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    Building a movement toward inclusivity

    Published March 17, 2014 by

    By Jenea Rewertz-Targui, Ordway Center for the Performing Arts The Ordway welcomes everyone and is committed to making our facility and programs accessible and inclusive to all in our community, including those with disabilities. We look forward to expanding and increasing access to opportunities to attend, participate in, and learn...
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    Our next bet on Miami

    Published March 17, 2014 by

    Photo credit: Flickr user Graham Coreil-Allen. Less than two years ago we made a new bet on Miami. We decided to widen our lens on the city’s creative community, focusing not only on artists but entrepreneurs. The idea: invest in Miami’s emerging and increasingly innovative entrepreneurs as a tool to build community in an effort to bind people to each other and to our rapidly evolving city. It’s a focus that seeks to build on our ongoing work at Knight Foundation in the arts. Over the past 18 months we have made more than 50 investments in entrepreneurship in South Florida; our biggest grant resulted in Endeavor – a global leader in building entrepreneurial ecosystems – launching its first U.S. outpost in Miami. Our aim is to connect, support and inspire Miami’s emerging community of entrepreneurs, startups, makers and doers of all kinds. The goal is to help make Miami more of a place where ideas are built.
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    “Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies”

    Published March 17, 2014 by

    For many of us, Cubism conjures up feelings of confusion; it is difficult to read visually; the subject is not always clear and neither is the message, and then there are all those cartoonish representations of guitars and violins. But if we can stop and try to understand what Pablo...
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    Bass Museum: March 2014 update

    Published March 17, 2014 by

    By Leilani Lynch, Bass Museum of Art Since I’ve been at the Bass Museum of Art, I’ve dealt with a number of artists in our tc: temporary contemporary storefront window space on Collins Avenue. Most of these projects have consisted of installing existing work on the walls in these two...
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    Put the public back in public information

    Published March 17, 2014 by

    Photo credit: Flickr user mightymightymatze. Today we celebrate Sunshine Week, a Knight-funded initiative to promote more open governments and freedom of information. The following is written by Emily Shaw of the Sunlight Foundation, a Knight grantee, and cross-posted from sunshineweek.org. This week is Sunshine Week, a nationwide discussion about the importance of access to public information and what it means for you and your community. During this week we pay special attention to our collective obligation to bring some “sunshine” to the often shadowy processes of government decision-making. Different governments have different ways of inhibiting effective oversight of government decision-making, from intentional stonewalling and secrecy to budget-driven decisions to reduce hours and staffing. These problems, while diverse, may have a similar solution: Public records and the content of public meetings should be considered public data, and accessible to anyone who wants it, including electronically. Technology has made the transmission of information easy and inexpensive, and when we demand electronic, online access to public information, we add a new and important method of bringing sunlight to all corners of government.
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    A new approach to helping journalism nonprofits at the IRS

    Published March 17, 2014 by

    Busting the Myths About Journalism and the IRS via YouTube. The following blog post is written by Jeff Hermes, the director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It is cross-posted from the Digital Media Law Project. Today, the Digital Media Law Project has launched a new version of its resources for journalism organizations seeking a Section 501(c)(3) tax exemption for the IRS. As a project, we have been concerned with non-profit journalism from the beginning, providing informational resources for news ventures seeking to form as non-profits. Since the launch of our attorney referral service, the Online Media Legal Network, in late 2009, about a third of our clients have been non-profit journalism organizations; more have been individuals or for-profits interested in starting a non-profit news venture. We have worked with more than forty groups to find counsel to assist them in applying to the IRS for recognition of tax-exempt status. But the path to tax-exempt status has not always run smooth. From 2010 to 2012, the IRS was reevaluating its standards for journalism organizations, causing these organizations to face long delayswhile struggling to stay afloat without an exemption in place. In fact, the now-infamous IRS "BOLO" listsflagged "newspaper entities" for special scrutiny [PDF] as of  February 2011. Several journalism applicants were questioned by the IRS about various aspects of their operation, without understanding why the IRS was interested in those issues -- and sometimes those questions seemed to verge into areas that should have been irrelevant under federal law. To help applicants satisfy IRS scrutiny, in April 2012 the DMLP released a detailed guide to the agency's decision-making process for granting tax exemptions to journalism non-profits. In late 2012, it appeared that the logjam at the IRS was beginning to break, with a couple of high-profileapplications accepted after delays of more than two years, and a steady stream of additional applications granted since then. And yet, the process remains complex, and there is substantial confusion about both how to obtain Section 501(c)(3) status and what that status allows you to do. For that reason, Eric Newton of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation reached out to the DMLP and offered Knight's support for the development of a video debunking some of the more common myths and misconceptions, which we're pleased to present above (thanks also to Dan Jones, Digital Media Producer for the Berkman Center, and Ogmog Creative).
  • Article

    Zero-occupancy vehicles

    Published March 17, 2014 by

    Photo credit: Benjamin de la Peña. I was at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., recently for a meeting convened by the New Cities Foundation and Google. About 100 of the top transportation experts from around the world were in the room to discuss the future of urban mobility. There were urbanists and designers, engineers and economists, researchers and city officials, such as Mayor Chris Coleman of St. Paul, Minn.  Google, of course, took the time to show off its autonomous vehicle, aka the “self-driving car.”  Its current incarnation is a white Lexus SUV, nondescript except for the spinning LIDAR contraption where the luggage rack should be and a Google logo with a smiley car painted on a rear passenger door. Some of us even got to ride the cars. (Sadly, not me.) In the parking lot where the tech giant was showing six of these smiley robot cars were dozens and dozens of yellow bikes that belong to Google’s campus-wide bike sharing service. It was fascinating that while the engineers talked up the robot cars, other Googlers were quietly coming and going via the yellow bikes in the background. The Google engineers also didn’t talk about the big Google buses that were streaming in and out of campus at the start and end of the day. These buses were huge tourist coaches, white but without the Google logo or smiley face and trying to be as nondescript as a 40-foot bus can be. Googlers were patiently waiting to get on these contentious buses that would shuttle them, mostly to San Francisco and Oakland, but also to San Jose and Marin County. Some of the bus waiting areas had tables with power outlets so the Googlers could juice up their laptops.
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    The “Plot” thickens at The Bindery Projects

    Published March 17, 2014 by

    The Bindery Projects’ new exhibition, by New York City-based artist Sreshta Rit Premnath, is rooted in fundamental, literal questions about bodies in space: “Why am I here? What is this existence, this right to be, that precedes or exceeds property?” “Plot” blends poetics, sculpture, moving and still images in wide-ranging...
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    The unmistakable Bernstein way

    Published March 15, 2014 by

    By Sebastian Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer There’s a famous moment in one of the equally famous Young People’s Concerts of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra that Leonard Bernstein created and conducted between 1958 and 1972. In one of those 53 televised concerts that provided a music education...