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    LitCrawl Miami

    Published April 21, 2014 by

    Lace up those sneakers, select a designated driver and come to South Beach for the first-ever (and hopefully annual) LitCrawl Miami. LitCrawl, somewhat invented in San Francisco, is a literary pub crawl series brought to Miami from the folks at the O, Miami Poetry Festival. Lit...
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    New website will explore how our cities get to what’s next

    Published April 20, 2014 by

    This fall author and media theorist Steven Johnson will debut a new series on PBS in association with the BBC called “How We Got to Now.” The series has been produced by Jane Root’s award-winning company, Nutopia, and is funded by the CPB/PBS Challenge Fund. As part of the launch, Knight Foundation is supporting the development of a complementary community and news site on how to make better cities, and partnering with Johnson on sharing his expertise through Knight’s national network of ideas. Photo credit: Nutopia.  Shortly after the fall of Constantinople, a small community of glassmakers from Turkey sailed westward across the Mediterranean and eventually settled in Venice, where they began practicing their trade in the prosperous new city growing out of the marshes on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. "$250,000 Grant to Finance Website Tied to PBS Seires" in the New York Times "Innovation hub will foster great ideas for our cities" by Carol Coletta Register here for "How can communities create places that foster great ideas?", a webinar with Steven Johnson on May 2 at Noon ET. (Webex.com)  Their skills at blowing glass quickly created a new luxury good for the merchants of the city to sell around the globe. But lucrative as it was, glassmaking was not without its liabilities. The melting point of silicon dioxide required furnaces burning at temperatures above 500 degrees, and Venice was a city built almost entirely out of wooden structures. And so in 1291, in an effort to both retain the skills of the glassmakers and protect public safety, the city government sent the glassmakers into exile once again, only this time their journey was a short one—a mile across the Venetian Lagoon to the island of Murano.  Unwittingly, the Venetian doges had created an innovation hub: By concentrating the glassmakers on a single island the size of a small city neighborhood, they triggered a surge of creativity, giving birth to an environment that possessed what economists call “information spillover.” The density of Murano meant that new ideas were quick to flow through the entire population. They perfected a new kind of clear, durable glass that would turn out to be one of the most important materials of the next 800 years, used in spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, test tubes, and eventually cameras and projectors. The scientific revolution might have unfolded on a much slower timetable had the glassmakers of Murano not invented the crystal-clear glass that became their trademark. 
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    Innovation hub will foster great ideas for our cities

    Published April 20, 2014 by

    Photo credit: Flickr user Mycatkins. Last year, I served as a judge for the Gensler Design Excellence Awards.  As I read through the entries from Gensler’s dozens of offices around the world, I was struck by one program requirement that was repeated from entry to entry in the office category. It was this: Design a space for our firm that will support chance meetings and the constant exchange of ideas among our employees. "New website will explore how our cities get to what’s next" by Steven Johnson on Knight Blog "$250,000 Grant to Finance Website Tied to PBS Seires" in the New York Times Register here for "How can communities create places that foster great ideas?", a webinar with Steven Johnson on May 2 at Noon ET. (Webex.com)  Just before I went to Chicago for the Gensler assignment, I met Steven Johnson at a quirky little meeting at UC Berkley.  Steven, a prolific author and media theorist, was there to speak about his book, “Where Good Ideas Come From.”  He had just returned from shooting another segment of his new series for PBS and the BBC, “How We Got to Now,” scheduled for launch in fall 2014. Steven is a great investigative reporter who takes on important, fascinating questions. Like Gensler’s clients, what he found is that the design and programming of place is central to sharing and spreading ideas. He also found that some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly.  Our question at Knight Foundation is what can cities do to become places where ideas “breed effortlessly”? How can cities support dense networks of creative people? How can ideas be made to flow more freely? How can cities encourage more spillover of ideas? How can cities widen the pool of minds that can come up with good ideas? How can cities create the tables where good ideas can be shared, especially as the economy relies less on large corporations and more on workers who are increasingly independent? As Steven put it, the city is naturally a great engine of supercreativity. How can we take advantage of this great engine, especially in Knight communities?
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    Dangerous Productions: April 2014 update

    Published April 20, 2014 by

    By Dangerous Productions Things are hopping in Frogtown, Saint Paul. Dangerous Productions has teamed up with a consortium of other local arts organizations and individuals to turn the once-troubled Saint Paul neighborhood into a unique and thriving cultural destination. How? By any means possible. For the past two years, Dangerous...
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    Christina Pettersson’s great ghost ride

    Published April 20, 2014 by

    Pettersson's work is inspired by Southern Gothic. When Christina Pettersson’s solo show opens at the new Primary Projects space in downtown Miami, it will launch much more than the intriguing “The Castle Dismal” exhibit itself. She joins up with O, Miami poetry month, creates special events...
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    56 ideas advance in News Challenge on strengthening the Internet

