Idea Lab

A. Adam Glenn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A. Adam Glenn is an Internet news veteran and independent digital media consultant who recently joined the faculty of the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. His focus is on social media, citizen journalism, enterpreneurial journalism and online storytelling. He has held posts with a wide variety of news media, most recently as senior producer at ABCNews.com. He co-founded I, Reporter with Amy Gahran in 2005. Glenn is an active member of the Online News Association and the Society of Environmental Journalists, where he serves on the editorial advisory board. He was awarded a 2002 Ford Environmental Journalism Fellowship to teach in India and a 2005 Environmental Media Fellowship at Vermont Law School. He trained at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Glenn previously earned a mid-career Masters of International Affairs (environmental policy) at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in Boston.

Project: Create a citizen/professional journalism project using innovative web tools and citizen journalism practices to track Boulder, Colo.'s implementation of a carbon tax.

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Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Aaditeshwar Seth is a Ph.D. candidate with the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (Canada). His research is focused on low-cost wireless communication infrastructures for rural areas, including developing hardware and software for starting radio stations in rural areas. He earned his BTech degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, India, in 2002. Prior to his Ph.D. work, Seth founded Kalzoom Technologies, an Indian software company. He also co-founded a student organization at the University of Waterloo that gives technical support to nonprofit organizations in India.

Project: This project will connect rural radio stations to the Internet by using new software and computer-based FM transmitters. The innovations will significantly reduce the cost of creating the stations in India -- from an estimated $50,000 to $2,500. India is issuing a new round of community radio station licenses, so the proposal is timely. The effort will start by helping nonprofits already operating in India launch radio stations.

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Aaron Presnall
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Aaron Presnall is Director of Studies at the Jefferson Institute. A political economist, Presnall specializes in issues of banking and telecommunications regulatory transition, and the role of participatory politics in regulatory outcomes. In addition to scholarly works and popular opinion pieces, he has written on the business and political environment of Europe for the Economist Intelligence Unit, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and numerous private and governmental organizations in Europe and the United States. Before joining the Jefferson Institute, he served with the EastWest Institute for seven years in Prague, then in Belgrade as EastWest’s regional director of Southeast Europe. He earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Virginia.

Project: As more information becomes available online, the challenge is to easily find, use and make sense of huge amounts of complicated data. Data visualizations are powerful depictions of abstract information that can reach millions of people by creating clear pictures that effectively communicate what the numbers actually mean. Unfortunately, the tools to create these visual representations are usually too expensive and difficult for smaller news organizations and everyday citizens to use, creating a gap for the future of community journalism. This grant will create a suite of easy-to-use tools for anyone to use on any standard set of data ranging from government databases to demographics and statistics.

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Adam Griffith

Adam Griffith is a co-founder of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science and serves as their director of Science and Coastal Environments. He received a B.S. in Biology from Roanoke College in 1999 and was subsequently accepted to Teach for America. He taught 6th grade science in the Houston Independent School District in Texas for three years before becoming a kayak instructor and head raft guide for the Nantahala Outdoor Center. He received his M.S. in Biology in 2008 studying the native bamboo Arundinaria gigantea (rivercane) and continues to work with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and community members in Western N.C. as coordinator of the Rivercane Restoration Project. Adam is currently a coastal research scientist in the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University and is based in Asheville, N.C.

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Adam Klawonn
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Adam Klawonn, a native of Phoenix, has spent the first part of his career working for metro newspapers and a city magazine. He started ZonieReport.com in 2006 to cover statewide issues in Arizona and previously taught online journalism classes at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

Project: The city of Phoenix debuted a new light rail transit system last winter, changing the physical and social fabric of the city. Now The Daily Phoenix will use print, web and mobile technology to cater to these new commuters, offering news and information, games, social networking features and promotions on a stop-by-stop basis so that they can interact with the city on a more meaningful level.

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Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Adrian Holovaty is a journalist and web developer in Chicago. He has developed innovative, award-winning web applications for washingtonpost.com, Lawrence.com and LJWorld.com. One of his projects, chicagocrime.org, an innovative overlay of the city's reported crimes using Google's online mapping technology, won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the 2005 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. He also co-created Django, an open-source web development framework. He graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001 and was named one of Crain's "40 Under 40" in 2005.

Project: To create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.

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AJ Ashton
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

AJ is a cartographer and developer at Development Seed, where he works with data to design beautiful custom maps like the ones you see on MapBox. AJ is also one of the lead contributors to TileMill, our open-source map design studio that makes it easy to design beautiful maps without a cartography background. Working as both a strategist, developer, and probably the most active user of the project, AJ has helped make TileMill intuitive to use, flexible, powerful and incredibly fast. AJ is also a skilled GIS developer and works closely with our mapping team on the development of MapBox products, a suite of open-source tools for designing, hosting and sharing custom maps. His technical skills allow him to make inventive use of open-source mapping toolkits like Carto, GDAL and Mapnik to pioneer new techniques for designing maps for the web.

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Aleksandra Chojnacka
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Aleksandra Chojnacka received her MBA specializing in strategic marketing from Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business. Prior to obtaining her MBA, Choinacka worked as an account manager for a digital marketing firm, Acxiom Digital, where she managed email marketing campaigns, online customer acquisitions and various online marketing efforts.

Project: The city of Phoenix debuted a new light rail transit system last winter, changing the physical and social fabric of the city. Now The Daily Phoenix will use print, web and mobile technology to cater to these new commuters, offering news and information, games, social networking features and promotions on a stop-by-stop basis so that they can interact with the city on a more meaningful level.

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Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Alexander Zolotarev was a Fulbright Scholar at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where he conducted research for his Ph.D. in citizen journalism and online communities. He is just back to Moscow where he will soon defend his dissertation at the Moscow State University Faculty of Journalism. After writing a Russian travel guide to Norway at 21, Zolotarev worked as an editor at several magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and National Geographic Traveler. He has consistently been involved in projects on pop culture and entertainment, including the launch of the IMAX Theatre in Moscow.

Project

The people of Sochi, the Russian resort city hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, will be able to use the latest online tools to both discuss and influence the impact of the games. A web site and database will allow the community to track and debate how the plans are changing life there over a five-year period. The idea is to help residents better prepare for the Olympics, to inform the media about the city’s issues and to use discussions about the games as a way to improve life in Sochi

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Amanda Atwood
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amanda Atwood has worked as an information activist in several Zimbabwean organizations, from the Movement for Democratic Change through to the country's major labor union. Amanda brings with her several years of experience in publishing civic and human rights information in a repressive media environment. Amanda is currently Zimbabwe's key resource person assisting SANGONeT, a South African based NGO, in the strengthening of citizen journalism. Amanda injects an extraordinary energy and enthusiasm into the Freedom Fone project and believes that "Freedom Fone is gonna Fly!"

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Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amanda Hickman joined Document Cloud as Program Director in November of 2009. Amanda comes to Document Cloud from Gotham Gazette where, as the Director of Technology, she managed development of a series of games about public policy issues. Prior to joining Gotham Gazette, she worked as a Circuit Rider, providing technology assistance and training to low-income grassroots groups in the U.S. working on anti-poverty issues and as a consultant to foundations looking for ways to support their grantees' use of technology in organizing work. She taught an undergraduate course at NYU's Gallatin School on using the Internet as an organizing tool. An active local organizer, she's got her hands in a few community composting and gardening projects, too.

Project: DocumentCloud is a website that will enhance investigative reporting by making source documents easy to find, share and read. While rich source documents are the foundation of investigative journalism, too often reporters throw or tuck them away after a story fades, never to be used again. DocumentCloud will provide an online database of documents contributed by a consortium of news organizations, watchdog groups and bloggers, and shared with the public at large. Users will be able to search by topic, agency or location. Reporters will benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, which will be able to collaboratively examine large document sets.

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Amy Gahran
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amy Gahran is a media consultant and journalist based in Boulder, Colorado. Working closely with the Society of Environmental Journalists, she covered energy and environmental issues for more than 15 years. She authors several blogs such as Contentious.com, one of the earliest leading voices on online content and communication, and Right Conversation, which focuses on conversational and social media. Gahran edits the Poynter Institute's group blog E-Media Tidbits, and she's created e-learning modules for News University. Two years ago she and business partner Adam Glenn launched I, Reporter, a guide for citizen journalists and news professionals who work with them. Their projects include an interactive database of nearly 500 citizen journalism projects throughout North America and helping launch the online side of a weekly community paper in NY state.

