On Wednesday morning, former Knight News Challenge winners like David Ardia and Lisa Williams gave their advice for web sites and non-profits at “Knight 101”

Wednesday evening brought a plenary called “Nerds, News, and Nabes” with Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibarügen, Henry Jenkins, principal investigator for M.I.T.’s Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM), and N.Y.U. Professor Eric Klinenberg.

At Thursday morning’s plenary session, Chris Csikszenmihalyi, co-direcotr of the C4FCM, talked about bringing communities near natural gas fields the news and information they need to preserve their communities and their health, and M.I.T. grad student Ben Fry helped us’visulaize data.

One example of data’visualization from Martin Wattenberg was Wordle, a program that generates images based on word frequency. The more times a word appears in a given text or blog, the larger it is in the image generated. Here’s one for a press release on the KNC winners. Throughout the rest of the day there were BarCamp sessions on such topics as reporting under repression and using “crappy cell phones.” Knight’s Journalism Advisory Committee hosted an afternoon BarCamp session on the future of journalism and Knight Foundation’s role.

On Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, KNC winners and M.I.T. grad students and employees explained their digital media projects. Notable demos included Virtual Gaza, Sourcemap.org (in beta version)’and a digital community storytelling effort.

Friday morning, we all voted on the best idea for collaboration among KNC winners developed over the course of the conference using Selectricity. TweetBill, a project’linking constituents to one another and alerting them to’bills and their representatives’ contact info,’won the $3,000 first prize.

Check out live tweets from the conference at #kncmit, #knc09, and #fncm09. Other information is available on the conference’s wiki.