Articles by

Knight Foundation

  • Article

    Four ideas for the future of hackathons

    Published June 26, 2012 by

      Photo Credit: Flickr user hackNY Earlier this month as part of its Technology for Engagement Initiative, Knight Foundation gathered thought leaders to talk about the best ways to use new tools and platforms to bring communities together around important issues. During the summit, a group considered the future of hackathons. Three of the group's participants, Eric Gordon, diector of the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College, and Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood, co-founders and co-chairs of the Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, share their insights. Perhaps no event in the young, Gov 2.0 movement has generated as much excitement, built as many connections, or led to as many alpha versions of apps as the hackathon.  Often more sprint than marathon, these one day or one weekend development sessions have united developers around specific challenges, new data and the lure of pizza. With a few years of hackathons in the rearview mirror, however, it is useful to reflect on how this platform for engagement and creation can be enhanced to better meet the challenges that cities and their citizens face today.  Too often, these hackathons have not led to solutions that address the biggest challenges of our day – issues such as the educational achievement gap, health disparities, and economic inequality.  Too rarely have the good app ideas started through these sessions been taken across the finish line and sustained after the weekend has ended.  And, too many of the leanings and too much of the code from these sessions is forgotten or not shared with a broader audience. During the recent Knight Foundation summit on Technology for Engagement, a group of us considered how the hackathon could evolve to build off its success and address these concerns.  The conversation centered on the interest in shifting the hackathon away from developers building quick products in response to general guidance.  Instead, hackathons could become opportunities for developers to learn about civic issues by engaging deeply with community groups and, in turn, enable community groups to learn about what’s possible in terms of technology by engaging with developers. The group suggested four ways to advance that approach.
  • Press Release

    Poynter, American Press Institute and Knight Foundation team up to help newspapers with digital tools training

    Published June 25, 2012 by

    ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – (June 25) — The Poynter Institute, The American Press Institute (API) and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation are teaming up to provide a major public service at a critical time by launching a new program featuring ongoing training in the state-of-the-art digital tools that newspapers need to multiply […]

  • Article

    Better defining digital literacy

    Published June 21, 2012 by

    Photo Credit Flickr user: Brad Flickinger On Saturday, June 23, Knight Foundation's Program Director in San Jose/Silicon Valley, Judith Kleinberg, is participating in a discussion around what digital literacy means at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Anaheim, C.A. The following, written by Renee Hobbs, a professor in the Harrington School of Comunicaton and Media at the University of Rhode Island gives a preview. It is crossposted from the Media Education Lab's blog. What is digital literacy? The term has been rising in visibility since 2009 but it has been used quite differently by a variety of stakeholders including policy makers, educators, and business and technology professionals. At the American Library Association’s annual conference, I’ll be moderating a discussion about four distinct but interrelated definitions and uses of this important term. Sharing ideas with me will be Judith Kleinberg of Knight Foundation, Roseanne Cordell, a librarian at Indiana University South Bend, and Laurel Felt, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Depending on what group of people you talk to, the term ‘digital literacy’ might suggest one or more of these meanings. Which of these definitions are most (and least) useful to your work? For school, academic or public librarians, which of these terms is most relevant? For those in K-12 education, which do you focus on? And for technology educators, where do you focus? Funders and policymakers, which ones are most likely to resonate with decision makers in local, state and national government? Computer Skills and Access Issues. Having broadband access and knowing how to use the Internet enable full participation in society. For some, basic keyboard and mouse skills are essential skills while others may benefit from a greater understanding of file management and browsers. For example, websites like DigitalLiteracy.gov emphasize the value of using the Internet to find a job, create a resume and for career exploration. Issues of Authorship. People are creating and sharing more than ever. The concept of digital literacy reflects the growing importance of user-generated content and the changing role of authorship in a digital age. Digital literacy programs like YouMedia empower people with easy access to powerful tools of expression and communication using social media, images, language, music, sound, and interactivity.
  • Article

    Data visualization: How long does it take U.S. veterans to get critical services at the Department of Veterans Affairs?

