Constitutional Law

Study on Digital Inclusion and Civic Engagement

Posted on December 16, 2008
Hey folks, I wanted to tell you all about a study I am wrapping up with Peter Funke, Dan Berger and a few other folks in Philadelphia. We received a grant from the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) "Necessary Knowledge for Public Sphere" initiative to study the Media Mobilizing Project(MMP) and their use of new media and digital inclusion to promote civic engagement in disenfranchised communities across Philadelphia To offer some background, MMP was launched in 2005 as a strategic initiative to partner with local organizations, facilitating grassroots media production to advance socio-economic justice through the (self) empowerment of disenfranchised communities...

The Day Print Didn't Stand Still

Posted on December 16, 2008
Last week, after 6 months of planning and hard work, we officially launched Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project, in alpha. We're still busy finishing up the remaining functionality while responding to the excellent feedback and ideas we're getting from alpha testers...

Beanstockd Internal Beta Test

Posted on December 15, 2008
Last week, members of the Beanstockd Team participated in the inaugural Beanstockd internal beta test of the Beanstockd Game. Members of the Beanstockd Team spent one week taking environmental actions and getting credit for it through the Beanstockd interface in order to brainstorm ways to make it better, find any bugs, and compete for a team prize: organic sweets from Manhattan's finest green bakery...

ReportingOn: Changing Horses Mid-stream is Easy When You're the Horse

Posted on December 12, 2008
DIY development, design, community management, and marketing isn't for me (this year). This is an update about what's going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there's not much going on with ReportingOn. For now. My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1...

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Why Spot.Us Should have used Drupal (and why it doesn't matter)

Posted on December 12, 2008
It's the one that got away. With many Knight News Challenge projects using Drupal, the dedicated Knight Drupal Initiative (reopening after DrupalCon in March), and Drupal sites for the Knight Foundation's own community, David Cohn must just be deficient in groupthink to have chosen to develop Spot...

Making News More Transparent

Posted on December 11, 2008
With our Knight News Challenge grant we (the Media Standards Trust and Web Science Research Initiative) are exploring and developing ways in which to help the public find and assess news on the web (for which we have also received a MacArthur Foundation grant)...

Mistakes I made with the Next Newsroom Project

Posted on December 11, 2008
Now that I've officially completed the work on our Knight Foundation News Challenge grant that funded the Next Newsroom project, I wanted to share some of the horrendous, grotesque mistakes I made over the past 18 months. I'm doing it not because I'm feeling particularly masochistic...

Hiring for Change: How to Staff a New Media Project

Posted on December 11, 2008
Now, I had something all ready to post, but I loved Chris O'Brien's post on Mistakes I Made With The Next Newsroom Project that I'm going to do one of my own. I've been working on Placeblogger, a 2007 News Challenge Winner, with Tish Grier, over the past year and a half...

Updating the Pulitzer Prizes for the Internet Age

Posted on December 11, 2008
The people who run the Pulitzer Prizes, undoubtedly America's premier journalism awards, have taken some useful steps into the 21st Century with new rules that welcome online-only entries. From the official rules (PDF): Entries for journalism awards must be based on material coming from a text-based United States newspaper or news organization that publishes--in print or online--at least weekly during the calendar year; that is primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories; and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles...

Iindaba Ziyafika: The News Is Coming

Posted on December 11, 2008
The news has started to flow. It's a trial-trickle from township teenagers, through to other social groupings in Grahamstown. With the kick-off of phase one during 2008, citizen youth content has crossed the chasm of age difference to reach the older readers of the Grocott's Mail newspaper...

Inspiration: The Secret Sauce for Printcasting

Posted on December 09, 2008
We're underway with alpha testing for Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge-funded project at The Bakersfield Californian. It's great to see everything coming together! The alpha period will give us feedback on how well we've done in presenting the basic functionality of the product...

Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Politics to Poetry

Posted on December 08, 2008
Go to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog and you don't know if you're going to find a post on politics, poetry, the NFL or the world of videogames. A journalist who has worked at Time Magazine and the Village Voice, Coates started his own blog after being laid off from Time Magazine...

Beanstockd Application Internal Beta test

Posted on December 08, 2008
This week we're running a private beta test of the Beanstockd application internally; members of the Beanstockd editorial, business development and tech teams will be competing against each other as they take the game for a test drive. The beta test will give us quick, snapshot results on user engagement with the app, which will prepare us for results gathered from upcoming full-scale beta tests...

Extract: Civic Defense 2.0

Posted on December 07, 2008
This week our development team announced the release of the LandmanReportCard (LRC), the first of our experiments in designing tools for community understanding and self-defense. We've chosen one of the most difficult community contexts imaginable: neighborhoods, mostly rural, that stand in the path of some of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world...

Answering the Information Needs of Non-Geographic Communities

Posted on December 07, 2008
There has been much said about the idea of empowering local communities through citizen journalism. But when I view this within the context of minority communities, focusing solely on geographic communities is a mistake. Lets focus on the Deaf community as an example of this situation...

