funders and governments are tapping into this trend, experimenting with games to unlock existing social challenges. Yet, what are games good for and when are they most effective?

Last month, we completed an in-depth evaluation of two-real world social impact games Knight funded to bring individuals together to address local challenges: Macon Money, an alternative form of local currency to connect residents to each other and to attract and expose people to local business in Macon, Ga; and Battlestorm, a youth-based game to improve hurricane preparation awareness and habits in Biloxi, Miss.

We’re excited to share the results of these two experiments today at the 9^th Annual Games for Change Festival! While a lot has been written about the impact of digital games on learning, less attention has been paid to the effects of real-world games – i.e., games that are played out in the physical world. We hope the insights gathered will encourage funders, researchers and gamers to explore the potential of these games with us and help move the field forward.

In addition to the main study, we’ve created an interactive data visualization synthesizing the Macon Money findings and an infographic poster on Battlestorm.

Here are seven lessons about the effectiveness of the two real-world games and how games can be leveraged for social impact in communities. 

1.       Making Exploration Safe – Games are powerful liberating structures that allow people to test new patterns of behavior in a playful and secure environment. In Macon Money, residents took advantage of their free currency to experiment with new spending habits: 46% of players surveyed spent their bills at a local business they’d never frequented before, and 92% of those players report returning to those businesses after the game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we’re excited to announce the Knight Prototype Fund, which will help entrepreneurs, journalists and tinkerers of all kinds build and test new ideas that push media forward. Prototype grants will offer $50,000 or less of funding over a shorter time cycle than our normal grants.

The cost and time requirements of quickly testing projects—particularly digital ones—continues to fall, and we’re working to adapt our grantmaking to the speed of that innovation. The prototype fund is a key component of that work. We’ll have several dozen prototype projects active at once, and we’ll work closely with each project to measure its progress. As successful projects emerge, we’ll help them find the next stage of financial and programmatic support they need to scale.

The scope of the fund is broad, and we’re interested in applications from anyone and everyone with an idea in journalism and media innovation. The Knight Prototype Fund application can be found online (updated link 6/28/12).

KnightBlog is sharing data visualizations from this week's MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, focused on "The Story & the Algorithm." For more, follow #civicmedia and @knightfdn today and Tuesday.

Knight Foundation received roughly 1,000 applications for the Knight News Challenge on networks.  The applications came throughout the challenge period, which stretched from Feb. 27 to St. Patrick’s Day, March 17.

But most came during the closing days.

Roughly 300 people from across the country and the world will gather today to talk about the future of news and information as part of today’s MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Since the theme is 'The Story and the Algorithm,' we decided to produce some data visualizations around the conference and its content. The first, this map, shows where American attendees live: 

This map shows the most common U.S. states:

And this chart breaks down the attendees by their Web site domains, and also by their gender:

A day before the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, the MIT Media Lab (pictured above) is hosting a 24 hour hack day. Dan Sinker, who heads the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, writes about what to expect. The following is crossposted from Sinker's blog.

Today,  60 developers, journalists, and data experts are converging on the MIT Media Lab to spend 24 hours collaborating, sketching, and building new tools and concepts to help move from data to stories.

It feels like we’re entering a golden age of data. As we arrive at more sophisticated tools to manipulate and visualize it, and as we understand what we can do with them, we are breaking new ground every day. Those leaps are both technological and conceptual: we are arriving at very new understandings of how data can enhance stories.

Just take a look at some of the recent data-driven reporting, and you see that something decidedly new is afoot:

• “Gay rights in the US, state by state” by the Guardian completely blew me away when it came out. It took what could have been a straightforward list of gay rights laws and cut it into a graphic that allowed you to rearrange the blocks by state population, and even the location of your Facebook friends. The data, and the presentation of it, was able to tell a very different story this way.
• “Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots” by the New York Times is a beautiful visulization of what could be exceptionally boring data: analysis of basketball shooting data. But by engaging in simple animations that beg the user to continue to engage, it illustrates the point beautifully.
• “The Message Machine” by ProPublica doesn’t go for jaw-dropping visualizations, but instead blazes new ground in data collection. Curious about the new attempts at micro-targeting political messages, the team at ProPublica built a system to collect e-mails from thousands of volunteers.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Andrew Whitacer

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

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

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

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

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

Syracuse University honored Knight Foundation today with its i-3 award for impact, innovation and influence in the journalism field.

