Each year at the Knight-MIT Civic Media Conference, to foster the spirit of innovation and cooperation, attendees are welcome to participate in the Collaboration Contest. Ideas are pitched during dinner, feverish campaigning occurs to win votes, submitted by text, and the winners are announced during the conference wrap-up. Third Place $1000 VoMU (vehicle of many uses) will be an open source fabrication tool kit that will move around, gather and share stories. They hope to partner with Clover Truck and give out ice cream as they play movies or project back to communities the stories they gather. They may also use a receipt machine to give attendees an artifact of an event they attend. Second Place $2000 Streaming Screaming Chilean-based Intelligent Citzens plans to partner with Public Lab and adapt their balloon mapping kit to cover protests in Chile (where protesters carry balloons). Hope to stream a live feed. Visual Voice  $3000 Rekha Murthy, PRX With over 40,000 audio pieces now stored at the Public Radio Exchange, Murthy knows there is an opportunity to help independent film and radio producers short documentaries similar to those from Radio Lab or This American Life and visualize more great audio content. She stressed that their work will create a template to encourage more collaboration.

Jesse Shapins, a partner in Zeega, one of this year’s the Knight News Challenge winners, as well as VoMU co-creator, sent this tweet: “Dreams keep coming true! W/ @mizzdmartin, @pazonada, @metalabharvard just won $1k at #civicmedia 4 Vehicle of Many Uses (VoMU)!”