Constitutional Law

When is a Riot a Riot?

Posted on January 12, 2009
By now almost everyone knows that a group of demonstrators protesting against the killing of a young father by a transit officer splintered off and began a wave of destruction in downtown Oakland. Mainstream media outlets called it everything from a riot to a violent protest...

Beanstockd Players Give Feedback on Beta Test

Posted on January 12, 2009
Happy 2009! Here at Beanstockd we're kicking off the new year with a bigger and better Beanstockd Game. 2008 ended with a cliffhanger: We'd just wrapped up our first beta test and were preparing to survey players on their gaming experience.This week the results are in, and we've got answers to questions that will determine the updates we make for version 2...

Populous Is Adopting News Mixer (And More)

Posted on January 12, 2009
We're chugging along over at Populous, and getting closer and closer to a public release of our CMS beta and demo. Right now we have an alpha of our CMS we're using to test and get selected feedback on, and we still have a bit more refinement to do to get things up and running for public consumption...

Inaccessible Pothole Data in Chicago

Posted on January 12, 2009
Recently in Chicago, as the weather warmed inordinately from a deep freeze, with a 70-degree swing in temperature, the attention of the media and the municipal workers turned to potholes. The two daily newspapers sent writers to a press conference at the city's "Pothole Command Center," where Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), Tom Byrne, and his top spokesman, Brian Steele held forth on the problem of holes in the street...

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Unrest in Oakland: Who's On The Case?

Posted on January 09, 2009
My friend and fellow citizen-journalism thinker Amy Gahran once asked, "Was Zapruder a journalist?" Zapruder's home-movie camera captured the famous footage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, TX. If your answer to that question is yes, then there were an untold number of journalists on the Oakland BART train platform on New Year's Day, where they pointed increasingly ubiquitous pocket-size video cameras toward Oscar Grant and BART transit police officer Johannes Mehserle...

News Mixer Generates Widespread Interest

Posted on January 05, 2009
Since we announced the launch of News Mixer, a Web application developed by Medill master's students to demonstrate new ways of fostering conversations around news, the site has gotten a lot of positive feedback. News Mixer is the final project for six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending Medill on Knight News Challenge scholarships...

Preview the Printcasting Local Ad Tool

Posted on December 31, 2008
Tonight is literally the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, so first I want to say Happy New Year to all of you. We've learned a lot since winning a Knight News Challenge grant 9 months ago, and are extremely grateful to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for making it possible for us and so many others to continue to experiment at a time when so many companies are eliminating into their research & development budgets...

A Holiday Gift

Posted on December 24, 2008
Written English Version: During this holiday season, many people take the time to reconnect with their family. This is true with deaf people, too. Yet for a large number of deaf people, their families are hearing. The majority of interaction is likely to be spoken, and the deaf individual is unavoidably left out of them...

Community-Owned Media: What Does It Mean?

Posted on December 24, 2008
Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working...

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

Posted on December 23, 2008
Application Deadline: January 18, 2009 Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own...

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

Posted on December 23, 2008
Application Deadline: January 18, 2009 Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own...

End of the Year Radical Transparency for Spot.Us

Posted on December 22, 2008
It is the end of the year and I received some questions from the TIdes Center who are doing due-diligence reports for the Knight Foundation. I've been meaning to do a public "where is Spot.Us" post for some time and since I'm answering all these related questions I thought - why not just go crazy and blog the questions and my answers...

What Will 2009 Bring for Journalism?

Posted on December 22, 2008
...it is hard to imagine what America would look like without the small and shrinking number of people who engage in painstaking, firsthand research in order to separate the truth from the body of supposed facts, and who keep the rest of us honest. That's what David Samuels wrote about John Coster-Mullens, the author of a book-length work on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945...

Ethnic Hyperlocal News Network Launched in L.A.

Posted on December 22, 2008
A project billed as the "first-ever online network of ethnic citizen journalists" was launched last week in Los Angeles. Called LA Beez, the effort is a project of New America Media with support from the Ford Foundation. It brings together six L.A.-area ethnic media outlets with the goal of providing a more diverse representation of views...

End of the Year Radical Transparency for Spot.Us

Posted on December 22, 2008
It is the end of the year and I received some questions from the TIdes Center who are doing due-diligence reports for the Knight Foundation. I've been meaning to do a public "where is Spot.Us" post for some time and since I'm answering all these related questions I thought - why not just go crazy and blog the questions and my answers...

What Will 2009 Bring for Journalism?

Posted on December 22, 2008
...it is hard to imagine what America would look like without the small and shrinking number of people who engage in painstaking, firsthand research in order to separate the truth from the body of supposed facts, and who keep the rest of us honest. That's what David Samuels wrote about John Coster-Mullens, the author of a book-length work on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945...

Ethnic Hyperlocal News Network Launched in L.A.

Posted on December 22, 2008
A project billed as the "first-ever online network of ethnic citizen journalists" was launched last week in Los Angeles. Called LA Beez, the effort is a project of New America Media with support from the Ford Foundation. It brings together six L.A.-area ethnic media outlets with the goal of providing a more diverse representation of views...

Language as a Bridge to Inclusion

Posted on December 21, 2008
Deaf people can participate in citizen journalism through written language tools. Given this, why do I believe that using American Sign Language videos are an essential tool to provide them access to journalism? For those who are confronted by the 'digital divide' there are often seemingly hidden elements that cause their lack of access...

Language as a Bridge to Inclusion

Posted on December 21, 2008
Deaf people can participate in citizen journalism through written language tools. Given this, why do I believe that using American Sign Language videos are an essential tool to provide them access to journalism? For those who are confronted by the 'digital divide' there are often seemingly hidden elements that cause their lack of access...

Online Filmmakers Offer New Glimpses of Iran

Posted on December 19, 2008
The last time we checked in with Iran Inside Out, project leader Shaghayegh Azimi had just finished a trailer video to whet our appetite for what was to come. As she details in a two-part project evaluation, Azimi intended for Iran Inside Out to become a full-time venture to spread awareness about and raise the profile of young Iranian filmmakers by introducing their works to an international audience...

Online Filmmakers Offer New Glimpses of Iran

Posted on December 19, 2008
The last time we checked in with Iran Inside Out, project leader Shaghayegh Azimi had just finished a trailer video to whet our appetite for what was to come. As she details in a two-part project evaluation, Azimi intended for Iran Inside Out to become a full-time venture to spread awareness about and raise the profile of young Iranian filmmakers by introducing their works to an international audience...

Interactive Journalism

Posted on December 18, 2008
The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant...

News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age

Posted on December 18, 2008
After a year of study, countless meetings, and at least two conferences, a team of researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have released a series of papers exploring the potential and challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment (note: I played a small role in this work)...

Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture

Posted on December 18, 2008
Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect...

Interactive Journalism

Posted on December 18, 2008
The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant...

News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age

Posted on December 18, 2008
After a year of study, countless meetings, and at least two conferences, a team of researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have released a series of papers exploring the potential and challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment (note: I played a small role in this work)...

Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture

Posted on December 18, 2008
Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect...

Freedom Fone Interviewed on the BBC

Posted on December 17, 2008
Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services here

Freedom Fone Interviewed on the BBC

Posted on December 17, 2008
Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Read the article, or listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services.

Introducing News Mixer: A 'Game-Changing' Approach to News Engagement

Posted on December 16, 2008
The Crunchberry Project -- six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending the Medill School on Knight News Challenge scholarships -- set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults...

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