    Published June 20, 2012 by

    This week, Knight Foundation announced it will support a new data project to visualize the amount of time Iraq and Afghanistan veterans wait for VA services, including healthcare and education benefits. The effort is an example of the kind of projects Knight is seeking to fund through the Knight News Challenge: Data, which accelerates breakthrough ideas that use data to inform and engage communities. The deadline for the challenge is noon ET Thursday June 21. Here, Dana Morrissey, chief engagement officer of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America talks about the project. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans filing a disability claim in Northern California have to wait 320 days for a ruling, according to a local congressman. That’s a backlog of a nearly a year for veterans seeking help for the back pain, post traumatic stress disorder, ear ringing and other conditions suffered through service. While the problem is particularly acute in California, veterans across the United States have shockingly long waits for a variety of Veterans Affairs (VA) services, including mental health care – with 51 percent of veterans seeking help having to wait 50 days on average for a full evaluation. Thanks to support from Knight Foundation, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) will hold the VA accountable by creating an interactive online tool that crowdsources and visualizes the true wait times for three VA services: mental healthcare, disability claims processing and new GI Bill application processing. Verified veterans will input their personal wait times, to help visualize the backlog by benefit and geographic region. Additionally, the tool will track the problem over time – noting progress and worsening conditions. This iteration focuses exclusively on the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, though it may be expanded in the future to capture data from veterans of all generations.
  • Article

    What’s in store for News Challenge Winner Watchup

    Published June 19, 2012 by

    The following interview with Adriano Farano, whose app Watchup won a 2012 Knight News Challenge grant, is crossposted from knight.standford.edu. Adriano Farano, a former Knight Fellow, has won a Knight News Challenge grant for Watchup, an iPad app that aggregates high-quality news videos.  The award was announced today (Monday, June 18th) at the MIT Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston. The award is the first of three Knight News Challenge grants to be bestowed this year, rather than an annual event, to more closely match the pace of innovation.  Farano is an entrepreneur in residence at StartX, a program to accelerate the development of Stanford’s top entrepreneurs through experiential education. He first came to Stanford in 2010 as a Knight International Fellow from France. He was the co-founder of cafebabel.com, a multilingual pan-European news magazine and pioneer in collaborative journalism with more than 10,000 contributors. He also was a partner at OWNI.fr, a media startup focused on database and crowdsourcing journalism.  We talked to Farano recently about his latest project, the legacy of his Knight Fellowship, and journalism today.  Farano's Watchup, an app that lets you curate video news that you watch on your iPad Q: First, tell us about Watchup, the proposal that won you a Knight News Challenge award. What does it do? A: Watchup is an iPad-only app that lets you catch up on the news through high-quality video channels. With Watchup you can create a video playlist in a snap. Just tap the news videos that matter to you, press play and sit back to watch what’s up in the world. That easy! Q: How does that help journalists or journalism? A: From the journalism industry’s perspective, Watchup is going to fix the distribution problem on tablet devices. News organizations are producing an increasing amount of premium video content for digital consumption. The issue is that discovering that content is painful. With Watchup we have created the fastest interface ever to search out quality clips and create a video playlist. You know, you could almost say that Watchup is like Hulu for news. But with three differences: We are focused on the news vertical (video only), we were born mobile, and we are an agile startup with a good dose of Stanford DNA.
  • Article

    OpenNews: countdown to the Knight-Mozilla-MIT Hack Day

    Published June 16, 2012 by

    A day before the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, the MIT Media Lab (pictured above) is hosting a 24 hour hack day. Dan Sinker, who heads the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, writes about what to expect. The following is crossposted from Sinker's blog. Today,  60 developers, journalists, and data experts are converging on the MIT Media Lab to spend 24 hours collaborating, sketching, and building new tools and concepts to help move from data to stories. It feels like we’re entering a golden age of data. As we arrive at more sophisticated tools to manipulate and visualize it, and as we understand what we can do with them, we are breaking new ground every day. Those leaps are both technological and conceptual: we are arriving at very new understandings of how data can enhance stories. Just take a look at some of the recent data-driven reporting, and you see that something decidedly new is afoot: “Gay rights in the US, state by state” by the Guardian completely blew me away when it came out. It took what could have been a straightforward list of gay rights laws and cut it into a graphic that allowed you to rearrange the blocks by state population, and even the location of your Facebook friends. The data, and the presentation of it, was able to tell a very different story this way. “Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots” by the New York Times is a beautiful visulization of what could be exceptionally boring data: analysis of basketball shooting data. But by engaging in simple animations that beg the user to continue to engage, it illustrates the point beautifully. “The Message Machine” by ProPublica doesn’t go for jaw-dropping visualizations, but instead blazes new ground in data collection. Curious about the new attempts at micro-targeting political messages, the team at ProPublica built a system to collect e-mails from thousands of volunteers.
  • Speech

    Our best innovations are still ahead of us

    Published June 14, 2012 by

    On June 13, 2012 Syracuse University honored Knight Foundation for its i-3 award for impact, innovation and influence in the journalism field. Knight’s President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen received the award on behalf of the foundation at the sixth annual Mirror Awards ceremony in New York. The follow are his remarks from the ceremony. Thank you, George, for honoring Knight Foundation and the […]