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    Bringing people back to the table

    Published June 11, 2014 by

    Dan Burden is director of innovation and inspiration for the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute and a keynote speaker at “8-80 Cities Forum: The Doable City,” a Knight Foundation-sponsored conference on fostering livable cities slated for June 16-18 in Chicago. Above, Dan leads a walkability study tour of Linden, Mich. Credit: Michigan Municipal League. I am standing with Ron Stein in a hallway. He recognized me, and with a smile I remember from 20 years ago, comes over and greets me with enthusiasm. In 20 years, we have both lost much of our hair, but he recognizes me by my vest and stature. I know his face, but have to ask how we know one another.  “Dan, you helped create my organization and built my career, with Vision Long Island. In these 20 years we have rescued more than 100 towns, and you launched us!”  Recollecting all this, I remember how we brought Huntington, Long Island, alive through a series of intensive workshops. Three hundred Long Islanders were doing what they do often, disagreeing on their future. When we started, there was insistence that they not change anything. They were especially opposed to creating a parking garage. They knew what they did not want; they were focused on battling that issue. 
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    Harnessing talent helps develop full potential of cities

    Published June 11, 2014 by

    Bryan Boyer third from left, is a partner at Makeshift Society, a co-working space in Brooklyn and San Francisco, and Dash Marshall, a design studio focused on buildings and the spaces between them. He was a recent facilitator at Knight Foundation’s Civic Innovation in Action Studio in Miami, which explored ways to harness talent, advance opportunity and promote robust engagement. Photos by Tom Carver for Knight Foundation. At some point during the opening of Knight Foundation’s Civic Innovation in Action Studio all of the toilets at Makeshift Society in Brooklyn clogged up and began to flood. It was a useful reminder that even when we’re thinking about big changes in our society and economy, the smallest of details still matter. Then I called a plumbing company and begged them to rush to the scene. Over the subsequent two days several small groups brainstormed ways of “harnessing talent” in America. In short, how do we make the most of the talent that we already have? Can we imagine an American future where a broad number of people make a fair living by doing work that is fulfilling to them? As more people work independently — especially the laid-off and the “downsized” —  how do we as a society afford them the same opportunities that have traditionally flowed from employers? For that matter, are jobs a useful end-goal, or do we have other ways to ensure a thriving society without perpetuating the mass-produced assumptions of the industrial era? To aid Knight Foundation and its guests in thinking about how to harness talent, I set out to learn from those who were freelancing. I spent the first four months of the year interviewing and getting to know freelancers in five cities across the country and one of the things I learned was that people of all walks of life are taking the courageous step to work independently.
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    Not your mother’s summer camp: Startup smarts with a side of coding

    Published June 11, 2014 by

    Knight Foundation supports the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) to prepare students from low-income communities for today’s technology landscape. Below, Stephanie Alvarado, NFTE’s development associate, gives a snapshot of NFTE alumni’s first day of GenTech, a summer camp to help students launch their tech-based business while learning to code. Photo by Chris Brignolle/NFTE South Florida We kicked off our inaugural GenTech Summer Camp on Monday by asking our alumni “where are you with your vision and business?” By asking our budding entrepreneurs to reflect on their accomplishments, obstacles and futures, Camp Instructor Ray Parris helped the students set up goals for this 10-day business accelerator. The camp, made possible by the generous support of Microsoft, is an opportunity for NFTE alumni to work with experienced entrepreneurs and experts in creating apps and websites and even launching their business. GenTech is a partnership of three organizations: the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship and Code Fever, with The LAB Miami in Wynwood serving as host. Topics include ideation, creating wireframes, coding, marketing and branding, and legal aspects of starting and running a business. Most importantly, students develop their first professional network as part of the camp, a perfect example of what is possible when we find common ground to build on. Even on the first day, our students were more productive than most of their peers who are in the brain drain of summer break. They toured The LAB Miami and talked with co-founder Wifredo Fernandez about his passion for both education and entrepreneurship. Alejandro Blanco of Design Red, an IT company for specialized small business needs, stopped by during lunch and talked with the students about his entrepreneurial evolution and the lessons he’s learned during his career in information technology.
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    Leave labels behind with Haitian-roots show

    Published June 11, 2014 by

    Installation view of "The Look." The artist-run space Guccivuitton has had some fine shows since it opened up a couple years back. But “The Look” fits it like a glove. That’s because the exhibit in a storefront in Little Haiti is filled with works of Haitian-born...
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    Impressions of Ballet Hispanico

