Idea Lab

Mobile Phone Gathering Outlines Successful Projects

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- A catalog of pioneering mobile phone projects for news and information was the centerpiece of an informal discussion on the topic at the Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT on June 17. And while successful approaches appear to remain relatively few, with most overseas, the two dozen participants at the barcamp gathering left with an array of models to explore. Among the U.S.-based examples cited by participants was VoteReport, which used Twitter and eight volunteers to gather some 17,000 user accounts of conditions at U.S. polling places on Election Day 2008, and Mobile Voices,...

• June 18, 2010
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Use Ready-to-Wear to Avoid the Custom CMS Albatross

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It’s always tempting to be cutting edge and build custom web publishing tools for a new web site. But we've found real benefits to using off-the-shelf content management tools -- especially for a small operation without an in-house web developer.

• July 26, 2008
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Participants Balk at Controversial Topics

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It might seem a good starting point for building virtual community when people already know each other in the real one. But for Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker, we've been surprised to find that doesn't seem so true. For many potential users of our online group blog and forums, the risks of speaking about a controversial topic so openly in an online public forum appear just too great. When we launched our project in the summer of 2007 in the wake of the city's approval of a carbon tax to fight global warming, we began with the premise that experts and...

• April 22, 2008
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Boulder's ClimateSmart Lacks Online Community

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Why the journalistically independent Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker fills a gap that local government web sites cannot.

• March 12, 2008
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Following the Carbon Cash in Colorado

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When Boulder, Colo., voters passed the nation's first municipal "carbon tax" last fall, it was an engraved invitation for me and my partner Amy Gahran at citizen journalism outfit I, Reporter. As long-time veteran environmental journalists with years of online experience, we've been on the look-out for ways to explore participatory journalism's potential on a tough eco-issue like global warming, with a local focus on a story that has national and international implications.

Then the Knight Foundation gave us our opportunity last May by funding our plan to build and launch our Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker citizen journalism web site. Since then, we've plunged ahead, learning as we go about what it takes to involve local citizens in such a complex, slow-breaking, but crucially important story.

• October 15, 2007
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A Conversation, Any Which Way

by A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the big lessons we've learned in just a few months into the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project is the enormous challenge of getting community members to think of themselves as journalists.So we're about to try a new approach. This week, we'll launch a new bulletin board service on the site with the aim of drawing in those citizen journalists through the relatively simple mechanism of the online comment.

• October 15, 2007
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