Photo credit: Stanford d.school

This weekend we’re putting the Knight News Challenge: Health road tour on hiatus while we gather 42 Knight-funded projects (38 Knight News Challenge winners and four companies from the Knight Enterprise Fund) for a couple of days at the Stanford d.school. It’s the first time we’ve gathered so many News Challenge winners in one place.

The d.school, with its focus on design thinking and reputation as a hub of innovation, provides convenient access to thought leaders in Silicon Valley. However, we’ve designed the day to take advantage of our greatest resource: the News Challenge winners themselves. Earlier this year a friend told me about a similar convening he attended that frustrated him because the real experts were his fellow participants. Reflecting that experience, we’ve organized the meeting around roundtables on People and Product, the two themes that came out of the surveys we did of the participants earlier in the month.  By “people,”  we mean the challenges of building organizations, working in institutions, hiring and managing people, and managing one’s own time. We’re using “product” to encompass the process of building things or services that serve a customer’s need or desire. This includes sales and marketing, the challenges of scaling and the challenges of maintaining  focus and limiting sprawl.

In addition to the roundtables, we’ll have two unconference sessions in which participants can create sessions collaboratively and short “pop-up” talks from people like John Lilly, Megan Smith and John Seely Brown.

We are looking forward to working together, sharing common experience, generating creative solutions and getting the band back together. Check Knight Blog next week for some of the highlights.

John Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation, and Megan Zimroth, media innovation assistant

The Knight News Challenge: Health won’t stop just because we’re in Palo Alto. You can see and share inspirations here. The contest will open for proposals Sept. 3.