    Published June 10, 2014 by

    Last Saturday, Latin fusion dance company Ballet Hispanico executed a mostly coherent and unified performance at the Arsht Center. The performance featured a repertoire of solid works by Ballet Hispanico Artistic Director Eduardo Vilaro ("Danzón"), Annabelle Lopez Ochoa ("Sombrerísimo"), Cayetano Soto ("Sortijas"), as well as a world premiere by Miami-based...
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    Miami hackathon traces money from World Cup, Venezuela and Miami-Dade dispensaries

    Published June 10, 2014 by

    Photo: Money-trailing hackathon promo. Credit: Carolina Wilson. A 10-cent hike in bus and subway fares spurred violent protests in Brazil last June when the country hosted the 2013 Confederations Cup. Since then, the demonstrations have left people wondering about the effects of Brazil hosting the World Cup this summer. That concern inspired Florida International University Prof. Susan Jacobson to lead a group analyzing Brazil’s World Cup expenditures during Hacks/Hackers “La Ruta del Dinero” Hackatón Latinoameriano (Pan Latin “Money Trailing” Hackathon). That work was one of three projects that emerged from the event at Univision last Saturday. Miami, the only U.S. city participating, joined 13 Latin American cities in a civic journalism hackathon to track the flow of money from Latin American governments and corporations.
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    Positive and negative space blend together at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

    Published June 10, 2014 by

    Andrea Gaydos Landau explores the strange domain of the double negative this June at Tiger Strikes Asteroid with her solo show “Never Wanted Nothing.” By utilizing collage comprised primarily of negative space cutouts mixed with dark and starkly contrasted structures that flood out across the pristine walls, Landau presents compositions...
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    Pan-Latin Hackathon follows the money

    Published June 10, 2014 by

    Miami was the only U.S. city to participate in a Pan-Latin Hackathon. The Miami chapter of Hacks/Hackers welcomed journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs at Univision on Saturday. Participants traced money from World Cup, Venezuelan government and Miami-Dade County dispensaries.
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    Tow Center program defends journalism from the threat of mass surveillance

    Published June 10, 2014 by

    Knight Foundation supports Journalism After Snowden to ensure access to information and promote journalistic excellence. Below, Jennifer Henrichsen, a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, and Taylor Owen, research director, write about the expansion of the program. We’ve long known that it’s easy to kill the messenger. Journalists are murdered all around the world for speaking truth to power. But, it wasn’t until recently that we realized how mass surveillance is killing source confidentiality, and with it, the very essence of journalism. By taking away the ability to protect sources—the lifeblood of journalism—surveillance can silence journalists without prosecutions or violence. Understanding the implications of state surveillance for the practice of journalism is the focus of our project, Journalism After Snowden. We’re in an age of mass surveillance and it’s expanding. Metadata can reveal journalists’ sources without requiring officials to obtain a subpoena. Intelligence agencies can tap into undersea cables to capture encrypted traffic. Mobile devices, even when powered off, can be remotely accessed to record conversations. The extent of manipulation and penetration of the technology that journalists rely on to communicate with their sources makes it difficult—if not impossible—for journalists to truly protect them. And without reasonable assurances of protection, sources will invariably dry up, cutting off a supply of information about government wrongdoing which for more than a century has been a critical balance of power in democratic governance. And journalism without sources is not journalism at all; it’s public relations for the powerful.
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    Remembering Civil Rights struggles and beyond

    Published June 10, 2014 by

    Three exhibitions at the Levine Museum of the New South help commemorate the significant milestones and anniversaries of the Civil Rights Movement: “Faces of Freedom Summer,” “Out of the Shadows: Undocumented and Unafraid” and “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow.” These exhibitions are part of or coordinate with a larger two-year...
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    ­­PolicyMic offers lessons on delivering compelling news for millennials

    Published June 9, 2014 by

    We’re lazy! Self-obsessed! A generation of idle trophy kids! A quick scan of media headlines about millennials — Americans ages 18-34 — paints a depressing picture of a generation that’s primed for failure. They say we’re too selfie-obsessed to care about the world, that our attention spans are too short to read about serious news and that we’re too lost in the depths of Facebook to be politically active and civically engaged. This caricature might make for great sound bites, but it couldn’t be further from reality. Nowhere in these stereotypes do we hear that young people represent the most-educated generation in American history, and we vote in higher numbers than any other generation of young people in recent history.