Project: Create a citizen/professional journalism project using innovative web tools and citizen journalism practices to track Boulder, Colo.'s implementation of a carbon tax.

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Amy O'Donnell
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amy joined FrontlineSMS at the beginning of 2011 and is coordinating the FrontlineSMS:Radio project. This is a tailored version of FrontlineSMS's free and open-source software which is customized for radio DJs to help them interact with their audiences via text message. The project has involved offering user support to the growing community of radio users who are interested in solutions for the management of SMS and translating their needs into the software development process. Previously, Amy has worked for the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation, Amnesty International and Action Against Hunger.

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Amy Saunderson-Meyer
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Amy Saunderson-Meyer is the Media and Information Officer for Freedom Fone. She completed an MBA at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town in 2009; focusing on social entrepreneurship, sustainable enterprise, communication, strategy, design, creativity and innovation. Prior to that, she worked for 5 years as an Art Curator, organizing international exhibitions of Zimbabwean stone sculpture and South African craft, primarily in Toronto, London and Scandinavia. Other experience includes being a Project Manager for Kagiso Exhibitions and Events, organizing green events, such as the Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Conference and Expo, for Western Cape Provincial Government in Cape Town. Over the years she has enjoyed freelance writing, mainly for magazines and has two years experience in the film industry in London. She has a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art Photography and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Psychology; both from Rhodes University, South Africa.

Project: Freedom Fone provides a voice database where users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or internet phones. In a concept similar to a telephone tree employed by many private companies, users can call in and then dial specific numbers to find the information they need. Independent radio station content can be broadcast, along with frequently updated audio reports created specifically for Freedom Fone. Users can pose questions and leave answers on a voicemail system. The concept, which employs both new and old technologies, allows the poor to receive and contribute information in a practical and economical way and is currently being deployed in Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Ghana.

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Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Andrew Whitacre is Communications Manager for the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, 2007 Knight News Challenge winner. A native of the nation's capital, Whitacre has written on communications policy issues, starting with work on satellite radio as a student at Wake Forest University. He is also the fiction editor for Identity Theory and is developing an aggregation tool for literary fiction readers and editors at Readsfeed.com.

Project: The Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Andrius Kulikauskas is a dual citizen of Lithuania and the United States. In 1998, he founded Minciu Sodas, an online laboratory for serving independent thinkers around the world. He wants to organize 100,000 of them, enough for a vibrant culture. He organizes them by asking: What is your deepest value in life? What is a question that you don't know the answer to, but wish to answer? What would you like to achieve? His own deepest value is "living by truth."

Blogging About: Different methods of getting digital information to rural areas that don't have Internet access. He will discuss using a "reader," or a device for writing and reviewing text files stored on any USB flash drive. The device is meant for people in rural areas with marginal online access so that messages can be physically transported to and from places connected to the Internet. In this system, an individual would load a USB drive at an Internet café, then travel to a village where the information could be read with another device. This method will be discussed in contrast to the pros and cons of using the $100 wireless laptop.

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Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Angela Antony is a senior at Harvard College and co-founder of The Beanstockd Project. She also founded the Harvard Presidents Forum, the first formal network of the leaders of all Harvard student organizations, and served on the founding board of the Leadership Institute at Harvard College.

Project: Beanstockd is a developing idea to encourage green living through an interactive game. Using social networking tools and real-time news and information, players would be able to track their environmental impact, discover how they stack up against neighbors and team up in a friendly competition to leave the smallest imprint on their community. The game revolves around a virtual stock market, where each player receives an amount of personal stock based on their environmental footprint. Players can increase their stock value by reducing their footprint, or invest in other teams who are predicted to do the same. The project is tailored for a small community, such as a university campus, and aims to unite its members around reducing the area's demand on natural resources.

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Angela Powers
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Angela Powers is director and a professor of the Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State. In addition to teaching, she has worked as a reporter for NBC and CBS affiliates, been a Senior Fulbright Specialist, Fulbright Scholar and Poynter fellow; written for journals and books and remained active in organizations such as the World Media Economics organization and AEJMC. Her research interests include influences on news content and media convergence. Powers received her Ph.D. from Michigan State.

Project: Create "incubator" at Kansas State (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Anne-Ryan Heatwole
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anne-Ryan Heatwole is a journalist based in New York City. In May 2009, Anne-Ryan received a master's degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to that, Anne-Ryan wrote for Virginia Living Magazine. She attended the University of Virginia for her undergraduate studies.

Project: With more than half the world owning a mobile device, the media industry, civil society groups and citizens yearn to use the technology to create and distribute news and information. Yet they often lack the knowledge and tools necessary. The Mobile Media Toolkit will offer media production tool sets for download and use on a variety of phones across regions of the world. The toolkit will include applications for video and audio recording, a distribution tool for mobile content to social media sites and detailed how-to information that outlines what users can do with the phones they have.

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Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anthony Pesce is a senior at UCLA in geography/environmental studies, and the Editor in Chief of the UCLA Daily Bruin. He wants to become a professional journalist, focusing on new media. Pesce enjoys thinking about creative ways to localize news coverage and build local communities around information. He won a Society of Professional Journalists Regional Mark of Excellence Award for general reporting, a first-place California College Media Association award for series writing and awards from both groups for editorial writing.

Project: Student editors at the UCLA Daily Bruin will create online publishing software geared to mobile editing. College journalists then will be able to use the content management system to remotely assign and edit stories, videos and photos for online college sites. Readers will use it to submit their own content and communicate with one another.

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Anu Sridharan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anu Sridharan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010 with a master's degree in civil systems engineering; she received her bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley as well. During her time there, Sridharan researched the optimization of pipe networked systems in emerging economies as well as new business models for the dissemination of water purification technologies for arsenic removal. Sridharan also served as the education and health director for a water and sanitation project in the slums of Mumbai, India, where she piloted a successful volunteer recruitment and community training model.

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Ardyth Broadrick Sohn
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ardyth Broadrick Sohn is director of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine and is serving as outside evaluator for the University of Belgrade Journalism Department through the University of Georgia Cox Center. With Sohn's expertise in media management, she has led work with Poynter and AEJMC. Sohn is the author or co-author of 15 books, book chapters or monographs and over a dozen scholarly articles. She was a newspaper reporter and assistant editor before returning to graduate school where she earned her master's and Ph.D. degrees in Journalism.

Project: Create "incubator" at University of Nevada (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Ari Olmos
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ari Olmos is co-founder and COO of NextDrop, a social enterprise that informs residents in India of the availability of unreliable water supplies and visualizes data for water utilities. Ari is a recent graduate of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, where he focused on development projects that leverage mobile phones. He worked on the design of a market information system for smallholder farmers in Senegal and an order aggregation platform for micro-entrepreneurs in Mexico. Previously, Ari directed a microfinance program at Supporting Kids in Peru.

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Aron Pilhofer
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Aron Pilhofer is editor of Interactive News Technologies at The New York Times, overseeing a news-focused team of journalist/developers who build dynamic, data-driven applications to enhance The Times' reporting online. He joined The Times in 2005. Previously, he was at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, and before that at Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Project: DocumentCloud is a web site that will enhance investigative reporting by making source documents easy to find, share and read. While rich source documents are the foundation of investigative journalism, too often reporters throw or tuck them away after a story fades, never to be used again. DocumentCloud will provide an online database of documents contributed by a consortium of news organizations, watchdog groups and bloggers, and shared with the public at large. Users will be able to search by topic, agency or location. Reporters will benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, which will be able to collaboratively examine large document sets.

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Balachandran Chandrasekharan
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Balachandran "Bala" Chandrasekharan is the technical architect of all Gram Vaani offerings. With a BTech from the Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Bala has been an active contributor on many open-source software in the past. He has a strong belief in participatory democracy, and the ability of community media to help reach the goal. Always aiming for perfection, Bala brings careful forethought on Gram Vaani’s technology and methodology, and an indispensable guidance on the development. Gram Vaani was a winner in the 2008 Knight News Challenge, and is focused on the development of appropriate technology for community radio stations in rural areas of developing countries.

This project will connect rural radio stations to the Internet by using new software and computer-based FM transmitters. The innovations will significantly reduce the cost of creating the stations in India - from an estimated $50,000 to $2,500. India is issuing a new round of community radio station licenses, so the proposal is timely. The effort will start by helping nonprofits already operating in India launch radio stations.

