Constitutional Law

Social Networks for Doing Good

Posted on February 25, 2009
At Rising Voices we are getting ready to announce the newest grantee projects. We received over 270 proposals from non-profits, NGO's, and activists from around the world who want to use citizen media tools to bring new and under-represented voices to the conversational web...

Cell Phone Journalism and Better Democratic Decision-Making: What Do We Measure?

Posted on February 25, 2009
How do you build a culture of participation? What does it mean to empower people to participate in projects and politics that might improve their own lives? How do you seed participation in a way that promotes sustainability after the initial impetus? 15 years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, following decades of political mobilization by anti-apartheid movements and organisations, these questions are still burning brightly in South Africa...

More thoughts on Times Open

Posted on February 23, 2009
I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a "hack day" there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters, most of them funny, all of them plenty worth listening to...

More Thoughts on TimesOpen

Posted on February 23, 2009
I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a "hack day" there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters, most of them funny, all of them plenty worth listening to...

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Army of Geeks

Posted on February 23, 2009
As communications change and the demand grows for local networks, our mission becomes clear: we are being called upon to organize an army of geeks to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead. The Background Joaquin Alvarado presented the plan for National Public Lightpath to public broadcasters at the Integrated Media Association conference last week in Atlanta...

How can Disadvantaged Citizens Learn to be Journalists?

Posted on February 22, 2009
How do I even have the gall to write here? I do not have any special knowledge of the media to impart. I am not a journalist with a degree or newspaper experience. I am just an everyday person who has realized... I have to be a journalist. This might be a strange dilemma, but it is one that has become increasingly common...

Games that Create Value

Posted on February 22, 2009
Online, multiplayer games open the door to a new form of group collaboration that can create value. Take, for example, the Google Image Labeler, originally the brainchild of MacArthur Grant-winner Luis von Ahn. The game pits two players against each other in an image-labeling challenge, as images are displayed on the screen in succession (for example a naval orange, or a pregnant MIA) players enter the name of the image, "naval orange", and every time both players enter the same word they are both awarded points...

Getting ready for testing

Posted on February 22, 2009
Finally after a lot of project and design changes we are approaching the starting line of testing. Right now one prototype is ready to go. We just have to set up the server and upload the content. We decided that on-site testing was the best choice for our purposes...

Using new technology in the fight against cholera in Zimbabwe

Posted on February 21, 2009
This week we gave our first targeted demonstrations of Freedom Fone, aimed at encouraging local health organisations to use Freedom Fone as one of the communications tools in the response to Zimbabwe's cholera crisis. We believe that given the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, greater use should be made of the country's most ubiquitous communication tool - the mobile phone - to share information that can help address the suffering and limit the number of deaths...

Playing the News ready for testing

Posted on February 21, 2009
After a lot of fits and starts, we are ready to deploy two different versions of the "Playing the News" prototype games. One uses a simulated environment that allows the user to visit various locations to interview stakeholders on the topic of the use of ethanol as fuel...

Using Technology in the Fight Against Cholera in Zimbabwe

Posted on February 21, 2009
This week we gave our first targeted demonstrations of Freedom Fone, aimed at encouraging local health organisations to use Freedom Fone as one of the communications tools in the response to Zimbabwe's cholera crisis. We believe that given the rapid spread of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, greater use should be made of the country's most ubiquitous communication tool - the mobile phone - to share information that can help address the suffering and limit the number of deaths...

Turning Print Upside Down and Inside Out

Posted on February 20, 2009
Scripps executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here's what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing. "Watch Dan Pacheco's Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale...

Janet Robinson's Remarks at TimesOPEN

Posted on February 20, 2009
Today, the New York Times is hosting TimesOPEN, their first developer conference. We're now listening to tech book publisher Tim O'Reilly, but just a few minutes ago Janet Robinson, President and CEO of the New York Times Company, concluded her remarks...

Digital migration - for a smalltown paper

Posted on February 19, 2009
No, this article is not about broadcasters shifting to digital transmission. But it's about something that's also a huge change - uprooting from known territory and heading for the unknown complexities of digital country. Switchover in the sense of convergence is the challenge facing South African community paper Grocott's Mail...

Digital Migration For a Small-Town Paper in South Africa

Posted on February 19, 2009
No, this article is not about broadcasters shifting to digital transmission. But it's about something that's also a huge change -- uprooting from known territory and heading for the unknown complexities of digital country. Switch-over in the sense of convergence is the challenge facing South African community paper Grocott's Mail...

It's "Bring a Professor Night" for a Conversation About Journalism Education

Posted on February 18, 2009
This Sunday, February 22, at 8 p.m. EST, it's "Bring a Professor Night" at CollegeJourn, a weekly live online chat about student media and journalism education. I spoke with Suzanne Yada today about the chat, why it's so important to bring the faculty to the table, and what she thinks they can learn from their students...

