Constitutional Law

Open Invitation to the Alliance for Community Media Conference

Posted on September 20, 2008
Denver Open Media is hosting the Western Regional Alliance for Community Media Conference, Oct 23-25, 2008 in Denver, CO. We will be showcasing the Drupal Modules being developed to empower user-generated media in our communities through Public Access TV stations and Community Technology Centers...

Meet The Printcasting Team

Posted on September 16, 2008
One of the most exciting times in the development of any new product is when concepts begin to give way to reality. That's the phase we're entering now with Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project to democratize print publishing and make print advertising affordable for local businesses...

iamnews: A Global DIY Newsroom

Posted on September 15, 2008
As one of the very early members of the Online News Association, I've attended my share of ONA conferences over the years. This year, I wasn't able to attend the annual gathering that ended in Washington, DC, over the weekend. Instead, I spent most of last weekend at TechCrunch50, a technology conference in San Francisco now in its second year put on by TechCrunch, one of those upstart startups that may put the San Jose Mercury News out of business some day...

Can the Political Press Self-Correct? Spinewatch Hopes it Can

Posted on September 15, 2008
Fellow IdeaLabber Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor and PressThinker, mounted a campaign this weekend to encourage the political press to grow a spine. Rosen and others are calling for journalists of all stripes (professionals, amateurs, citizens, bloggers, etc...

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Start with the Low Hanging Fruit with Software Development

Posted on September 15, 2008
A key component of Freedom Fone is the software development we will undertake over the next two years. Last weekend Brenda and I met with a handful of people who have experience with open source development projects like those we'll be undertaking. We got to share our ideas and experiences to date developing the Freedom Fone prototype, and we benefited from their contributions and suggestions...

Are the Info Needs of Local Communities Being Served?

Posted on September 15, 2008
Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion...

The Travails of Taking a CPU Tower from Zimbabwe to France

Posted on September 15, 2008
Brenda and I went to Paris recently for a development launch and brainstorming meeting for Freedom Fone. In addition to picking the brains of a small handful of experts in the field, we thought it would be a good opportunity to have some of our equipment assessed...

Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 2

Posted on September 12, 2008
Yesterday I wrote about the financial troubles impacting some of the nation's collegiate newspapers -- the public struggles of the Daily Cal and the Daily Orange, and the less public struggles of many of the papers that are quietly looking to the future and worrying...

Eliminating the Fear of Being Open

Posted on September 12, 2008
Spot.Us is about to hit the ground running. We hope to have something to show in mid-to-late October (assuming everything stays on schedule). We've gotten here through a couple of stages. The Cliffs Note version of that is as follows. Stage one: Narratives After realizing Spot...

Challenges for the Collegiate Press, Part 1

Posted on September 11, 2008
This is the first half of a two-part series on the financial challenges facing college newspapers, and what they can do to embrace the future. There was an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today about the financial state of student newspapers...

Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File

Posted on September 10, 2008
During the 2004 presidential election season, I ran a column in Technology Review Online which described the way that average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons...

Public Information Done Right

Posted on September 10, 2008
I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we're passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC's astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither...

Youth, New Media Literacies, and Civic Engagement

Posted on September 07, 2008
This fall, I am going to be teaching a course on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement, which is designed to help facilitate conversations across two of the projects we run through the Comparative Media Studies program: the Center for Future Civic Media, funded by the Knight Foundation as a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, and Project NML (New Media Literacies), which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation...

Listen and Learn: Recording in Harare's Cafes

Posted on September 03, 2008
Even though we're still a few months, and a telephony server with a PCI slot, short of our first deployment, the Freedom Fone creative team has been hitting Harare's arts scene. In an effort to train our ears and give our digital audio editing fingers a work out, we've been recording some audio at a few public events...

Street Team Exclusive: Palin Liked Romney, Paul In Primaries

Posted on September 02, 2008
Back in February, on Super Tuesday, MTV News/Knight Foundation Street Teamer Dani Carlson did a Flixwagon mobile phone interview with Alaska Governor -- and now presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate -- Sarah Palin, who had some interesting things to say about energy policy and the "party machinery...

Takeaways from the Conference

Posted on June 14, 2008
Some takeaways from the Future of Civic Media conference, showcasing Knight News Challenge winners, that ended yesterday at the MIT Media Lab in Boston: ? All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years...