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Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Benjamin Melancon is co-founder of Agaric Design Collective, developing and maintaining websites for companies, organizations, and individuals, using open source free software. He also promotes and supports several non-profit organizations, especially public interest news sources, including the Fund for Authentic Journalism, Art For Change in Spanish Harlem New York, Gringoyo Productions, and The NewStandard. He helped found and was elected to the board of directors of the Amazing Things Arts Center and is helping to form a non-profit called People Who Give a Damn. He has worked in media, retail and consulting. He attended the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on a Commonwealth Scholarship and studied journalism, economics, political science and information technology.

Blogging About: "Related Items," a module for the community-oriented and open-source content management system, Drupal, which enables people to quickly and easily connect any item (news, idea, group, event) to any other content they consider related.

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Bev Clark
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bev Clark co-founded Kubatana.net, Zimbabwe's civic and information portal. Bev has assisted a variety of civil society organizations with their media and communications strategies focusing on the need for non-profit organizations to engage marketing and vibrant publicity in their social justice work. Keenly interested in the intersection between art, communication and technology Bev has broken new ground in Zimbabwe by encouraging an alternative approach to citizen outreach. Bev is Kubatana's key blogger and has written for OpenDemocracy and Slate.

Project: Freedom Fone will provide a voice database where users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or Internet phones. In a concept similar to a telephone tree employed by many private companies, users will call in and then dial specific numbers to find the information they need. Independent radio station content will be broadcast, along with frequently updated audio reports created specifically for Freedom Fone. Users will be able to pose questions and leave answers on a voicemail system. The concept, which employs both new and old technologies, will allow the poor to receive and contribute information in a practical and economical way. It will be tested in Zimbabwe.

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Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

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Bonnie Bogle
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bonnie Bogle runs everything "behind the scenes" at Development Seed - from finances to logistics to the office. She develops efficient systems without a lot of overhead, allowing Development Seed to stay small, agile, and focused on building open source tools. In addition to her role as operations manager, Bonnie leads communications, managing the blog, Twitter accounts, and most other external messaging. She is active in the local technology community, having organized monthly technology meetups in Washington, DC for more than two years and promoting other local events in her weekly Week in DC Tech blog post. She was also the lead organizer of DrupalCon DC, an international conference that drew more than 1,400 people, where she organized and ran all event logistics, communications, and coordination.

Project: To inspire residents to learn about local issues, Tilemapping will help local media create hyper-local, data-filled maps for their websites and blogs. Journalists will be able to tell more textured stories, while residents will be able to draw connections to their physical communities in new ways. The tools will be tested in Washington, D.C. Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, used a prototype after the earthquake in Haiti to create maps used to crowdsource reports on places needing aid.

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Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brad Flora is a journalist and entrepreneur in Chicago. He is the founder and president of WindyCitizen.com, which gives Chicagoans a place to share, rate and discuss their favorite local stories, events and deals. His work has appeared in Slate magazine and Chicago area newspapers. He was a 2008 Carnegie-Knight News21 Fellow and is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism.

Project: As a way to help online startups become sustainable, WindyCitizen will develop an improved software interface to help sites create and sell what are known as "real-time ads." These ads are designed to be engaging as they constantly change -- showing the latest message or post from the advertiser's Twitter account, Facebook page or blog. Challenge winner Brad Flora helped pioneer the idea on his Chicago news site WindyCitizen.com.

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Brein McNamara
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brein McNamara is the technology coordinator at the Minnesota North Star Academy, a bilingual charter school for the deaf in the Twin Cities. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in communication studies with an emphasis in new media. Deaf himself, McNamara is heavily involved in the deaf community and is driven to provide this minority group with equitable access to the tools of citizen journalism in American Sign Language.

Blogging About: Ways to empower deaf people to become citizen journalists. He will write about the digital information needs of deaf people, including his own proposal to integrate a web-based video capture system with the videophones popular among the hearing-impaired. The blog also will highlight the gaps not being filled by current technology.

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Brenda Lynne Burrell
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brenda Lynn Burrell is the co-founder and IT Director of Kubatana.net, Zimbabwe's civic and human rights information portal. She has a background in social justice activism and has 9 years of experience working in the pro-democracy movement in Zimbabwe strengthening the use of information communication technologies in civil society organizations. Widely respected in Zimbabwe, Brenda has worked tirelessly to provide more democratic access to information for all Zimbabweans. Brenda has a BSc (Botany & Zoology) and a teaching diploma (HDE). She is on the board of The Tactical Technology Collective.

Project: Freedom Fone will provide a voice database where users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or Internet phones. In a concept similar to a telephone tree employed by many private companies, users will call in and then dial specific numbers to find the information they need. Independent radio station content will be broadcast, along with frequently updated audio reports created specifically for Freedom Fone. Users will be able to pose questions and leave answers on a voicemail system. The concept, which employs both new and old technologies, will allow the poor to receive and contribute information in a practical and economical way. It will be tested in Zimbabwe.

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Brian Boyer
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Brian Boyer is news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune. He runs projects, designs products and writes code, all in the name of journalism. He earned a master’s in journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, on a scholarship for developers funded by Knight Foundation. He was the 2010 Chicago Tribune employee of the year.

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Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Chris O'Brien is a business reporter at the San Jose Mercury News where he has covered Silicon Valley since 1999. Previously, he was a staff writer at The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., for seven years. He graduated from Duke University in 1991, and was an editor at the student-run, independent daily newspaper, The Chronicle.

Project: To plan an "ideal newsroom" for the digital news era and create an online resource for student newspapers and other news organizations looking to bring their facilities up to date with new media trends.

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Christina Xu
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Christina Xu is the chancellor of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, a fledgling nonprofit that promotes microgranting as a new alternative to traditional funding. She also works on Breadpig, which seeks to direct technological resources towards social good. She has worked at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

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Christopher Callahan

Christopher Callahan became the founding dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in August 2005. In his first 18 months, Callahan added seven award-winning journalists to the Cronkite School's full-time faculty. He also brought to ASU the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism and created the New Media Innovation Lab and Cronkite News Service. Prior to joining the Cronkite School, Callahan served as the associate dean at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Before entering a career in journalism education, Callahan was a Washington correspondent for The Associated Press.

Project: To support the development of media entrepreneurship and the creation of new digital media products through the establishment of the Knight-Kauffman Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

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Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Chris Csikszentmihályi (pronounced Cheek-sent-me-hi) is the Muriel Cooper Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and directs the Computing Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab. A 2007 Radcliffe Institute Fellow, he has worked in the intersection of new technologies, politics, media and the arts for 15 years, lecturing, showing new media work and presenting installations in four continents and one subcontinent. His work aims to create a new technology to embody a particular social agenda. For example, he designed his piece "Afghan Explorer" to defend the First Amendment by creating a tele-operated robot reporter to bypass American military censorship. Csikszentmihályi has lectured and presented to government agencies and arts, humanities and science and engineering departments across the globe. He served on the National Academies' "Information Technology and Creativity" panel, and has recently won fellowships from the Langlois and Rockefeller Foundations. (MFA, UC San Diego; BFA, Art Institute of Chicago).

Project: To create the Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Christopher Groskopf is the lead developer on PANDA Project and a former developer on the Chicago Tribune's News Applications Team. He is also the creator of django-boundaryservice, csvkit, and Hack Tyler. His residence is in flux, but you can find him on Twitter regardless of his present whereabouts: @onyxfish.

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CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

From 2008-2011 CJ Cornell was Co-Director the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Professor of Digital Media & Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, the university’s first full time Entrepreneur-in-Residence and was the recipient of the 2010 President's Award for Innovation. Currently, Dr, Cornell is the Executive Director of New York Institute of Technology's global Vanguard Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program.

As a serial entrepreneur, CJ Cornell was a founder or part of the senior management team of more than a dozen successful startup ventures that collectively attracted over $250 million in private funding; created nearly a thousand new jobs; and launched dozens of innovative consumer, media and communications products that have exceeded $3 billion in revenues.

CJ Cornell holds degrees in engineering, management and a Ph.D. in marketing and strategy, and has authored dozens of papers and articles on technology, behavior, innovation and entrepreneurship.

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Cody Shotwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Cody Shotwell has lived in downtown Phoenix since 2008. A fresh graduate of the Masters of Mass Communication program at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the Seattle-area native keeps his fingers on the pulse of the journalism community through his day job as web coordinator at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Project: To inform and engage communities, CitySeed will be a mobile application that allows users to plant the "seed" of an idea and share it with others. For example, a person might come across a great spot for a community garden. At that moment, the person can use the CitySeed app to “geotag” the idea, which links it to an exact location. Others can look at the place-based ideas, debate and hopefully act on them. The project aims to increase the number of people informed about and engaged with their communities by breaking down community issues into bite-sized settings.