The honor is given annually to individuals or organizations that “have made a profound impact on the media landscape or have captured the public's imagination about the potential or importance of the media in a unique way.”

Knight’s President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen received the award on behalf of the foundation at the sixth annual Mirror Awards ceremony in New York.

Knight Foundation was “chosen as this year's recipient for redefining the role philanthropy can play in media innovation.” Over the past decade, Knight has invested more than $300 million in journalism and media innovation projects, including through the Knight News Challenge, which accelerates breakthrough ideas that inform and engage communities.

“As much as we appreciate the recognition, we also think our best innovations are still ahead of us. If the cutting edge is good, the bleeding edge is better. That’s where we want to be. To get there we must keep moving,” Ibargüen said.

The Lens, a two-time Knight Community Information Challenge winner, has won a prestigious national Edward R. Murrow Award.

The New Orleans online investigative site won the Audio Investigative Reporting Award for “One homeowner’s travails: Even after more than six years, family can’t move into ‘new’ house."

The report, produced in cooperation with the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, investigated the story of a New Orleans family that was persuaded by a bank to use its Katrina insurance settlement to pay off the mortgage of their home, leaving no money to repair it.

The report brought into focus the problem of more than 40,000 blighted homes in New Orleans and illustrated how the recovery process has left people who lack financial literacy homeless.

Community PlanIt is a Knight-funded online game platform to involve communities in local planning efforts. Here, project lead and professor Eric Gordon – who participated in Knight’s recent Technology for Engagement Summit - writes about how the game worked in Detroit. The post is part of a series on KnightBlog on using technology to get people more involved in their communities. It was originally published on Gordon's blog.

All too often, when planners plan, the public retreats or takes the defensive position. “What planning process?” they ask. Or, “You’re not going to build that project here!” So, Community PlanIt turns planning into a story, structured through simple interactions and game mechanics, and invites the public to shape the narrative.

We started work on the platform last year. It was first tested in Lowell, MA as part of a city visioning process. We did a larger pilot in fall 2011 with Boston Public Schools to engage the public in the question of “what makes a quality school?” And this spring, we did another city visioning project in Quincy, MA and were part of a citywide long term planning effort in Detroit.

The Detroit project was called Detroit 24/7 and was designed in collaboration with Detroit Works Project Long Term Planning. It lasted 21 days, and consisted of three week-long missions. In that time, 1,033 players registered and created over 8,400 comments about their experience with city as it is now and where they think it should go in the future. After the missions ended, there was a Game Finale meeting at the Central branch of the Detroit Public Library, where over 120 people showed up to celebrate players’ accomplishments and to plan for next steps.

These numbers are impressive and encouraging.  And when you add to that the fact that 42% of players were between the ages of 14 and 17, and 74% were 35 or under, you have an impressive demographic shift in a process that is too often stereotyped as geriatric. But Community PlanIt was not only for young people. Some of the most active players were over 50 and were energized by the participation of youth. In general, the people who played the game were not your usual suspects. Many of the highest point earners have never been to a planning meeting in the past and those that typically dominate in-person planning meetings were not the highest point earners.

iWitness, a 2011 Knight News Challenge Winner, launches its new app which helps users explore social media content. The following, written by Jesse James Gareth, is crossposted from AdaptivePath.com

The iWitness concept was one of the winners of last year's Knight News Challenge, an open competition that funds media innovation projects. That funding enabled us to bring in a development partner, New Context, to help turn our concept into a reality.

We designed iWitness to enable people to explore content in new ways. We wanted it to be a vehicle for discovering what's happening in the world in cases where time and place really matter.

But we didn't just want to create an interesting new product. We also wanted to see what could be done with the latest web techniques and technologies. As a result, iWitness runs entirely in the browser—it has no server-side component.

Above: A mural at Wynwood Walls. Photo Credit: Flickr user wallyg

Today, the national funder ArtPlace announced support for new projects in Miami, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Paul, San Jose and other communities across the United States.

ArtPlace funds projects that put the arts at the center of community revitalization and is supported by Knight Foundation, other leading foundations, banks and government agencies.

