and who will deliver the news tomorrow?
When not chasing spider webs, you might find me dodging grates in downtown Miami sidewalks as my high heels carry me toward the tall building where I work managing online community for the Knight Foundation.
As most of you know, I was hired three months ago to architect and implement a large community area that will span many the multiple project categories that Knight funds; I’ll share more about that closer to launch (likely late this fall).
For the past month, though, I have been working on another project that we’re calling the Garage. A brief overview:
The News Challenge is the contest most people associate with Knight Foundation; it’s a yearly contest that awards up to $5 million for ideas about local news delivery mechanisms.
This new Garage site is to help potential News Challenge applicants think through their ideas with the people in the best positions to advise them: past contest winners and expert mentors.
It’s an “incubator” site, and we (the Knight News Challenge team) hope it will be a place where ideas mature and strengthen, emerging from the Garage raring to apply, win, and implement.
Though an intentionally simple Drupal (an open source content management framework) site, this is an experiment that may serve as a model for how foundations can stage grant applications and help proposed notions solidify into ideas with longevity.
And I jumped at the chance to work with Susan Mernit, who continues to mentor me, and who let me lead the project.
An ambitious timeline, the chance to work with a tech diva I admire, projects that connect those who can improve local information chains for all of us—can you tell why I’m happy to dodge those Miami grates on weekday mornings?
The Garage lives at garage.newschallenge.org, and you should come have a look.
How can you pass up a chance to talk strategy with the venerable Brian Oberkirch, implementation with Mr. Messina, social media with Beth Kanter, video with Ryanne and Jay? And that’s not even half of the cool kids in Garage ready to mentor you.
Come hang out, and let’s see what kind of awesome local news ideas we can think up together…
p.s. The Garage stays open until November 1st for project mentoring–
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Posted Thursday, August 7th, 2008, 11:51 pm | Filed in Cyberfeminism, Design, Technology, Video. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Congratulations on the launch! Great idea. Looking forward to seeing what develops out of it.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Thanks, Dave. I’m really excited about it–we already have fifteen projects in the Garage, which bodes well, I think.
And congrats on your new gig; I was just leaving a comment on that awesome Mario scarf in today’s heh. :)
August 8th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
This does sound like such an important project, empowering people who possibly often don’t feel heard. That’s what the MSM should be doing much more of, but alas…
You’re doing fine work here, KT…
August 8th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Thanks, Antony. It’s a great team (staff and mentors), so it will be exciting to see what happens in this third year of the contest—