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Corinne Ramey
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Corinne Ramey is a freelance journalist living in New York City. Cory began writing for MobileActive in 2007, and has since written about mobile phones being used for everything from election observation and mass organizing to farming tips and sex education. In addition to writing for MobileActive.org, Cory regularly writes for publications including the Jewish Daily Forward, City Hall News, The Capitol and the Manhattan Times. She is a recent graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and holds undergraduate degrees in comparative literature and viola performance from Oberlin College.

Project: With more than half the world owning a mobile device, the media industry, civil society groups and citizens yearn to use the technology to create and distribute news and information. Yet they often lack the knowledge and tools necessary. The Mobile Media Toolkit will offer media production tool sets for download and use on a variety of phones across regions of the world. The toolkit will include applications for video and audio recording, a distribution tool for mobile content to social media sites and detailed how-to information that outlines what users can do with the phones they have.

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Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The program, which is just being launched, aims to help students appreciate the startup culture of risk-taking, and to foster new media projects. Dan remains director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. He is also author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People" (O'Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens' media and why it matters. From 1994 until early 2005 Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.

Project: To support the development of media entrepreneurship and the creation of new digital media products through the establishment of the Knight-Kauffman Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

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Dan Pacheco
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Pacheco is a product manager who specializes in social media -- the idea that average people can and should be active participants in the media they consume. He has 14 years of experience in this area at The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Tribune, America Online and The Bakersfield Californian.

Pacheco is managing The Bakersfield Californian's Printcasting initiative, a two-year, $837,000 Knight News Challenge project that will democratize print publishing and create self-serve advertising tools for local businesses. They plan to go into beta in December, and launch in March of 2009.

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Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dan Schultz graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009 with a BS in Information Systems and minors in Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences. He won the Knight News Challenge in 2007, an opportunity that has given him a unique perspective as a young technologist. He has been developing digital community systems for almost a decade, and has worked for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CMU, Vanguard, and Colorquick LLC. He has been trained as a system and interface designer, programmer, and project manager and looks forward to taking on some of the creative challenges that lie ahead for this field.

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Dan Sinker

Dan Sinker heads up the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership for Mozilla. From 2008 to 2011 he taught in the journalism department at Columbia College Chicago where he focused on entrepreneurial
journalism and the mobile web. He is the author of the popular @MayorEmanuel twitter account and is the creator of the election tracker the Chicago Mayoral Scorecard, the mobile storytelling project CellStories, and was the founding editor of the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet until its closure in 2007. He is the editor of We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews and was a 2007-08 Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

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Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Daniel X. O'Neil is a co-founder of and the People Person at EveryBlock, the Web site that filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what's happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city. His main responsibility is to work with local governments to uncover new data sets.

Prior to EveryBlock, he spent ten years working as an Internet strategist and Web developer. He's developed a special focus on helping organizations use emerging tools like wikis, weblogs, and social networks to get things done quickly and cheaply. Over the last few years, his focus has turned to bringing these tools to government, especially at the municipal level in his hometown of Chicago.

Project: To create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.

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David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

David Ardia is director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media. David received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Syracuse University College of Law and received an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Prior to founding the CMLP at Harvard, he was assistant counsel at the Washington Post where he provided pre-publication review and legal advice on First Amendment, newsgathering, intellectual property, and general business issues. Before joining the Post, David was an associate at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation. David is a former member of the Newspaper Association of America's Legal Affairs Committee and is a current member of the First Amendment and Media Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association, the Media Law Committee of the District of Columbia Bar, and the New England Media Lawyers Group.

Project: The Citizen Media Law Project, a joint venture between Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media, provides legal assistance, education, and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media. The CMLP also provides research and advocacy on free speech, newsgathering, intellectual property, and other legal issues related to online speech.

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David Cohn

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David Cole
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dave Cole is a project lead at Development Seed, an R&D shop that specializes in building online maps, data visualizations, and open-source tools. In this role, Dave leads key projects, working closely with the Development Seed team and partners to manage open data and mapping work from the strategy and needs assessment phase through a successful launch. He is highly involved with MapBox, a suite of open-source mapping tools, and works directly with the development team and current users as Development Seed rolls out its first products.

Dave is a recognized advocate for the use of open source software, particularly in the federal government. Prior to working at Development Seed, he served as a senior advisor to the Chief Information Officer of the Executive Office of the President where he spearheaded successful efforts to contribute open source code developed for WhiteHouse.gov back to the open source community.

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David Gurman
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

David Gurman is a San Francisco-based designer and artist who makes memorials that use live data feeds to connect viewers in “safe zones” to conflict areas. He is currently the Creative Director at Brainvise, the design and development collective responsible for the Basetrack online presence. He received his M.F.A. from California College for the Arts, San Francisco. Gurman has received grants and fellowships from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Eureka Fellowship, the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, the Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellowship, and he is a 2010 TED Global Fellow. His work has been included in national and international exhibitions. Currently, Gurman and Brainvise are working on an installation that draws real-time earthquake data from conflict zones and uses the ground motion to signal events as they occur. He will debut the project at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, California.

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David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

David Sasaki is the Director of Rising Voices, a global citizen media outreach initiative of Global Voices Online. He manages a portfolio of small-scale projects around the developing world that use citizen media to effect social change. Prior to his current focus on outreach he served as Global Voices' Latin America Regional Editor, monitoring the Latin American blogosphere, highlighting key content and translating select posts from Spanish to English. Sasaki transitioned into online journalism after working as a freelance web developer and English instructor in Monterrey, Mexico. He now splits his time and residence between North and Latin America and writes frequently at Rising Voices, Global Voices, and on his personal weblog.

Project: Over the past two years, Global Voices has introduced readers around the world to the brilliant, funny, insightful and touching voices of bloggers from developing nations. Rising Voices is our new effort to introduce thousands of new developing world bloggers to the world, helping students, journalists, activists and people from rural areas join the blogosphere.

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Desiree Everts

Desiree Everts is the associate editor for Idea Lab and PBS MediaShift. She's dabbled in digital media for the past decade including stints at CNET News and Wired magazine. When she's not editing, you can find her exploring the nearby redwoods and running after her chickens and her own brood.

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Dianne Lynch
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dianne Lynch is dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. The school is launching an endowed Center for Independent Media to explore new journalistic forms. As the founding executive director of the national Online News Association, she was the editorial director of the first national study of the credibility of online news, and co-producer of a series of digital training modules for online newsrooms on the Poynter Institute's News University. Lynch is a Fulbright Senior Specialist in new media technologies and learning; a member of the national Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications; and a member of the inaugural class of the ASJMC Leadership Institute. Lynch earned her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. in Art History and Communications from McGill University in Montreal.

Project: Create an "incubator" at Ithaca College (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dori J. Maynard is president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the nation's leading trainer of journalists of color. She is the co-author of "Letters to My Children," a compilation of nationally syndicated columns by her late father, Bob Maynard, the first African-American to own a major metropolitan newspaper. Maynard was a reporter at The Bakersfield Californian, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., and the Detroit Free Press. In 1993, she and her father became the first father-daughter duo to be appointed Nieman Fellows at Harvard University.

Blogging About: Creating and maintaining diversity in digital media.

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Eliza Kern
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eliza Kern is a senior political science major at UNC Chapel Hill, where she was an editor for The Daily Tar Heel and now serves as managing editor for reesenews.org. A politics and news junkie, she tweets from @elizakern and hopes to pursue a career in journalism upon graduation in May.

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Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ellen Hume became the research director of the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT in January 2008. She also is publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire, which she founded in 2007 at UMass Boston while teaching there. Hume was a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, executive director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, executive director of PBS's Democracy Project, senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program, and an international media analyst and trainer. You can learn more about her at this personal website.

Project: To create the Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Eric Gundersen
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eric Gundersen is the president and co-founder of Development Seed. Over the past eight years, Gundersen has developed communications strategies and tools for some of the largest international development organizations in the world, in additional to working with U.S.-based public health and education organizations. He is especially interested in improving information flows within large organizations, better integrating on the ground operations with those of their home bases and visualizing information in actionable ways. Eric, a 2009 winner of the Federal 100 award for his contributions to government technology, earned his master's in international development from American University in Washington, D.C., and has dual bachelor's degrees in economics and international relations. He co-founded Development Seed while researching technology access and microfinance in Peru. Before starting Development Seed, Eric was a journalist in Washington, D.C. writing on the environment and national security.