In Miami, funds will help launch a new Business Improvement District in Wynwood - which has grown from a warehouse district into the center of the local contemporary arts scene over the past decade. If property and business owners approve, they’d ultimately tax themselves to fund projects to beautify the neighborhood and make it safer.

“Art has been at the core of the revival of Wynwood,” Matt Haggman, Miami program director for Knight Foundation, told the Miami Herald. “Art gives an area a sense of place and an identity, which serves as a catalyst for economic development.”

ArtPlace is also funding Wynwood’s the Light Box at Goldman Warehouse, a multi-disciplinary cultural center and meeting space, and the Bass Museum’s project to commission site-specific, works in public spaces to engage residents and visitors in the center of Miami Beach.

Four other Knight communities will also receive funding for the following projects:

Earlier this month, Knight Foundation, as part of its Technology for Engagement Initiative, gathered thought leaders to talk about the best ways to use new tools and platforms to bring communities together around important issues. Here, author Charles Tsai and Dave Timko talk with Games for Change co-founder Benjamin Stokes and others on design principles for engagement. A full report is forthcoming.

At Knight’s recent Technology for Engagement Summit, innovators, academics and funders took time to examine some of the recent successes in civic engagement and what we can learn from them. Do they hint at design principles for the tools we develop for engagement?

Recent bright spots point to increased uses of narratives and gaming. This is no surprise. If engagement is about sustaining action and involvement beyond one-off events, then engagement will naturally take the form of stories or games. They provide meaningful structures for sustained actions.

They can motivate action better than facts and figures. Just witness the challenge in getting people to exercise, eat healthfully and recycle. Compare that to how immersed children are in gaming: the average American will have played 10,000 hours of games by the time he or she reaches age 21.

Narratives are cleverly used by three recent initiatives that succeeded in spreading quickly, person to person: the Harry Potter Alliance, Kony 2012 and Caine’s Arcade.

Each one relies on an unfolding narrative to hook people. You’re not just told a good story, you’re part of one. You don’t just donate or sign petitions, you’re writing the next or last chapter of a powerful story.

 The Harry Potter Alliance asks fans who grew up with the books to imagine the young wizard in this world. What evil would he fight and how can you raise your own “Dumbledore’s Army” to help him? This simple reframing, a practice dubbed “cultural acupuncture,” helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of youth to action. Together, they’ve sent five cargo planes of aid to Haiti and donated more than 88,000 books around the world. 

The alliance’s success gave founder Andrew Slack this epiphany: “Fantasy is not an escape from the soul of our world but an invitation to go deeper into it.”

Photo Credit: Code for America

A new online platform intended to use technology for social good is currently in the development stage.

SocialCoding4Good, a project from the Palo Alto-based Benetech, is designed to engage software developers, technical writers and other IT professionals with social causes that need their tech help.

The platform aims to increase awareness of this new type of volunteerism by matching humanitarian organizations that work on issues like disaster relief, human rights and education with the ideas, skills and time of product developers.

The project is supported with seed funding from Knight Foundation through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

About the foundation’s support for the project, Knight’s Program Director in Silicon Valley, Judith Kleinberg says:

Earlier this month, Knight Foundation, as part of its Technology for Engagement Initiative, gathered thought leaders to talk about the best ways to use new tools and platforms to bring communities together around important issues. Here, author Charles Tsai writes and videographer Dave Timko contribute the first post in a series on the opportunities and challenges uncovered. A full report is forthcoming.

For many parents, educators and sociologists, the term “Technology for Engagement” may seem like an oxymoron, much like “Fast Food for Health.”

When we see how much time we spend on smart phones, video games, Facebook and YouTube, it’s hard not to worry about how disengaged we are from one another, from community, from the “real world.” The consequence of this digital revolution is summed up in the title of Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together. The MIT sociologist describes how we seem to demand more from our technology and less from each other. The result: we’ve let technology diminish us.

Civic technologists and social innovators believe it doesn’t have to be this way. After all, technology is simply a tool. We can use it however we want or make better ones. 

But how can technology be used to deepen engagement so citizens become more involved with one another and more active in their communities?

That was the main question Knight Foundation posed at the recent Technology for Engagement Summit, sponsored by Knight at the MIT Media Lab. The rare “unconference” brought together more than 60 innovators, funders and thought leaders to speak across sectors about challenges in this nascent field and identify a way forward.

