• Article

    Powering innovation in Philadelphia

    Published March 26, 2015 by

    Photo of Philadelphia by Flickr user Ahd Photography. I participated recently in Philly Innovates, the city of Philadelphia’s innovation summit in partnership with Salesforce. Mayor Michael Nutter, Chief Customer Service Officer Rosetta Lue and Deputy Mayor Rich Negrin unveiled “The Philly Innovates Blueprint” to become a more connected city. Salesforce, best known for its customer relationship management product, has created an enhanced Philly 311 platform that allows for a multichannel user experience.    As I talked to Michelle Lee, co-founder of Textizen, in the exhibit area, I saw a demo of the newly unveiled Open Data Philly platform. During lunch I looked around the room a bit more, and it became clear that Knight Foundation has been a catalyst for much of the city’s innovation in recent years.
  • Article

    Prototype Fund winner Max Ogden building data-sharing ecosystem

    Published March 26, 2015 by

    Imagine two government agencies that have the same data set on potholes. Right now, those agencies could have different versions of the data and might update them separately, with no way to easily compare or analyze the two sets of information.  Knight Prototype Fund winner Max Ogden wants to lower that barrier to sharing data and is well on his way to building a new infrastructure – meaning that someday there could be better data that might help government more efficiently address potholes, plow streets or serve residents in other ways. Ogden received $50,000 from Knight Foundation in 2013 to build Dat, a tool that will allow multiple people to collaborate on the same data set. “It’s basically the result of the lack of any of these kind of collaboration tools. That was a big problem that I identified in a lot of civic, public data systems.”
  • Article

    The 2014 Highland Square Porch Rockr Festival

    Published March 26, 2015 by

    By Anita Marron, HSNA Explore the positive impact of PorchRokr on the Highland Square neighborhood, with interviews and music samplings throughout the day. With more than 90 bands and performers playing on residential porches and stages throughout the 8 block festival area, Highland Square Neighborhood rocked 2014. Over 7000 residents...
  • Article

    To clap or not to clap

    Published March 26, 2015 by

    By Sebastian Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer “How, when and where?” to applaud at a classical music concert is an eternal subject of heated controversy. Everyone has an opinion backed by good reasons, but what do musicians themselves, the younger generation in this case, think? As part of...
  • Article

    Hmong art is compelling part of new history exhibit

    Published March 25, 2015 by

    By Levi Weinhagen, St. Paul arts blogger "We Are Hmong Minnesota," the new exhibit at the Minnesota History Center developed in partnership with many individuals and organizations active in the local Hmong community, does an amazing job of letting visitors stand in the past and look through the present into...
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    To strengthen local news & information, community engagement is at the core

    Published March 25, 2015 by

    New Brunswick Today team member Kaila Boulware works an outdoor event in February 2015, part of a crowdfunding campaign to support the local watchdog-journalism website and newspaper, which is being supported by the Dodge Foundation. (Photo courtesy of New Brunswick Today)   This post is one in a series on what four community and place-based foundations are learning by funding media projects that help to meet their local information needs. All are funded through the Knight Community Information Challenge. For a New Jersey-based foundation immersed in a major effort to enhance a weak regional news and information system, "community engagement" is more than a buzz phrase. Project managers are promoting the idea that for local news and information providers, it is:
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    New Knight Visiting Nieman Fellows: Journalism needs everyone’s help

    Published March 25, 2015 by

    Ann Marie Lipinski is curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, she previously served as editor/senior VP of the Chicago Tribune and senior lecturer/VP for civic engagement at the University of Chicago. She is a trustee of the Poynter Institute and former co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. For 77 years, the idea of a Nieman Foundation fellowship was elegantly simple: We give you an academic year at Harvard; you repay journalism with your expanded knowledge and outlook. As a Nieman Fellow myself, I can say the experience remains the single most important contribution to my journalistic development. But much had changed about journalism when I returned to Harvard as Nieman curator almost four years ago. Not every journalist who would make an awesome Nieman Fellow is ready to spend a full academic year at Harvard or has a goal that would merit that commitment. And not everyone whose work is having an impact on the future of news is a journalist. That’s long been true of publishers and media company owners, but now developers, entrepreneurs, academics and others are increasingly influential in the news ecosystem — sometimes because they’re building the tools journalists use and the organizations that they work for.
  • Article

    Exploring the entries in Knight News Challenge: Elections

    Published March 24, 2015 by

    The first Knight News Challenge of 2015 opened on Feb. 25 with the question, How might we better inform voters and increase civic participation before, during and after elections? We looked to inspire people to not only submit ideas, but also to contribute to broader discussions on improving our democracy. The challenge was met with an overwhelming level of engagement, resulting in more than 1,000 ideas being submitted to newschallenge.org. Submissions came from an impressive mix of teams. A group of external readers are currently helping us evaluate every submission through April 13. Although the submission window is closed, the  #newschallenge conversation continues. For the second year in a row, Matt Miller (@thisismmiller) of the New York Public Library Labs), analyzed the submissions. Writing Python source code (available on GitHub here), Matt scraped all the submission data from the website, compiled it into a data set and generated several visualizations. Again, City Tracking, a 2010 Knight News Challenge winner, created the map tiles that Matt used to generate the analysis, Stamen’s Toner.