Project: To inspire residents to learn about local issues, Tilemapping will help local media create hyper-local, data-filled maps for their websites and blogs. Journalists will be able to tell more textured stories, while residents will be able to draw connections to their physical communities in new ways. The tools will be tested in Washington, D.C. Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, used a prototype after the earthquake in Haiti to create maps used to crowdsource reports on places needing aid.

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Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eric Rodenbeck is the founder and creative director of Stamen, a leading mapping and data visualization design studio based in San Francisco. Recent Stamen projects for the London 2012 Olympics, MSNBC and the City of San Francisco push the boundaries of online cartography and design. In addition, the studio’s contribution to open-source mapping projects are helping to make possible a bottom-up revolution in how maps and data visualization are made and consumed. Rodenbeck led the interactive storytelling and data-driven narrative effort at Quokka Sports, illustrated and designed at Wired magazine and Wired Books, and was a co-founder of the design collective Umwow. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art Rodenbeck received a bachelor’s in the history and philosophy of technology from The New School for Social Research in 1994. In 2008 he was name one of Esquire magazine's "Best and Brightest" new designers and thinkers, and one of ID Magazine's top 40 designers to watch. He is on the board of directors of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

Project: To make municipal data easy to understand, CityTracking will allow users to create embeddable data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos. The dynamic interfaces will be appropriate to each data type, starting with crime and working through 311 calls for service, among others. The creators will use high design standards, making the visuals beautiful as well as useful.

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Erik Hersman
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Raised in Kenya and Sudan, Erik Hersman is a technologist and blogger who lives in Nairobi. He is a co-founder of Ushahidi, a free and open-source platform for crowdsourcing information and visualizing data. He is the founder of AfriGadget, a multi-author site that showcases stories of African inventions and ingenuity, and an African technology blogger at WhiteAfrican.com. He currently manages Ushahidi's operations and strategy, and is in charge of the iHub, Nairobi’s Innovation Hub for the technology community, bringing together entrepreneurs, hackers, designers and the investment community. Erik is a TED Senior Fellow, a PopTech Fellow and speaker and an organizer for Maker Faire Africa. You can find him on Twitter at @WhiteAfrican

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Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fabio Berzaghi Computer Science Master's graduate at the University of Minnesota. Besides being a researcher for the Knight News Challenge. His focuses are game and sound design. He has previous experience in the videogame realm working in quality assurance for Milestone. He also has a rock band in Minneapolis.

Project: Playing the News is a news simulation environment which lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.

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Florence Scialom
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Florence Scialom, FrontlineSMS' community support coordinator, joined the FrontlineSMS core team in late 2010 to manage FrontlineSMS’ user support and engagement. Her role involves actively connecting and supporting the wide community of those using FrontlineSMS software for social change projects across the world. In addition, she oversees online communications and helps organize FrontlineSMS events. Florence previously worked at the Humanitarian Centre, a networking organization for international relief and development, where she helped initiate a network dedicated to ICT4D (use of information and communication technologies for development). Florence holds her B.A. in International Relations and Development Studies from the University of Sussex.

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G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

G. Patton "Pat" Hughes has worked in a wide variety of media jobs, including community journalism, advertising, online hosting, clerking, TV reporting, sports reporting, and marketing. As the population of Paulding County, Ga., began to boom, Hughes saw the opportunity for a hyper-local news site and obtained the Paulding.com domain in 1997 as editor of a local weekly newspaper. Monthly reach in the community is about 30 percent of households. Hughes has a B.A. degree from Hendrix College and is married with two children.

Blogging About: Making Paulding.com a financial success, from discussing practical aspects of building its revenue base from advertising and paid subscriptions, to sharing prior (and future) technical and strategic successes, failures, objections and issues.

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Gabriel Berrios
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gabriel Berrios is a journalist and currently works as co-developer and project coordinator of "Our City, Our Voices: Immigrant Voices" for JUNTOS, a community-organizing and leadership development non-profit in Philadelphia. He also serves as a consultant for non-profit organizations focusing on the development of micro-media communications in Chile and Mexico. From 2001 to 2004 he was a member of the coordinating committee of the Mexico-based global program "Make a Connection," creating networks of youth documentary makers who promoted their rights through informative video production. He was the creator of the project "See and Participate for Democracy," where a team of youth videographers promoted a culture of transparency for public funding in Mexican municipalities by monitoring the activities of local authorities. Gabriel received his BA in Communications, BA in Philosophy of Art in Chile, lived and worked for 7 years in Mexico City, and presently resides in Philadelphia.

Project: To develop online digital newscasts for Philadelphia's immigrant community and to distribute them via the new citywide wireless platform.

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Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gail Robinson is editor-in-chief of GothamGazette.com, an award-winning publication on New York City policy and politics. Founded in 1999, GothamGazette has pioneered the use of online media to cover local issues, from arts to environment to technology, and political campaigns. It offers original reporting, summaries of and links to other journalism, commentaries by prominent New Yorkers and a wealth of links to reports, organizations and city offices. Robinson has 25 years of experience as a political journalist. In 2000, she joined Gotham Gazette where she has written extensively about the upheaval in the New York City school system, covered local political contests and reported on issues from parades to pollution. She also worked on Gotham Gazette's early forays into games. A resident of Brooklyn and loyal (if not native) New Yorker, Robinson became editor-in-chief of Gotham Gazette in 2007.

Project: Gotham Gazette will develop games to inform and engage players about key issues confronting New York City. Gotham Gazette will hold forums on the games' issues, report on what solutions the players developed and relay those ideas to city officials.

2nd Project: Gotham Gazette won a second grant in 2009 to expand its City Council coverage with a wiki devoted to local legislators called Councilpedia. With Gotham Gazette providing coverage and context about campaign contributions and voting records, the public will be able to share what it knows about legislators through scrutinizing records and its own reporting and knowledge. The project strives to create a better- informed, more engaged citizenry and a new era of greater government transparency.

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Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Geoff Dougherty is the founding editor of ChiTownDailyNews.org and the CEO of its parent company, PublicMedia, Inc. He was an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune, and served in similar roles at the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times. He has 14 years of journalism experience and has won numerous awards for his work. While at the Miami Herald, Dougherty played a key role in the newspaper's effort to review, count and analyze discarded ballots from the 2000 presidential election. He is a graduate of Colorado College.

Project: The Chi-Town Daily News will recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists -- one in each Chicago neighborhood. The journalists will work with editors to produce a professional, comprehensive daily local news report.

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Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Guy Berger heads the School of Journalism & Media Studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. He has worked in print media and television. He was deputy chair of the South African National Editors' Forum from 2003 to 2004 and remains an active member. Berger also writes "Converse," a column for the Mail & Guardian online. He has a Ph.D. from Rhodes University.

Project: Local news reports disseminated through cell phones will help connect an all-black township in South Africa with the white population living in the urban center -- giving everyone in Grahamstown equal access to news and information. Articles from the community newspaper, Grocott's Mail, will be delivered to mobile phones, the only modern communications system available in the rural township. In a partnership with a local university, journalism students will create audio and video feeds for distribution. Meanwhile, masters-level students will study the project's design and impact, while post-graduate students develop a sustainable business model for the technology. The project will create open-source software so that small town newspapers around the globe will be able to send mobile reports.

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Harry Dugmore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Professor Harry Dugmore is MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communication at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University. Harry has been involved in media and communications for twenty years, first with visual communications pioneers Rapid Phase (Madam & Eve, Soul City scripts) and then as joint programme coordinator for government’s Khomanani HIV and AIDS communication programme. In recent years, Harry has used long-term trend analysis and scenario planning techniques to create planning frameworks for South Africa, through the Presidency scenarios 2025 project, and for Gauteng Province and Johannesburg City.

Project: Local news reports disseminated through cell phones will help connect an all-black township in South Africa with the white population living in the urban center -- giving everyone in Grahamstown equal access to news and information. Articles from the community newspaper, Grocott's Mail, will be delivered to mobile phones, the only modern communications system available in the rural township. In a partnership with a local university, journalism students will create audio and video feeds for distribution. Meanwhile, masters-level students will study the project's design and impact, while post-graduate students develop a sustainable business model for the technology. The project will create open-source software so that small town newspapers around the globe will be able to send mobile reports.