An initial challenge involved the term, “technology for engagement” - what it means and what a working definition might look like.

Technology for Engagement, the group said, should create and support opportunities and capacities for people to transact with others for the common good.

To that end, such tools should: 

• connect people
• build relationships
• increase participation in governance
• facilitate discovery
• surface common needs and shared values
• enhance the ability to act

The following is the first in a series of reports on Knight Foundation's work in the communities where it invests.  Above: Akron, Ohio.

Its mouth turning blue, a small child cries  “I want my mommy!” But no one is panicking, because the child isn’t real.  It’s a teaching tool in the state-of-art simulation center at the new Austen BioInnovation Institute headquarters in Akron. When the center soft launches this month, medical students and others will come to hone their skills amid an array of ambulances, actors, cadavers (both real and synthetic) and computer simulations that can recreate all types of medical emergencies. The goal: create a facility that is the best of its kind in the world.

Akron’s future prosperity depends on delivering upon such innovative visions and attracting the talent to support it. The former “Rubber City” -- a nickname from the time America’s four major tire companies were headquartered there -- is shedding its industrial past for a future of biomedical discovery, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Knight Foundation will be with the city every step of the way. The foundation was founded in Akron by two of the nation’s leading newspapermen, John S. and James L. Knight, and it is supporting the emergence of the next generation of talent in Akron. Why? Economic revitalization is not built on state-of-the art facilities alone; it requires people to sustain it. Knight is focused on creating an informed and engaged community where talented young professionals can increase the city’s momentum by stepping into leadership roles.

This comes on top of  support from the region’s strong institutions,  including Akron’s Children’s Hospital, Akron General Health System, Northeast Ohio Medical University, Summa Health System and the University of Akron in establishing the institute.

To help support new civic leadership, the foundation funded a new program with Business Volunteers Unlimited to attract the community’s diverse young business professionals to the nonprofit sector. Jennifer Thomas, Knight’s Akron program director, hopes young leaders will become so deeply engaged the experience will “increase the probability that they will stay and build their lives in Northeast Ohio.”

Young voices are needed everywhere. A sprawling neighborhood surrounding one of the city’s largest institutions, the University of Akron, is a key economic development zone. The Knight-supported University Park Alliance is helping develop retail, residential and economic development opportunities in the 50-block area surrounding the college. Yet Eric Johnson, the alliance’s executive director, says town meetings on important issues attract hundreds, “but most of them are over 50.” Not the best turnout when more than half of the city is younger. Johnson is now working to engage younger participants with events like a business plan competition which was held in May, 2012.

The Akron Neighborhood Trust uses a Knight grant to test the idea that community learning centers can become trusted spaces for engagement of new voices in the community. The Trust envisions these centers, like the one in the neighborhood of Buchtel, as a place for members of the community, service providers and leaders to come together to tackle issues they’re facing.

The Civic Commons, also with Knight support, uses a web-based platform as an online forum where people in the community can gather to participate in conversations that matter. President Mike Shafarenko says the site “actively organizes the conversation around a particular topic and calls on community partners and individuals to get involved.” The Akron Beacon Journal embeds the commons’ conversation widget into selected articles so readers can join in. Shafarenko thinks the average age contributors are in their 30s, “about the time when people start caring about macro-issues in the community like affordable housing and good schools for their kids.”

Generation Next in Akron
 

Three of Akron’s most engaged young leaders talk about how and why they work for the greater good. Read more.

From her stone-solid building on the tree-lined High Street, Suzie Graham, the executive director of the Downtown Akron Partnership, can see the John S. Knight Convention Center and along with a good slice of the downtown many communities would be envious of. She believes the city’s assets -- including a treasured performing art theater, a bustling library with 21st century digital media capabilities, an art museum and a brand-new YMCA facility which is exceeding expected membership rates by nearly 50% -- need to be both better promoted and expanded. That “would enable the community to attract and retain talent, foster civic pride and celebrate the continued revitalization.” A high priority is bringing more foot traffic, increased retail and residential opportunities.

Three of Akron’s most engaged young leaders talk about how and why they work for the greater good.  The Q&A is part of an article that looks at how Knight is helping develop the next generation of leadership in Akron.