Initial Milestones from Denver

Posted on June 13, 2008
Goal 1: Staffing. Our first goal for the Deproduction / Denver Open Media project was to establish the development team. In June, we hired long-time contractor Brian Hiatt, as well as his partner/designer Sharee Dierringer, merging their Drupal development shop, Civic Pixel, into the Deproduction Family...

The Sites in their Sights

Posted on June 13, 2008
So which are the regular websites visited by the big names at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media conference? I asked people like Jay Rosen, JD Lasica, Amy Gahran, Paul Grabowicz, Henry Jenkins and others to share their favorites. Surveying ten or so folks shows that top of the list is Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine...

Trying to Solve the Civic Media Participation Gap

Posted on June 13, 2008
Knight News Challenge winners are meeting at MIT to discuss the future of civic media. The focus has been on PARTICIPATORY culture and the skills that the youth and others need. Problems that have been identified include the following: Transparency problem: people are swimming in media Participation gap: resources growing in the life of young vs...

1st day at Knight News Challenge Winners Conference

Posted on June 12, 2008
I am in Boston at the Center of Future of Civic Media which hosts the Knight News Challenge Conference. Yesterday after registering I assisted to the welcome speech by Alberto Ibarguen. He believes that what Knight is doing is the next big thing happening...

Live-Blogging Future of Civic Media Gathering

Posted on June 12, 2008
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- I am in the swanky Stata Center at MIT for the conference on "The Future of Civic Media," put on by the new Center for Future Civic Media. Nearly all the Idea Lab bloggers are here in attendance as the Knight Foundation is using this gathering to help all News Challenge winners get to know each other and collaborate more...

Election Day Could Be Our Own Pangia Day

Posted on June 11, 2008
When the filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), her wish was to create one day where people across the world gathered at the same time to watch films produced by international filmmakers. Best known for her film Control Room(film), Noujaim believed the power of the films could help the audience see beyond our differences to the humanity that binds us together...

AFRICAN CELLPHONE MEDIA: HOSTAGE TO POLICY DELAYS

Posted on June 11, 2008
There are a couple of delays in implementing our Iindaba Ziyafika - the news is coming project around cellphone journalism, supported by the Knight Foundation - but the tardy policy context in South Africa is also a constraint. At present in South Africa, at least six out of ten adults have access to cellphones, but their main use is for interpersonal conversation...

Civic Media Innovation Camps

Posted on June 11, 2008
I've just arrived at MIT in Boston, where the Future of Civic Media conference is being held over the next three days. Attendees are gathering to compare notes, soak up new ideas (including some smart technologies devised by students here) and tease out ways to maximize the impact of civic media in our lives...

Twittering from the Future of Civic Media Meeting

Posted on June 11, 2008
Opening panel at the conference is talking from local media (as civic media), ranging to macro political level. Tweeting the debates.

Voces Bolivianas Featured in Vamos Magazine

Posted on June 10, 2008
Rising Voices aims not just to get new communities actively participating in the conversational web, but also to introduce their voices to mainstream media outlets so that, for once, under-represented communities are portrayed by their own residents. While the majority of the ten current Rising Voices outreach projects have been covered by mainstream media organization, Voces Bolivianas takes the prize when it comes to attracting national and international media attention...

Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?

Posted on June 10, 2008
Apple's announcement yesterday of a GPS-enabled iPhone is further fanning the flames of excitement around location based services and mobile social networking. Being able to connect with friends (and strangers), and to interact with your immediate environment via your smartphone is the new new thing...

A Participatory News Agenda

Posted on June 08, 2008
We all know that the "audience" analogy no longer represents the way journalism should work. We know that the people reading the news have opinions, perspectives, and facts that are relevant to the conversation. Some of them just have observations, but others are reporters at heart or maybe they have the wordsmithing abilities of a columnist...

Smart Mobs for News Participation

Posted on June 08, 2008
Following is part 3 of my 3-part series on open APIs and crowdsourcing community news. Part 1, Part 2.At the NetSquared conference for nonprofits in San Jose on May 27-28, one of the most intriguing projects I heard about was Social Actions, a project to tie together disparate cause movements through an open API that would aggregate information about dozens of different campaigns and allow users to take action to further a cause...

we need a PowerPoint to make games

Posted on June 07, 2008
I just returned from Ottawa where Nicole and I went to collaborate with Distill. We spent two days in their office and it was a positive learning experience. I should make a premise that distil is trying to build a system that will allow non tech-savvy users, with little knowledge of coding, to create a game or game-like environment in a simple way and in a short time...

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