Guest post by Bonnie Bogle, general manager of operations at Development Seed.

This morning AfghanistanElectionData.com launched, providing an open data and open government vantage point into a controversial'election.

The site is a data browser that shows the raw results from the August 20th presidential election in Afghanistan, using the data released in mid-September that gave Karzai a 54% lead.

It was first'used internally by the National Democratic Institute to help their team plan for a runoff election, which was called off, and make assessments about voting patterns. With planning already beginning for a new round of Afghan elections for the provincial council (Wolesi Jirga ) this coming year, NDI decided to open up this application to the public to allow everyone to see the problem areas in the country and to start a dialog around how to reduce fraud and increase participation the next time around.

The main underlying tool that powers this site is ManagingNews.com, which was funded by the Knight Foundation this summer and just released in September. This is a great example of why we invest in open source applications - we never know who is going to build off them to make the next great site.

Check the site out in detail.

Eric Newton, VP of Knight Foundation's Journalism Program, recently spoke at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on how journalism will survive the digital age. At a moment when the potential role of government in supporting journalism is being discussed, Eric listed five examples of policies the government could adjust to help a new journalism ecosystem flourish. Some snippets:

Public media. A lot of the government money that flows to public media is status quo money. Not good enough. [...]

 

Nonprofit digital startups. Our old rules don't treat them fairly. Tax rules make it hard to switch to being a nonprofit, or a L3C. [...]

University journalism. Students everywhere are showing they can do great journalism. (By the way, if the nation's 200,000 journalism and mass communications students spent just 10 percent of their time doing actual journalism, that would more than replace the journalism lost in the past 10 years from the elimination of jobs by badly run news businesses.) But our old rules don't treat student journalists fairly. [...]

The government itself is a huge producer of mass media today. But in general not a very good one. For the most part, local, state and national government can't seem to use the new technology to do a better job obeying its own freedom of information laws, not even on the people's web sites that it now runs. [...]

Read the full piece for the fifth (and most significant) government policy Eric calls for. You can also read the rest of the testimony from the FTC's future of journalism workshop.

 

Not only is Facebook a great place for social networking, it's also a great tool for transferring news.

A NewsCloud experiment proves young people will participate in and contribute to a news and information community that goes where they live and share.

Jeff Reifman, founder of NewsCloud, created a Facebook site to distribute environment news from Grist, a site that provides environmental content daily, and another to distribute daily campus news from the University of Minnesota's newspaper, The Daily. .

The environmental news site, Hot Dish, allows users to read, rank, annotate, post, create, share and discuss climate change topics.

The application also includes an Action Team feature where users can earn points for prizes by meeting specific challenges. For example, users can earn points by sharing a story, posting a blog entry, being active in their community through volunteering, recycling, taking part in an environmental event, etc.

The grand prize winner won a trip to Greenland by persuading their gym to start recycling plastic bottles, having three letters to the editor published, and recycling an old washing machine.

The Hot Dish site had about 2,000 registered users and 346 agreed to be part of the research project.

Nearly three-quarters of the group surveyed said they used the Hot Dish site to interact with like-minded people. According to a NewsCloud report, users saw the site as a place where their views and contributions were more welcomed than in other Web sites.

According to Reifman, more than two-thirds of the content was contributed by users of the site during the two month period.' More than 2,300 comments were written, 1,500 stories were written, 4,500 stories were shared and about 1,200 eco-challenges were submitted.

This study indicates that social networks are a good way of getting young people involved with current events and community issues. Not only did the study inspire users to post articles and write comments on environmental issues, but also to actually do something about those issues.

This could definitely be a stepping stone for publications and other media that want to increase user engagement and interest.

The study also tested the distribution of news using University of Minnesota's student newspaper, The Daily. Although the outcomes were not as successful as Hot Dish's, the lesson learned is that timing and good marketing for a campus audience are essential for obtaining enough data for a study.

Follow the link to learn more.