Pink Chaddi (Underwear) Campaign in India

Posted on February 17, 2009
I am posting here a blog written by Ruchika Muchhala, the online manager of Video Volunteers' website "Channel 19", ch19.org, where we post the videos made by the community producers. This is a blog she wrote for Rising Voices, where she has also recently started blogging -- courtesy of connections made in the Knight News Challenge community...

Spot.Us Deals with the Good and Bad of Limitations

Posted on February 16, 2009
Long-time readers of Spot.Us updates will know I am a big believer in staying agile and iterative. Take small bites, chew well, rinse and repeat. With that in mind - I am in route to visit my developers to do another "dev blitz" to try and get Spot.Us as close to a 2...

BarCamp NewsInnovation Chicago: Join the Conversation

Posted on February 15, 2009
If you've been following my posts to this blog, you know that I'm always interested in exploring ways to connect journalists and technology professionals. The Knight News Challenge "programmer-journalist" scholarships are one approach. So is the idea of a "computational journalism" conference like the one held last year at Georgia Tech...

ReportingOn is Back in the Lab, Defining the Terms of the Pitch

Posted on February 14, 2009
[I'm going back to the proverbial drawing board for ReportingOn, working with the development and design team at Lion Burger to build the next iteration of the backchannel for your beat from scratch, more or less. Here's some of what we're talking about in front of the whiteboard...

?thulhu, Polar Bear, Futurama's Dr. Zoidberg, M.D. and the Teacher of English to symbolize the Olympics.

Posted on February 13, 2009
On the web, choosing the symbol of the Sochi Olympics was probably the most discussed topic around the Games. What is great with the Olympics is that being a global, international affair, each time it presents the local quintessence of the hosting city...

?thulhu, Dr. Zoidberg & the Teacher of English to Symbolize the Olympics

Posted on February 13, 2009
On the web, choosing the mascot of the Sochi Olympics was probably the most discussed topic around the 2014 Winter Games. What is great with the Olympics is that being a global, international affair, each time it presents the local quintessence of the hosting city...

Balance the Budget: Gotham Gazette Game 3

Posted on February 12, 2009
After a series of false starts on an energy consumption game we decided to skip ahead to a timely game of balancing the budget . The game is actually a reprise of a popular budget balancing game we created in 2003 -- we're regularly asked for the source code for that game, and while we do have it, it is a bear of a maze of a mess that no self-respecting programmer would want to try to wade through in search of numbers and texts to change...

Putting Our Plane on the Runway

Posted on February 12, 2009
Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing, entered closed beta last week. An open beta just around the corner, and we're doing everything we can to officially launch in Bakersfield in early March. To make that happen, two camps -- development and marketing -- are busy getting everything into place for a successful launch...

Journalism Education's Broader, Deeper Mission

Posted on February 07, 2009
Accepting an award from Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably "the best general education that an American citizen can get" today...

Strategizing Media Software Development: Some Lessons Learned

Posted on February 05, 2009
Here's a story showing the extent of complications in getting a system going, so I'll tell it simply. It's my non-geek experience of work for a community newspaper that aims to produce world-class code for community papers that is singing-dancing, super-portable and open-source...

The Sins of Princes...

Posted on February 05, 2009
I've been following the story of Prince's copyright battles for over a year, and found the latest development noteworthy enough to call attention to. My interest began with Prince and Universal targeting YouTube, Fansites, and housewives for a number of debatable copyright infringements in 2007...

Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan

Posted on February 04, 2009
The above video is one of a large number posted via Youtube by students in Pakistan to share what was happening in their country during the 2007-2008 political emergency. During a time when the government was tightening its control over traditional media, citizen journalists took on vital functions in fostering public debate, insuring the spread of important information, monitoring elections, and helping the outside world understand what was happening...

Options for News Mixer: Launch a Site, Use the Code or Just Be Inspired

Posted on February 02, 2009
What's next for News Mixer? The demonstration Web site, launched in December by a team of Medill students, shows off some interesting new ideas for engaging people in online conversations around news. The site has attracted quite a bit of attention from people interested in the future of journalism, social media and new technology...

First Beta Site in the Open Media Project is a Success!

Posted on February 02, 2009
Urbana Public Television, the first of six Public Access TV and Community Technology Centers to implement the model and modules developed for Deproduction's Knight News Challenge project, has launched their new Drupal website with our help. Lead Developer for Deproduction/Civic Pixel, Kevin Reynen explains the process of setting up this revolutionary new system with Kate Gorman of UPTV, "Launching a basic Drupal site can be a lot for someone to take in...

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