• Article

    Karl Staven: Resident Animator

    Published August 18, 2014 by

    Although I grew up in Georgia, since I graduated from high school I’ve spent most of my time in the northeast. When I was accepted into the AIRIE program more than a year ago, I was excited to return to the deep south, about as deep as you can get...
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    Coming Home to Music comes together!

    Published August 15, 2014 by

    By Coming Home to Music staff Nearly a year into this adventure called Coming Home to Music, we’re excited to see the pieces coming together. And we’re really thrilled to be sharing our vision of creating an intimate, engaging series of concerts that rotate through the homes of Detroit and...
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    Temple University summer program teaches kids digital literacy skills

    Published August 15, 2014 by

    Above: Apps & Maps students working on Gotcha App development. Credit: Urban Apps & Maps Studios. Youngjin Yoo is director of the Center for Design+Innovation at Temple University and leads the Urban Apps & Maps Studios there, which Knight Foundation supports. Over the last three years, Temple University’s Urban Apps & Maps Studios has been running Apps & Maps BITs Summer Program. This year, 95 girls and 84 boys participated in the program. From July 1 through Aug. 5, these students worked on several hands-on projects to learn three essential digital literacy skills: design thinking, computational thinking and spatial thinking. Photo: Apps & Maps participants creating visualization of self-image Credit: James Moustafellos The group worked with more than 30 Temple students who were supervised by 10 Temple faculty members from various academic departments, including information systems, geography and urban studies, electrical engineering, computer and information science, English, arts and entrepreneurship. The program was funded by Knight Foundation, together with the U.S. Economic Development Administration and Philadelphia Youth Network.
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    Transportation advocates seek new solutions to transform San Jose, Calif.

    Published August 15, 2014 by

    Knight Foundation recently announced $100,000 in support for TransForm, California’s leading transportation advocate, to expand its GreenTRIP program within San Jose. GreenTRIP offers a certification program for new, more affordable residential and mixed-use developments that are built with less parking and more incentives for residents to walk, bike and use public transportation. San Jose is one of 26 Knight communities, cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once owned newspapers.
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    FIU names Knight Innovator in Residence

    Published August 14, 2014 by

    Alex de Carvalho is the first Knight Innovator in Residence at Florida International University. In the last decade, a wave of innovation in digital technologies has transformed the way we produce, deliver and consume media. As digital services, social utilities and smart devices grow in features and sophistication, the media industry must continue to adapt and redefine how they employ new technologies – or they will inevitably fall by the wayside. Companies of all sizes must also learn to employ, master and innovate digitally if they are to effectively compete in a faster and more crowded communications landscape. Over the past eight years of creating professional associations and tech events, I have found myself in mentoring positions; it was a calling I didn’t realize I had. Through my successive work experiences, the common thread has been in helping companies and people to communicate better and more effectively online. My experiences in the U.S. and in Europe as the founder of media-related startups, as a business strategy and marketing consultant, and as an adjunct professor and small-business educator, have all rewarded me with insights obtained from looking at similar problems from various angles.
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    Knight-Mozilla Fellows take on era of ‘no excuses,’ public data demands

    Published August 14, 2014 by

    Above: 2014 Knight-Mozilla fellows.  In newsrooms around the globe, data experts are embracing daily challenges from their ever-demanding, increasingly info-savvy audience. Related Link Applications for the 2015 Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellowship are open through Aug. 16.   The third class of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellows is developing solutions to these demands in seven newsrooms: Internews in Kenya, La Nacion, The New York Times,  ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Washington Post. Each fellow creates tools that empower journalists and citizens to access complicated relationships hidden in the untouched stacks of data and research. Mozilla initiated the program in 2010, and Knight Foundation has supported it since 2011. The latest discoveries include: the pay gap between men and women in the San Francisco Bay Area, patient reviews of  hospitals across Texas, and a new method to forecast the outcomes of Congressional elections to be released this fall. Members of the code community -- with and without journalism experience -- are partnered with newsrooms as part of the Knight-Mozilla fellowships program.
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    Simple steps of creativity may inspire big change in Akron, Ohio

    Published August 14, 2014 by

    Photo: League of Creative Interventionists invites Akron neighbors to participate in #CreateAkron. Artist Hunter Franks uses people as his medium to break down barriers and make neighborhoods more neighborly. It’s simple, really. He invites people to come together – most recently in Akron, Ohio – and they create public, amateur art for the neighborhood to take part in and enjoy. Franks has taken his participatory art on a national tour and is concluding his three-week visit to Akron in August. Knight Foundation gave Franks more than $55,000 to add to the tour four Knight cities: Akron, Detroit, Philadelphia and Macon, Ga. Detroit, which he is scheduled to visit next month, is the final city on the Knight tour.   His work has included neighborhood love notes on post cards sent to random mailing addresses, a collection of love stories from passersby to show the similarities of human experience and even inspirational sidewalk chalk and duct tape art. “We won’t change the face of Akron forever,” Franks said.  The chalk will get washed away by the rain and the duct tape will have to be removed, “but these simple steps will lead to bigger things.”
  • Article

    Imagine 2025: Share the Vision

    Published August 14, 2014 by

    Arts & Science Council. Reserve your seat now for “Imagine 2025: Share the Vision,” a creative and interactive arts event to debate, dream and envision the future of the cultural sector in Charlotte. Sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and presented by...
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    La fanciulla del West by Giacomo Puccini

    Published August 13, 2014 by

    By Minnesota Opera staff From the Italian master who wrote Madame Butterfly and Turandot comes a romantic portrait of America’s iconic Golden West. Puccini’s gorgeous melodies and blazing orchestral colors are set against a backdrop of a gold-mining frontier town, where a poker-playing, pistol-wielding saloon owner finds herself in a...
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    Reframe It project seeks input of tech community on immigration policy

    Published August 13, 2014 by

    Digital media in use at immigration rally in Washington DC. Photo credit: SEIU on Flickr. Bobby Fishkin is CEO of Reframe It, which Knight Foundation supports. Debates about immigration policies today are often loud, noisy, rancorous, simplistic and ill-informed. These policies impact the tech community profoundly, often with consequences that were unintended by the policy’s framers. Misinformation and disinformation have undeserved influence; preventable and problematic unintended consequences go unchecked.   Reframe It is collaborating with TechCrunch and Silicon Valley Community Foundation to bring a currently underutilized resource to these debates: the intelligence, creativity and problem-solving mindset of the tech community. The goal is both to harness fresh ideas about assumptions, arguments and possible reforms, and to test whether the tech community would support these reforms if they understood them. Media, think tanks and individual citizens often claim that one or another public policy proposal would have a particular result. But they base these expectations on assumptions, which can be  “buggy.”  If only a small group of people have the opportunity to debug our pending legislation and public policies, then any preventable bugs they don’t find are likely to cause real problems for our society. In “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Steven Raymond paraphrased  “Linus’s Law”:  “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”  With support from Knight Foundation, Reframe It  and its collaborators are working  to bring the creative energy of the technology community to the debugging of public policy related to immigration reform.