Articles by

Knight Foundation

  • Press Release

    Survey: People want more government transparency, traditional media less likely to sue to get it

    Published August 24, 2011 by

    While a lack of resources have made news organizations increasingly less inclined to file freedom of information lawsuits, citizens have a growing interest in government transparency and are becoming more active in asserting their right to government information. The rise of citizen interest and the decline of newsroom aggressiveness are among the findings of an […]

  • Article

    Announcing judging panel for Apps for Communities

    Published August 12, 2011 by

    Photo: Code for Oakland was a one day workshop for people interested in using Oakland and Alameda County, CA data to build mobile apps for the 2011 Knight/FCC Apps for Communities Competition. By Ellen Satterwhite, FCC Consumer Policy Advisor The FCC and the Knight Foundation have partnered up for a competition to build apps to make cities more livable! As developers and communities’ use the last few weeks of summers to finish their entries for the Apps for Communities Challenge, it’s time to announce the impressive panel of judges who will be reviewing and scoring those entries. We are honored to have investors, technologist, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, and philanthropist who have agreed to server as judges for the competition; which ends August 31. Without further ado, the judges are: Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is a noted investor in information technology. He previously developed the web browser Mosaic and co-founded the company Netscape; he is an investor in numerous technology startups including Digg and Twitter; and he serves on the boards of Facebook, eBay and Hewlett-Packard (among others). Charles Best, founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose.org is a website that allows people to donate directly to specific projects in schools and classrooms. It was started in 2000 by Charles Best, when he was a teacher at a public high school in the Bronx. Since then, it has grown to serve all the public schools throughout the United States. As of August 2010, more than $55 million dollars had been donated to over 138,000 projects, helping more than 3,400,000 students in need. Corey Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey Mayor Booker has a history of organizing and social justice work. His parents successfully fought against racial discrimination and shattered corporate ceilings, inspiring him to pursue a life of breaking barriers and working for change. On May 9, 2006, Cory Booker was elected Mayor of Newark, with a landslide victory. Brad Feld, Managing Director of Foundry Group Brad Feld has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over twenty years. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group—which focuses on investing in early-stage IT companies—he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures, a company that helped launch and operate software companies. Brad currently serves on the board of directors of several companies for Foundry Group. In addition to his investing efforts, Brad has been active with several non-profit organizations and currently is chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Tom Lee, Director of Sunlight Labs Tom Lee is the Director of Sunlight Labs; prior to assuming leadership of the labs, he managed Sunlight's Subsidyscope project, an effort to explore the level of federal involvement in various sectors of the economy. His writing on technical policy has appeared in the American Prospect, Techdirt, Progressive Fix, and various impassioned Slashdot threads. Jennifer Pahlka, Founder, Executive Director and Board Chair of Code for America Jennifer Pahlka is the Founder, Executive Director and Board Chair of Code for America, and has spent the past 15 years in the company of the technology elite. She spent eight years at CMP Media where she led the Game Group, overseeing GDC, Game Developer magazine, and Gamasutra.com; there she also launched the Independent Games Festival and served as Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association. Recently, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O’Reilly Media, and co-chaired the successful Web 2.0 Expo. Note: Cross-posted from FCC.gov How to apply to the Challenge
  • Article

    A new golden age for arts criticism

    Published August 10, 2011 by

    Knight Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts are seeking ideas from individuals and organizations for the development of new, sustainable models for arts journalism. Applications for the Community Arts Journalism Challenge must be received by midnight Thursday, Aug 18 - apply now. The following blog about the importance of arts criticism is crossposted from Art Works, the official blog of the National Endowment for the Arts: By Abraham Ritchie                 Abraham Ritchie. Photo by Anna Wolak Like a ship heading towards open ocean, progressive art is constantly moving away from us. Culture does not slow down or stop when visual art is cut from school curricula or when art critics are fired from major newspapers. Rather it is the community that suffers, as the public becomes distanced from its own culture. Unaware of the innovations that are going on and why, the community can become alienated from art. The artists can also suffer, though they are still fundamentally connected to culture in ways that the public is not. Without critics, artists can pursue unproductive or backwards paths. The art critic is crucial to both the public and to artists. The art critic must connect new art to the public, providing a platform for understanding and appreciation. Logically, the critic must also give critical feedback to the artists who are focused on innovation in their work. This allows the artist to improve their practice or reject the critic’s assessment. Rather than invalidating the critic’s point, this will build complexity into the conception of an artwork. After all, once a point has been made it cannot be forgotten, though it can be ignored. Increasingly, however, mainstream art criticism is merely being used as a public relations outlet for the arts industry. This is the real danger to art and to culture; that it is used as a tourist attraction rather than understood as meaningful culture. This is damaging to artists and the public alike as both are given a superficial understanding of culture. Artists are...
  • Article

    Arts criticism for the millennials

    Published August 3, 2011 by

    Cross posted from Art Works, the official blog of the National Endowment for the Arts By Maura Judkis, Producer, Style, Washington Post Maura Judkis.  Photo by Jay Wescott, Politico In the last hour on Twitter, I’ve read that artist William Powhida’s New York show is a dud, and that Hugo Weaving’s performance as the Red Skull is a high point in Captain America. These weren’t opinions from published critics; rather, they were from regular Twitter users with an enthusiasm for art and pop culture. Readers of my generation, the Millennials, are more likely to want to see a movie or play because their friends like it than because a critic does. We’re more likely to discover art through our Facebook and Twitter feeds, and to take the suggestions of Netflix and Pandora than to discover new things on our own. It might seem, then, that Millennials have no appetite for arts journalism, but that’s not the case: Younger readers want to read and share stories more than ever. They just want to have a say in what’s being read and shared. They want to be the critics. So where do arts journalists fit in?
  • Press Release

    Aspen Institute FOCAS Seminar to Explore the Impact of Technology on Communities and Citizenship

    Published July 29, 2011 by

    WASHINGTON, D.C. – Leaders and experts from the public, private, and academic sectors will explore the growing impact of network technologies on communities and citizenship at a roundtable discussion August 2-4 in Aspen, Colorado, streamed live at www.aspeninstitute.tv. The annual Forum on Communications and Society (FOCAS), a project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society […]

  • Article

    New initiative promotes digital literacy through game design in Silicon Valley

    Published July 13, 2011 by

    (Students use Globaloria in Austin, Texas., one of the five communities currently using the platform) More than 5,000 youth and young adults in Silicon Valley schools, youth clubs and community centers will soon become interactive programmers and civic advocates thanks to a $950,000 Knight Foundation grant for an innovative platform that uses games design to teach digital literacy. Over the next three years, Silicon Valley youth will use the World Wide Workshop’s Globaloria platform to develop, program and blog about their own educational games.  The idea is to leverage social issues and open-source principles to craft collaborative games that provide youth with the digital and media literacy skills they will need to fully engage in the 21st century information age.  The initiative will also connect participants to important civic concepts. “Globaloria presents a powerful technology-driven participation model that is relevant to today’s Internet-focused generation.  It allows them to conceptualize, design and program their own web games on important topics, and to engage in civics by ‘learning by doing,’” said Dr. Idit Harel Caperton, president and founder of the World Wide Workshop. The initiative will further provide local instructors with training to help the youth form teams and conduct the online research necessary to effectively design their projects. World Wide Workshop will be ...