Kyle Kutuchief, 33, is the director of development at the Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron. He is a board member of several civic groups, including the Knight-backed Torchbearers Akron.

Knight Foundation: What’s your favorite thing about living in Akron?

Kyle Kutuchief: I love Akron ... my personal and professional networks are here. I grew up in a community on the west side called Bath. My parents were guidance school counselors. There’s such a strong sense of community here, that’s what keeps me here. People know each other, when you call someone, they call you back. People here genuinely care about the community. In other cities it can be less personal, but Akron is a very relationship-driven place. It’s a city, but it feels like a town.

You’ve said you like the city’s cultural assets: Which ones?

K.K.: A lot of people don’t know it, but we have one of the country’s best national parks systems. I’m a runner, so I love that I get to explore Cuyahoga Valley. There are also great new restaurants that makes it easier to carbo-load before marathons. I’m a hobby photographer so I really appreciate our local emerging and indy art scene.

How is the community getting stronger?

K.K.: Akron is lucky … we have an established leadership that is committed to helping us realize a better future.  Akron also has a strong civic leadership, including a good mayor, superintendent and a strong county executive. We also have other assets like a great university program and healthcare facilities, so I think we have fared better than other communities in the region.

What can Akron do to attract the next generation of talent?

K.K: We face a challenge, a lot of outsiders see Akron as uneventful or boring. But there are a lot of exciting things going on here and we need to share them! We should better market our community … we need to give companies, non-profits and other institutions in the area better tools to market those opportunities so that when they go out and recruit for talent, they’re better equipped.  We have assets that are on par with other communities. It’s really up to us to build our confidence in how we talk about them.

Photo Credit: Flickr user .distracted

As New Orleans prepares to become a major city without a daily newspaper, a foundation-supported online news start-up this week documented residents’ love of the local Times-Picayune.

Starting this fall, the paper will be printed and delivered only three days a week. That’s a blow for a city with lots of committed newspaper readers. The Lens NOLA, a nonprofit news site in New Orleans and a Knight Community Information Challenge winner, decided to show what that commitment looks like.

Managing editor Steve Beatty assigned a photographer to show New Orleans residents reading their newspapers on Monday and Tuesday, days when the Times-Picayune will no longer be published starting in the fall.

The result is a photo essay entitled “A look at a disappearing daily ritual for many.”

Three projects intended to bring people together across cultures and faiths have been named winners of a Minnesota state-wide contest designed to engage residents in making their community stronger.

The third annual Minnesota Idea Open Challenge was open to the public and close to 2,000 people voted for the winning ideas. The three winners listed below will each receive $15,000 to implement their projects.

The Minnesota Idea Open Challenge, which works to spread a deeper understanding of key community issues and challenges by engaging citizens in problem solving efforts, is a project of the Minnesota Community Foundation and was supported by Knight Foundation’s Knight Community Information Challenge.

About the challenge and its winners, Knight’s Program Director in St. Paul, Polly Talen says:

“I am thrilled to see the Minnesota Community Foundation continue to use this online tool to address statewide issues. Bringing people together across cultures and faiths is essential to informing and engaging communities.”

The three winners are: 

Hidden Pearls 7-Step Summer Challenge

A group of Muslim women in the state, led by Fatuma Mohamed, hope to dismantle stereotypes and empower others to lead across their cultures and faiths. Mohamed is encouraging Minnesota residents to participate in a series of fun summer events including a church/synagogue/mosque-hopping event, a healthy community-wide walk, a “pink hijab week” and more.

Tents of Witness

Eilen Kennedy and Margo O’Dell’s idea of a “Tents of Witness” exhibit will give more Minnesotans the chance to learn more about its diverse refugee community. The exhibit will feature several 8' x 12' tents each representing an individual refugee's story. The goal of the project is to “bridge cultures, faiths, and experiences within Minnesota and globally through dialogue and awareness around issues of discrimination and violence wherever it occurs.”

Knight supports Globaloria, a project of the World Wide Workshop, to advance new and innovative ways of teaching digital literacy and community engagement to students. Here, Idit Harel Caperton, founder and President, World Wide Workshop, and Judith Kleinberg, program director/San Jose/Silicon Valley, Knight Foundation write about the first annual Globey Awards, which celebrated excellence in learning game design. Above: Globey Finalists from The Levin Boys & Girls Club of Silicon Valley.