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Heather Ford
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Heather Ford is a budding ethnographer who studies how online communities get together to learn, play and deliberate. She currently works for Ushahidi and is studying how online communities like Wikipedia work together to verify information collected from the web and how new technology might be designed to help them do this better. Heather recently graduated from the UC Berkeley iSchool where she studied the social life of information in schools, educational privacy and Africans on Wikipedia. She is a former Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board member and the former Executive Director of iCommons – an international organization started by Creative Commons to connect the open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world. She was a co-founder of Creative Commons South Africa and of the South African nonprofit, The African Commons Project as well as a community-building initiative called the GeekRetreat – bringing together South Africa’s top web entrepreneurs to talk about how to make the local Internet better. At night she dreams about writing books and finding time to draw.

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Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Henry Jenkins is the director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, the newest books of which include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. Jenkins recently developed a white paper on the future of media literacy education for the MacArthur Foundation, which is leading to a three year project to develop curricular materials to help teachers and parents better prepare young people for full participation in contemporary culture. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. He is one of the leaders of the Convergence Culture Consortium, which consults with leading players in the branded entertainment sector in hopes of helping them adjust to shifts in the media environment.

Project: To create the Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Ian Bogost
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ian Bogost, a videogame designer, critic and researcher, is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at Persuasive Games. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on political games and art games. Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and co-author of the forthcoming Newsgames: Journalism at Play. Bogost's videogames cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally.

Project:: To engage readers in the news, The Cartoonist will be a free tool that produces cartoon-like current event games – the game equivalent of editorial cartoons. The simplified tools will be created with busy journalists and editors in mind, people who have the pulse of their community but don’t have a background in game development. By answering a series of questions about the major actors in a news event, and value judgments about their actions, The Cartoonist will automatically proposes game rules and images. The games aim to help the sites draw readers and inspire them to explore the news.

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Ian Cairns
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Project: To inspire residents to learn about local issues, Tilemapping will help local media create hyper-local, data-filled maps for their websites and blogs. Journalists will be able to tell more textured stories, while residents will be able to draw connections to their physical communities in new ways. The tools will be tested in Washington, D.C. Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, used a prototype after the earthquake in Haiti to create maps used to crowdsource reports on places needing aid.

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Ian V. Rowe
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ian V. Rowe is the vice president of Strategic Partnerships and Public Affairs for MTV. His department oversees MTV's campaigns that build awareness of issues important to MTV's audience. He now oversees MTV's new pro-social platform, Think MTV, which informs and engages viewers to take action on the domestic and global issues that matter most and affect their lives. Prior to MTV, Rowe was the director of Strategy and Performance Measurement for USA Freedom Corps at the White House, the president's initiative on volunteer service. He is an Echoing Green Fellow and was also founder and president of Third Millennium Media, a media consulting business. Rowe spent two years with Teach for America, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science Engineering from Cornell University.

Project: MTV will cover the 2008 presidential election with a Knight Mobile Youth Journalist in every state and the District of Columbia who will create video news reports specifically for distribution on cell phones. The weekly reports will be voted on by the public, and the best will be rebroadcast on the MTV television network. By enabling young adults to report on issues that interest them and distribute those reports on their most commonly used digital medium, the cell phone, MTV hopes to compel leading presidential candidates to address issues important to this demographic and to mobilize young adults to register and vote.

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Idealab Admin

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J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

J.D. Lasica is an independent strategist, journalist, author and social media pioneer. He is president of the Social Media Group, a company that offers consulting in social media, video and podcasting services to companies and organizations. He is also co-founder and president of Ourmedia, a free community site and learning center for user-created video and audio. His book, "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation," explores the personal media revolution and the emerging media landscape. He was the first new media columnist for both the American Journalism Review and Online Journalism Review. He writes about citizen media and social networks at Socialmedia.biz. CNET named him one of the 100 top media bloggers in the world.

Blogging About: A Community Media Toolset that will provide publishers, editors and developers at citizen media sites with easy-to-use social media tools -- plug-ins, scripts, guides and tutorials -- to expand public participation.

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Jake Shapiro

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Jane Briggs-Bunting
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jane Briggs-Bunting is director of the Michigan State University School of Journalism. She joined the MSU faculty in August 2003 after 24 years in journalism education at another university. In April 2003, she was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame. Before joining the faculty, she worked as a Detroit Free Press reporter covering breaking and hard news. She earned her law degree at night. While at the university, she reported for the Free Press, People and LIFE magazines. Since her arrival at MSU she has been transitioning the curriculum to address the revolutionary changes in the media industry.

Project: Create "incubator" at Michigan State (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Jay Rosen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. From 1999 to 2005 he was department chair. Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism issues that launched in September 2003. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression. He also blogs at the Huffington Post. In July 2006 he announced the debut of NewAssignment.net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. His book about the rise of the civic journalism movement, "What Are Journalists For?" was published in 1999 by Yale University Press. He lives in New York City.

Blogging About: How beat reporters can work with social networks to improve their reporting.

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Jeffrey Warren
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The creator of GrassrootsMapping.org, Jeff Warren designs mapping tools, visual programming environments, and flies balloons and kites as a fellow in the Center for Future Civic Media, and as a student at the MIT Media Lab’s Design Ecology group, where he created the vector-mapping framework Cartagen. He co-founded Vestal Design, a graphic/interaction design firm in 2004, and directed the Cut&Paste Labs project, a year-long series of workshops on open source tools and web design in 2006-7 with Lima designer Diego Rotalde. He is a co-founder of Portland-based Paydici.com.

Project: The Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Jeremy Ashkenas
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jeremy Ashkenas is the lead developer at DocumentCloud. His previous job was at Zenbe Inc., a provider of online email and collaboration software. He's the creator of the Ruby-Processing visualization toolkit, and a winner -- twice -- of the Sunlight Foundation's Apps for America competition. Jeremy graduated from Brown University in 2008 with a degree in Literary Systems.

Project: DocumentCloud is a website that will enhance investigative reporting by making source documents easy to find, share and read. While rich source documents are the foundation of investigative journalism, too often reporters throw or tuck them away after a story fades, never to be used again. DocumentCloud will provide an online database of documents contributed by a consortium of news organizations, watchdog groups and bloggers, and shared with the public at large. Users will be able to search by topic, agency or location. Reporters will benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, which will be able to collaboratively examine large document sets.

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Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jesse Shapins is co-founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard, an experimental research unit at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, dedicated to innovation in arts, media and humanities. Jesse is also the chief collaboration architect of Media And Place (MAP) Productions, a startup non-profit whose mission is to tell powerful stories, inspire democratic participation, strengthen the public domain, and deepen the vitality of local communities through innovative technologies, interactive documentaries and educational programs. Jesse is a media artist, theorist and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Metropolis, PRAXIS and Wired, and exhibited at MoMA, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, among other venues. He is the co-creator of Yellow Arrow, the groundbreaking mobile storytelling platform, as well as Zeega, Mapping Main Street, UnionDocs, Periplurban, and The Colors Berlin, among other projects. He is on the faculty of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-teaches the courses Media Archaeology of Place and The Mixed-Reality City. He's also completing a Ph.D. in Urbanism and Critical Media Practice titled "Mapping the Urban Database Documentary: Utopias of Panoramic Perception, Sensory Estrangement and Participatory Media."

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Jessica Mayberry
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jessica Mayberry founded Video Volunteers in September 2003 after spending a year training rural Indian women in filmmaking as a fellow of the American India Foundation. Video Volunteers is working to create a media industry at the base of the social pyramid by training local people to run their own "Community Video Units" in partnership with NGOs. Prior to that, Mayberry worked at Court TV, the Fox News Channel and CNN. She is a fellow of Echoing Green, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs. She also serves on the board of Free the Children, the world's largest organization of "Children Helping Children" and on the Advisory Council of Counterpart International. She holds a degree in modern history and modern languages from Oxford University.

Project: Video Volunteers, a New York-based nonprofit, will train 100 people in rural India as Community Video Producers. These citizen journalists will produce magazine- style video news reports, typically on local social issues, and show them on widescreen projectors in poor communities. The idea is to distribute public interest information to the poor - without having to provide the entire population with digital tools. To date, Video Volunteers' screenings in India have reached 140,000 people in 150 communities. The video technology is not new. The innovation is to do citizen journalism on a significant scale in a poor, rural area.

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Joe Boydston
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Joe Boydston is vice president of technology and new media at McNaughton Newspaper Group of Northern California. Boydston has extensive experience in project management, software and Web site design, sales development, sales training and performance management.

Project: Publishing files on the Web that were originally created for print publications has always been a challenge, especially for small community newspapers. News organizations have typically solved the problem by creating proprietary publishing systems for their sole benefit. This grant will create new and easy to use tools that will allow news organizations to essentially drag and drop articles onto an online news site. The process will save news organizations, particularly small community newspapers, significant time, money and manpower, allowing them to direct their resources to bring their community the news and information it needs.

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Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Joe Spurr is a multimedia journalist and a web developer currently directing a soon-to-launch WBUR/Knight Foundation project to modernize public access to local courtrooms. He previously was the staff web developer for San Diego’s NPR member station, kpbs.org, which he helped completely overhaul in 2009. He pioneered the station's adoption of Twitter and Google "My Maps" which culminated during the 2007 California wildfires, built layered, interactive maps to help track the drug-related murder surge in Tijuana, and produced in a roving, three-person skeleton crew from the DNC and RNC in 2008. Joe is a Boston native, a graduate of Northeastern University, and a former freelance reporter at the Boston Globe.

Project: To foster greater access to the judicial process, this project will create a laboratory in a Boston courtroom to help establish best practices for digital coverage that can be replicated and adopted throughout the nation. While the legislative and executive branches have incorporated new technologies and social media, the courts still operate under the video and audio recording standards established in the 1970s and 80s. The courtroom will have a designated area for live blogging via a wifi network and the ability to live-stream court proceedings to the public. Working in conjunction with the Massachusetts court system, the project will publish the daily docket on the web and build a knowledge wiki for the public with common legal terms.

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Joel Sucherman

For nearly 20 years, Joel Sucherman has been a pioneer in the field of new media. Sucherman is currently NPR’s Program Director for Project Argo, building
a network of niche, topic-based Websites for NPR and public media stations. An accomplished multimedia journalist, Sucherman led teams that pioneered some of USATODAY.com’s most innovative features, including the award winning USA TODAY iPhone application and a USA TODAY-branded flat-screen news and information display, known as the “Go Board," that has become a brand standard for Marriott Courtyard hotels. Sucherman spent the early 1990s covering Congress and the White House for a radio news bureau in Washington then ventured into digital media in 1992, experimenting with audio and text news delivery over phone networks. He later founded USA TODAY’s streaming audio and video unit and covered the 2000 and 2004 political conventions and the Sydney and Salt Lake Olympics as an early “backpack” journalist. Sucherman led a team that spearheaded the USA TODAY’s blogging, social media and Web 2.0 innovations. During that time, he also supervised the overhaul of USA
TODAY’s website and built out more than 20 new community blogs, helping a traditional print organization re-imagine its storytelling on the web.

Project:NPR’s Project Argo is a pilot program to build and launch a network of 12 niche, topic-focused websites for NPR member stations that can be models for the rest of the public broadcasting. Argo sites are piloted by one reporter-blogger. At a time in which we’ve seen large-scale layoffs across the news industry, we’re proving the notion that a news organization can quickly build authority, engagement and traffic without significant increases in newsroom staff. The topics we cover are important locally, but resonate nationally. They vary in scope from Global Health to Higher Education and from Climate Change to Crime and the Courts. Argo stations include KQED and KALW in San Francisco , KPCC in Pasadena , KPBS in San Diego , Oregon Public Broadcasting , KPLU in Seattle , Minnesota Public Radio , WBUR and WGBH in Boston , WNYC in New York , WXPN in Philadelphia and WAMU in Washington, D.C.

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John Barth
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

John Barth is the managing director of the Public Radio Exchange (PRX.org), an online distributor and archive of radio programs and audio that serves public radio networks, stations, producers, podcasts, satellite radio and commercial digital companies. He was the founding producer of the public radio business program Marketplace, went from there to run all of AOL's news operations and business, and then was in charge of original content for the premium spoken-word site, Audible.com. He was the editorial director of the 2003 Public Radio Collaboration project Whose Democracy Is It? and forged collaborations with NPR, the BBC, Microsoft, PBS and Alibris.com. John has been a reporter, producer and news director at public radio stations in Missouri, Minnesota and Philadelphia. His radio work has been heard on NPR's various programs. He was an adjunct at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs and serves on its advisory council. He has also been a judge for the Third Coast Audio Festival, served on the board of the Public Radio Program Directors, and has advised many funding evaluation panels for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. John has an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia (1979) and a B.A. in political science from the University of Delaware (1976). He lives in St. Louis.

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John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

John Davidow was named WBUR’s executive editor of new media in July of 2009, where he has overseen the growth of the award-winning wbur.org. Davidow joined WBUR as news director/managing editor in 2003 after spending more than two decades as a journalist in Boston. Davidow’s work has been recognized with regional awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Associated Press and UPI. He has also been the recipient of a number of regional Emmy Awards. Davidow graduated cum laude from Tufts University with a bachelor’s in economics.

Project: To foster greater access to the judicial process, this project will create a laboratory in a Boston courtroom to help establish best practices for digital coverage that can be replicated and adopted throughout the nation. While the legislative and executive branches have incorporated new technologies and social media, the courts still operate under the video and audio recording standards established in the 1970s and 80s. The courtroom will have a designated area for live blogging via a wifi network and the ability to live-stream court proceedings to the public. Working in conjunction with the Massachusetts court system, the project will publish the daily docket on the web and build a knowledge wiki for the public with common legal terms.

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John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

John Ewing is a new media artist merging dialogs, public art and education. He worked for two years in El Salvador, using the arts to organize and inspire dialogue about human rights. Other work includes projects in Nicaragua, Uruguay and Cuba, as well as various cities in the U.S. He has a master’s of fine arts in digital media from the Rhode Island School of Design and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University.

Project: The Greater Boston neighborhoods of Brookline and Roxbury are 2.4 miles apart, yet there is little interaction between them because of divisions of race and class. This project will connect them through citizen journalists’ video newscasts that will be projected on life-size screens to enable real-time interaction between citizens. Organizers hope the broadcasts spur crowds and discussion about their shared region, and engage citizens to think beyond their social circles. Reporters could then mine those crowds for further stories.

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Jon Vidar
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jon Vidar is executive director of the Tiziano Project. His past work has included archaeological excavations in Turkey and Greece, new media training programs in Rwanda and Iraq, and writing and photographing for the travel guide series Modern Overland in South Africa. In 2007, with Andrew McGregor and Tom Rippe, he founded The Tiziano Project in Kigali, Rwanda. Vidar has since led two programs in Iraqi Kurdistan and in 2010 launched The Tiziano Project | 360 Kurdistan, which has received recognition from SXSW Interactive, the Gracies and the Webby Awards.

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Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jonathan Stray is interactive technology editor at The Associated Press global headquarters in New York, overseeing developers and producers who create new storytelling techniques and experiences. Stray started writing computer graphics software in high school, eventually landing a job at Adobe Systems, where he led a number of research projects. In his time off, he traveled through Africa and Asia. Awed by what he saw, he began to write about it and found work as a freelance journalist. He moved to Hong Kong in 2009, contributing to Foreign Policy, The New York Times and China Daily. He holds a master’s in computer science from the University of Toronto and a master’s in journalism from the University of Hong Kong.

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Jordan Salinger
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Jordan Salinger works as the Research and Volunteer Coordinator at San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) As a researcher and writer, his focus has been on congestion pricing, economic development, and publicly accessible data. On SPUR’s blog, he has created a weekly series called the “Data Blog," which examines infographics, user generated maps, and other visualizations that profile issues affecting cities.

Project: To make municipal data easy to understand, CityTracking will allow users to create embeddable data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos. The dynamic interfaces will be appropriate to each data type, starting with crime and working through 311 calls for service, among others. The creators will use high design standards, making the visuals beautiful as well as useful.

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Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Juliana Rotich is Co-founder and the Program Director of Ushahidi. Ushahidi (which means “testimony” in Swahili), a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence during the post-election crisis in Kenya. Currently, she is working with a team to continue development of this new free and open source platform that makes it easier to crowd-source crisis information and visualize data.

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Justin Miller
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Justin Miler is the founder of
Code Sorcery Workshop, a Portland-based company that provides solutions that live on the web using server technologies, on your Mac using desktop software, and in your pocket with the iPhone and iPad. Code Sorcery Workshop has partnered with Development Seed to to bring MapBox maps to mobile devices. Justin helped create the MapBox iPad app, which brings custom map tiles - like the ones created with the Tilemapping project - to the iPad, and lets users not only use custom maps on the iPad, but also add their own data to them, save and share them, and much more. Justin will blog here about his work on Development Seed's Tilemapping project, which aims to make it easier to create and use beautiful custom maps.

Project: To inspire residents to learn about local issues, Tilemapping will help local media create hyper-local, data-filled maps for their websites and blogs. Journalists will be able to tell more textured stories, while residents will be able to draw connections to their physical communities in new ways. The tools will be tested in Washington, D.C. Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, used a prototype after the earthquake in Haiti to create maps used to crowdsource reports on places needing aid.

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Kara Oehler
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Kara Oehler is a Peabody award-winning audio documentarian, executive director of the news nonprofit Media And Place Productions and co-founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard, a hub for media innovation. Oehler is c-ocreator of: Zeega, an open-source HTML5 platform that allows anyone to easily create works of interactive journalism; Mapping Main Street, a collaborative documentary that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos; Yellow Arrow :: Capitol of Punk, an interactive documentary that was featured in MoMA’s exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind”; and the UnionDocs Collaborative, a laboratory for documentary arts research and production.

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Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Kathleen A. Hansen is a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center (MJC) and supervisor of the school’s Digital Information Resource Center. She is a co-author (with Nora Paul) of “Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators.” Playing the News is a news simulation environment which lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.

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Katrin Verclas
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Katrin Verclas is the co-founder of MobileActive, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones for social impact. Verclas has written widely on mobile phones in citizen participation, civil society organizations, health and for development. She is a co-author of Wireless Technology for Social Change, a report on trends in mobile use by NGOs with the UN Foundation and Vodafone Group Foundation, and author of A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media, a report supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development. She is currently a fellow at MIT's Media Lab and was a 2009 TED fellow.

Project: With more than half the world owning a mobile device, the media industry, civil society groups and citizens yearn to use the technology to create and distribute news and information. Yet they often lack the knowledge and tools necessary. The Mobile Media Toolkit will offer media production tool sets for download and use on a variety of phones across regions of the world. The toolkit will include applications for video and audio recording, a distribution tool for mobile content to social media sites and detailed how-to information that outlines what users can do with the phones they have.

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Kimberly Sultze
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Kimberly Sultze is chair of the department of journalism and mass communication at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt. After 13 years of teaching, she is an expert in curriculum development in journalism, mass communication and media studies. Her research interests include the history and cultural interpretation of visual communication. From 2003-2004, she was Head of the Visual Communication division of the AEJMC. She received her B.A. from Carleton College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University's Department of Culture and Communication, Program in Media Ecology. Prior to earning her academic credentials, she worked in print journalism in Sydney, Australia, in television production in the Twin Cities, Minn., and as an editor with FIS-New York.

Project: Create "incubator" at St. Michael's College (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Kristofs Blaus is socially active European entrepreneur managing various innovative businesses in Baltics. Since 2007 his companies are successfully working with teaching-aid softwares for mobile phones, advanced marketing solutions, payment-systems and advanced IT services for clients from Finland, Estonia, Latvia. He is founder and CEO of Education Mobile Ltd., Technology Mobile Ltd., Politics Mobile Ltd. and founder of Society Technologies Foundation. By the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia, Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, EIROPE INNOVA and various other business institutions, Kristofs Blaus is recognized as one of few successful innovative entrepreneurs in Latvia. Winner of various business competitions in Latvia: Cup of Ideas 2007 (www.idejukauss.lv), Innovation Plan Competition 2007 (by www.db.lv), Business Plan Competition 2006 (by www.db.lv). He has lectured and presented to young entrepreneurs, teachers, young leaders and business students across the Baltic region.

Project: To inspire people to get involved in their community, this project will create a live, online map with local news and activities. GoMap Riga will pull some content from the web and place it automatically on the map. Residents also will be able to add their own news, pictures and videos while also discussing what is happening around them. GoMap Riga will be integrated with the major existing social networks and allow civic participation through mobile technology. The project will be tested in Riga, Latvia, and ultimately be applicable in other cities.

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Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Leslie Rule is director of the newly created Center for Locative Media. She also runs KQED's Digital Storytelling Initiative and Digital Media Center, working in the fields of Community Education and Outreach. She is an acknowledged expert on using digital storytelling as a communication strategy, sat on the Executive Board of the Digital Storytelling Association, is a founding member of the Society of M-Learning and is on the advisory board of ourmedia.org. Currently she is using mobile devices and emerging technologies to create location-specific, community-based narrative projects, including "Scape the Hood," a neighborhood narrative; "Re-storying," a creek restoration project; "100 Years Later," a community walk through San Francisco's 1906 earthquake; and a social justice project inspired by "Eyes on the Prize." Ms. Rule has undergraduate degrees in rhetoric and linguistics from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Education with an emphasis in instructional technology. She lives high atop the hills of San Francisco with her beloved son Thom and her beastly border collie, Bella.

Blogging About: The Interactive Community Spaces project, the use of GPS tracking to inform people through mobile media.

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Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Lisa Williams is the founder of Placeblogger, the largest live site of local weblogs and of H2Otown, a nationally recognized citizen journalism site and online community for Watertown, Mass. After attending Emerson College, she worked briefly at a regional daily newspaper. Later, as an analyst at Daratech she wrote about computer-aided design technology. Williams moved from Daratech to Yankee Group, where she became the director of their enterprise software research group. Williams is an active member of the regular bloggers' meeting at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. She was recently named a fellow of Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution at the National Constitution Center.

Project: To make it easier for people to find hyperlocal news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of "universal geotagging" in blogs.

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Liz Barry
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Director of urban environment at Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science and co-founder of TreeKIT, Liz Barry develops geographic tools and civic science methods for collaborative cities. Her background is in urban landscape design, and she teaches at Columbia University, Parsons the New School for Design, and Pratt Institute. Previously, she worked at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill planning international new cities and campuses, at Durham Inner-city Gardeners (DIG) coordinating youth urban agriculture enterprise, and has traveled around the country catalyzing interaction among strangers with a “Talk To Me” sign – a project that received international press including The New York Times, AP, CNN, Oprah and NPR’s "This American Life." She likes to play outside.

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Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Liz Nord is a producer and documentary filmmaker. She currently runs MTV/Knight Street Team '08, a team of 51 state-based citizen journalists who are covering the presidential election. In 2006, she toured the world with her film about rebellious young Israelis, "Jericho's Echo: Punk Rock in the Holy Land." She is also a media educator, lecturer, and columnist. She recently relocated to New York from the Bay Area, where she ran a media education non-profit and served on the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Women in Film and TV.

Project: MTV will cover the 2008 presidential election with a Knight Mobile Youth Journalist in every state and the District of Columbia who will create video news reports specifically for distribution on cell phones. The weekly reports will be voted on by the public, and the best will be rebroadcast on the MTV television network. By enabling young adults to report on issues that interest them and distribute those reports on their most commonly used digital medium, the cell phone, MTV hopes to compel leading presidential candidates to address issues important to this demographic and to mobilize you adults to register and vote.

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Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Lucy Chambers is a community coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. She works on the OKF's OpenSpending project and coordinates the data-driven-journalism activities of the foundation, including
running training sessions and helping to streamline the production of a collaboratively written handbook for data journalists.

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Margaret Rosas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Margaret Rosas is founder and chief strategist of Quiddities, Dev Inc., a web development agency in Santa Cruz, Calif. Quiddities specializes in web application projects using the open source social publishing system, Drupal. These projects include work for the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Santa Cruz; leaders in the sustainability movement; and large e-commerce companies. Rosas began her career building data networks and supporting their users, in large corporations and small businesses. As the internet emerged, Rosas immersed herself in web application design, where she could focus her technical skills on creating user experiences.

Project: Drupal, one of the popular open-source software platforms that publish web sites, will be used to create a turnkey web site for radio news organizations. This content management and publishing system will address the needs of radio news sites, such as creating and archiving audio and text, producing podcasts and playlists and streaming live audio and video. KUSP, a public radio station on California's Central Coast, will test the project.

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Mark Follman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Follman is associate director of MediaBugs. He was a writer and editor at Salon from 2003 to 2009, and his reporting and essays have appeared in various other publications including Rolling Stone, Arrive and Mother Jones. He blogs regularly about culture, media and politics, and can be found on Twitter @markfollman. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their one-year-old vizsla, Renzo.

Project: All journalists make mistakes, but they sometimes view admitting errors as a mark of shame. MediaBugs aims to change this climate, by promoting transparency and providing recognition for those who admit and fix their mistakes. MediaBugs will create a public test web site in a U.S. city for people to report errors in any news report – online or off-line. