Thursday’s afternoon bar-camp sessions at the 2010 Future of Civic Media conference @ MIT, attendees were talking about how to be stewards of the Internet and support journalism with net neutrality. At one, people with varying degrees of fear of facebook, health care companies, and the U.S. Government discussed from whom information should be private. Compared to academics like’Medill’s Rich Gordon, the KF interns’ generation isn’t too worried about a totalitarian state.

In a later session, participants discussed successes in mobile news and got a neat guide to mobile media from MobileActive. Two attendees who work in sub-Saharan Africa said that local media outlets provide numbers people can text to contact the journalists and learn more. Justin Arenstein, a Knight Fellow at Stanford, said that people reporting their moods onVodacom’s platform for social networking in South Africa provided the company with data they could compare to places with ethnic conflict. Now a ‘happiness report’ follows the daily weather report on T.V.

Shu Choudhary, a Knight International Journalism Fellow, uses Google’s free SMS service to’reach rural India. The service allows users to send 140 characters to everyone who signs up on the list. Google, like many major companies, focus on user-generated content rather than employing journalists to vet and report information.

The team at Department of Play, a project by C4FCM students, developed the What’s Up neighborhood news system. It connects voicemail and a web site to connect young people in Lawrence, MA who may not have Internet access. Department of Play’s’Leo Burd is developing’Voip Drupal, an open-source platform for community information systems.

See Frontline SMS and Mobile Commons for more on mobile news and information.