Yesterday was an exciting day. Globaloria students and educators, their families and community leaders gathered for a special awards ceremony. Teams of students from San Jose’s Oak Grove School District and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley, who have spent hundreds of hours over the course of the school year developing educational video games through the Globaloria curriculum, were recognized for their outstanding original programming and design of video games at the annual Globey Awards.

The Globeys celebrate excellence in learning game design and teamwork. A structured year-long process motivates students to dig deeper into their learning, and develop real-world digital literacy skills. Reflecting the rigorous nature of the program, students are judged on: 1) the technical quality of their game, 2) its educational content, 3) the quality of the original artwork and animations, 4) teamwork, 5) research skills, and 6) overall production.

"The World Wide Workshop has been a fantastic partner this year. Globaloria has propelled students into the most exciting 21st-century world of learning," said Manny Barbara, former superintendent of the Oak Grove School District and currently the Vice President of Advocacy and Leadership at the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. Barbara served as the emcee of this year’s Globeys.

Each of the winning games is published on http://www.Globaloria.org, enabling visitors and aspiring game designers to learn from students’ original ideas. What’s important is that every student who participates in Globaloria becomes a producer of original multimedia content, connects with civic issues in their community, benefits from the resulting boost in critical competencies—including programming, online research skills and the effective use of Web 2.0 tools —and acquires valuable self-confidence needed to thrive in today’s global digital economy.

Charlottesville Tomorrow, a local news website in Virginia, is a Knight Community Information Challenge winner. Its project, supported by the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, helped add a community engagement editor to its established news site. Here the editor, Jennifer Marley (pictured above), writes about the site's progress.

As a Community Engagement Coordinator for the hyperlocal news platform Charlottesville Tomorrow, my job is to take the content that my team is producing and deliver it to our community in ways designed to encourage, well…engagement:  engagement with the content and, ultimately, engagement with each other.

To accomplish this, I use a variety of tactics:  I’m very active on social media; I work with leaders in the community to share our content with their groups when appropriate; we hold a range of in-person events; I occasionally even print teasers to our stories on door hangers and paper a neighborhood if we’re writing about a backyard issue.

And, I use surveys.

One of the first things I did when I began working at Charlottesville Tomorrow was to put together a survey to take the general temperature of our readers. As I was new to the position (and city!), I wanted to know:  who is reading us? How are they reading us? What is important to them? Are we sharing our content effectively? I used Survey Gizmo to put together an 11-question survey and sent it out to our mailing list (which at the time was around 2,700 subscribers) and over our social media channels. I had about 475 responses, mostly from our mailing list, and I think that was due largely to the fact that I sent out a personal email introducing myself to our readers and asking them to take the survey as a favor. Never underestimate the power of the personal touch.

That first survey was in October of 2011, and in May of 2012, we did another. All the methods were the same (Survey Gizmo, email list, social media channels), but parts of this survey were designed to measure my progress. Some key takeaways:

In Akron, the University Park Alliance is working to bring more services and amenities to a 50-block neighborhood in an effort to meet the needs of future residents and create a sense of place in the community.

A recent move by the alliance illustrates a part of its strategy to shore up the neighborhood by buying up local property. 

The alliance recently purchased 12 homes for $180,000 situated along Excelsior Avenue as part of its efforts to rehabilitate houses and stabilize neighborhoods. It worked with community bank Valley Savings Bank to secure the transaction.  

Univeristy Park Alliance's Executive Director Eric Johnson said the move will ensure keeping people in their homes while also bringing in revenue for the alliance.

Since the announcement of our Knight News Challenge grant back in June, we at The Tiziano Project have been extremely busy. As an organization, we provide new media journalism training in conflict, post-conflict and underrepresented regions. In the last year, our team has launched programs and partnerships that have brought us to Jerusalem and the West Bank, Latvia, South Los Angeles, Philadelphia and an Apache Indian reservation.

Simultaneously, we are neck deep in the development of our new collaborative storytelling platform that was directly funded through the News Challenge. StoriesFrom will be based on our pilot 360 Kurdistan and will allow organizations and individuals to easily create immersive online experiences that depict the richness of communities worldwide from both local and professional perspectives.