When a Cell Phone Is Bigger Than a Yacht

Posted on December 07, 2008
Despite the global warming reports snow covered the Moscow roads and rooftops just on time this year, preluding to the urban installation of the New Year trees all around the city, bringing romanticism into the hearts of the Muscovites, and inspiring citizens to upload new Christmas-related videos (along with those featuring car crashes) at the http://mreporter...

RadioEngage on the Move

Posted on December 07, 2008
The news is old now, we won a grant, eh? Over the course of the last six months we have embarked upon a journey traveling down the road of journalism, technology and community building. We were awarded this grant as technologists to build a tool for public radio...

The IncluderEpisode 13Do-Gooders

Posted on December 05, 2008
The Includer, if it ever exists, will write when and where it wants to. Just like the laptop that I bought in March 2007 at Office Depot in Hyde Park, Chicago for David Ellison-Bey of Episode 3.  He was making good use of a Time Dollar Tutoring computer, which has provided thousands of refurbished computers to children and adults on the South Side...

The Revolution in Social Software is Finally Here

Posted on December 02, 2008
Social software -- technology that enables interactions among multiple people -- has existed for almost a half century now. (Clay Shirky, in a widely linked essay on this topic, traces the roots of social software to the PLATO system, built at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s...

Freedom Fone goes on the road

Posted on December 01, 2008
Freedom Fone had its first public debut at the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) 2008 Forum in Cape Town, 14-17 November. The event was a great opportunity to deploy Freedom Fone - even in its software prototype state. We prepared different content for each of the four days of the conference, and ran four "channels," or options which users could access when they phoned in: Highlighted sessions, Interviews with presenters, Culture and inspiration, and the Feminist Tech Hunt, which was run in association with Take Back the Tech...

Tough economic times put a new spin on the Beanstockd Game

Posted on November 30, 2008
It's official: the US economy is in recession. The reality of our current economic crisis has hit corporations hard and is now starting to affect the American consumer. Reports on this year's Black Friday show that the annual post-Thanksgiving shopper has a new attitude, one that is cautious about what and how much is bought...

The IncluderEpisode 12Wisdom In Characters

Posted on November 28, 2008
I read Charles Dickens's David Copperfield.  On my Sony PRS-505 Reader, thanks to Ricardo.  On my three-hour rides through the mountains between Sarajevo and Tuzla, thanks to the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Also in bed, when I unwind, before I'd fall asleep, in my room in Grbavica, without Internet, thanks to God, who lets me wake up offline in every way, on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, so that I might devote my best intensity to my life's quest...

Happy Thanksgiving! Love, Beanstockd

Posted on November 26, 2008
As Thanksgiving approaches, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the past few months and offer a few words of thanks. This past August, after winning the MTV-Knight Foundation Young Creators Award, appearing in Entrepreneur Magazine, and participating in the summer-long DreamIT Ventures incubator program, Beanstockd relocated to New York City...

Two Weeks, Two Stories, Too Early For A Victory Dance

Posted on November 24, 2008
It has been two weeks since the "official" launch of Spot.Us. I'm happy with its progress, but I remain unsatisfied. The new media hype has been great. I'm truly honored at how much attention Spot.Us has received, the optimistic and hopeful remarks, the young journalists with questions, etc...

Populous Code Released

Posted on November 24, 2008
I have an exciting, albeit brief, announcement to make about our progress on the Populous project (formerly known as the Community News Network). Today we publicly released all of our code, in alpha, on the social coding site GitHub. The entirely of our progress so far is there, which at this point is an extremely powerful and flexible content management system...

Market Research for The Beanstockd Game

Posted on November 23, 2008
We're doing a bit of market research to understand how different communities perceive and can benefit from The Beanstockd Game. Because the competition is so community-centric, tailoring the nuances of the game (prizes, length of game cycle, competitors, etc...

The IncluderEpisode 11$100 Solar Project

Posted on November 21, 2008
Do you ever have an extra day? or a day's wage? A denarius, as in Roman days? A Sunday or twelve hours of sun spread out over a year? The Includer is a human-sized device, the product of a human-sized economy, the sum of working one day at a time. Jackton Arija was the spark for the day in question...

Two Different Media/Game Approaches to Delivering Content

Posted on November 21, 2008
There are a couple of new things happening in our research group. Just a quick reminder first: we had an outside contractor for our mini-games idea that we decided to part with, and then we were also working with Distill Interactive for a game-like environment...

The Next Newsroom Proposal is complete

Posted on November 20, 2008
It is with great pleasure that I'd like to announce that we have completed work on our newsroom proposal for The Chronicle, the independent, student-run newspaper at Duke University. The Chronicle’s board has adopted our proposal for a new home...

The Pitch: Bringing Together Seattle's Best Media Minds

Posted on November 20, 2008
So here's The Pitch: Put together some of the smartest, most engaged, passionate thinkers about the changing media landscape in a room, buy them a few drinks, and let the conversation flow. That's the premise behind a series of meet-ups in Seattle, put together by Jason Preston, a social media consultant with the Parnassus Group...

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