    Published April 18, 2014 by

    Above: Advisers gather to review applications in Mozilla's offices. Photo credit: John Bracken.  Yesterday we huddled with 14 advisers in Mozilla’s San Francisco office to help us determine a group of semifinalists in the News Challenge. Today, we’re sending notices to 56 projects asking them for additional information. We’ll look at their submissions over the next few weeks and, after considering the advice of another set of advisers, we’ll notify a group of finalists on May 12. We received 704 submissions in the contest, which is focused on the question “How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?” We saw ideas covering a range of topics, among them access to the Internet, freedom of expression and ideas to fix the Web. Now we enter the “refinement phase.” For the next 10 days, we encourage you to review the entries and add your comments, questions and suggestions. During refinement, semifinalists will get the chance to provide more details about their ideas and respond to community input. After the refinement phase, we’ll review the entries offline and select the winners. We will announce that group on June 23 at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Winners will receive a share of $2.75 million.
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    Motionpoems unveils the results of a year’s work by major pop musicians, moviemakers, and mad men on May 22 at the Walker Art Center

    Published April 18, 2014 by

    By Todd Boss, Motionpoems Think poetry is for nerds and old ladies? Some of the world’s most trend-forward hipsters are saying, “no way.” Last year, we challenged some of America’s hottest advertising, production, and design companies to turn contemporary poems into short films. Several of the companies we contacted work...
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    Get with the program: Developing an action plan for successful cities

    Published April 18, 2014 by

    Photo credit: Flickr user Forgemind ArchiMedia. If you’ve ever hired an architect to design a project, you probably spent a lot of time up front talking about the “program” for the project. The program describes how you want to use the space and the activities you want the space to support. If you are renovating a home (as I am currently), you might say, I want to make sure I have space that meets my needs for work I have to do at home or encourages me to do sit-ups when the mood strikes. The same is true of the buildings and public spaces that make up a city. All of these places can be programmed to encourage and discourage certain behaviors. Take, for instance, offices of the latest tech firms. They are all designed to encourage employees to meet and mingle serendipitously so that they share ideas. Co-working and incubator spaces are usually heavy on social areas, too.   Or take New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The mayor passionately promoted the concept of “active design” to promote physical activity and health through design.   
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    Journalism awards: Let a thousand bloom

    Published April 18, 2014 by

    Photo credit: Flickr user Tony Hammond. Every year about now journalism contest winners spring up like a riot of crocuses (the Pulitzer Prizes the best example) and my thoughts float back to the Oakland Tribune. Critics of journalism awards say they are too many – like best baby contests or even dog shows – to mean anything.  But I can remember a time when even the smallest award helped keep us going at the Trib. Picture a city wracked by an earthquake (1989) and an urban firestorm (1991). Chunks of our advertising and readership lost to natural disaster, the Tribune was a flat-broke daily paper before it was fashionable. Our newsroom was talented. Yet it had taken pay cuts. It was ambitious. But it might be out of business in a month or even a week. It was wonderfully diverse, yet incredibly young. We experimented but without money. Say what you will about prizes. They helped. We won more than 150 awards for our journalism from roughly 1986 to 1992 when I was city editor, assistant managing editor and managing editor at the Trib under Bob and Nancy Maynard, the first African-American couple to own a major mainstream paper.
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    What we learned from the first-ever OpenNews Code Convening

    Published April 17, 2014 by

    The following blog, written by Ryan Pitts and Dan Sinker, is cross-posted from source.opennews.org. When we talk with newsrooms about open-sourcing their work, often the response we get is that they’d love to, but deadline pressures keep the last-mile work and documentation that signifies a good open-source project on the to-do list. So at OpenNews, we came up with a simple proposition: What if we free up that time by getting developers out of the deadline grind? Let’s put them up for a few days, feed them, and help get the work done. Last week, we brought eight news developers to Portland, Oregon, to pilot the concept. We’re calling these type of get-togethers “Code Convenings,” and last week’s was the first of many that OpenNews will organize over the next three years. We had developers from the New York Times, NPR, ProPublica, WNYC, Al Jazeera America, and Github, and together they released: ·       Pym.js: An NPR library enabling responsive iframes for embedded graphics ·       PourOver and Tamper: A New York Times library and protocol pair that let you quickly filter datasets with thousands of records, right in the browser ·       Landline + Stateline: A ProPublica tool for creating easy SVG maps that work across all browsers ·       FourScore: A WNYC graphic template for capturing reader sentiments in an elegant 2D chart Each team has introduced their projects here on Source, and we also wanted to share our own process and things we learned from this event.