While we still have a long way to go, here are a few lessons we have learned so far:

1) Don't bite off more than you can chew

When we started, we wanted StoriesFrom to do it all: It should display stories in a fun and engaging manner, it should reinvent conversations and how to connect with local communities, it should be a fundraising tool for organizations and individuals, and more. For every component, we had ideas of custom ways for developing more efficient and effective tools than what already exists. 

As development schedules set in however, we quickly realized that we had to pull in the reins a bit and not attempt to reinvent the wheel, sliced bread and mobile computing all at the same time. 

As a team, we decided to focus heavily on the core storytelling experience and to make sure that the site is, first and foremost, a tool that both content producers and content consumers will enjoy using. We will still be incorporating all the things mentioned above, but will leverage many existing tools in the first iteration of the platform and expand as demand for the services grow.

Photo Credit Flickr User Steve Bowbrick

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how journalism funders this past decade were working together more often. Here’s an example of that. During the past seven years, we teamed up to help journalism nonprofits develop better business practices in a project called the Challenge Fund for Journalism.

A recent study of the Challenge Fund for Journalism showed how the project helped 53 journalism nonprofits, both professional organizations and media outlets.  The fund’s partners were Ford, which created the project, as well as Knight, McCormick, and Ethics and Excellence in Journalism. The management consulting firm TCC Group coordinated the project.

Some organizations, usually the smaller ones, got fundraising and administrative training only. Others got training as well as a grant that they could collect only if they could raise twice as much themselves. That’s like giving away a fish if someone can catch at least two more on their own. Hence, the name of the report on the project: Learning To Fish.  As we’ve said before, the largest amount of philanthropic money given away each year in the United States is donated not by foundations but by individuals. The challenge fund helped nonprofit journalism groups learn to fish where the most of the fish really live.

Photo Credit: Flickr user YouthBuild Philly 

Today at the White House, Knight Foundation is excited to help present a new report with lessons on engaging some of the country’s most disadvantaged youth.

The Knight-funded study centers on YouthBuild, the national organization known for helping high school drop outs get a GED and job skills by building affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Yet since its founding, Executive Director Dorothy Stoneman has focused on engaging these young men and women in their communities, as a way to reweave the frayed community fabric needed for stronger neighborhoods and cities. This new research, by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), shows just how well the approach is working, one alum at a time.

Among their findings: A significant number of YouthBuild graduates go on to become leaders in their communities, or turn that new-found sense of service into their careers. Many hold public office or are church officials, and more than one-third have become professional educators or youth workers. That’s extraordinary for this particular group of young people - nearly half of whom had expected to be dead by early adulthood.

Students from Broward College whose proposed project "My College Guide" was one of five to win funding

Five projects that will support South Florida’s community college students as they finish school will receive funding after winning a competition that engages young  people in providing solutions to educational challenges.

The award competition marked the culmination of Mobilize.org’s three-day Target 2020 summit, which brought together close to 100 students to discuss the challenges they face in completing school, and helped them work collaboratively to propose solutions.

The summit focused on boosting community college completion rates and increasing civic engagement - Miami’s Millennials are the least civically engaged in the country, a new report finds. And according to Complete College America, only 12 out of every 100 Florida community college students will graduate with a post-secondary credential within four years, which is problematic since it's estimated that by 2020, 63 percent of jobs will require a certification or college degree.  

Knight Foundation supported the summit as a way to promote Millennial-led engagement in South Florida and four other communities.

Kicking off the summit award competition on Sunday morning, Knight’s Damian Thorman encouraged students to think about finding innovative ways to solve problems on issues they care most passionately about. Thorman said by doing so, students will become leaders with the ability to shape their communities’ futures. “Ultimately it’s people like you, in this room, who have the skills, the energy and the passion to solve the problems you’re facing. You’re going to be the ones to change this community,” Thorman, Knight’s national program director, said.

The winning projects listed below, which were voted on by the students using interactive keypads, will receive a share of $25,000 and a year of staff and other networking support. The project’s leaders will also participate in a year-long Mobilize.org leadership program.

Projects were judged on four criteria: potential social impact, creativity and innovation, sustainability and the use of new and social media. The five below were selected from a group of 13.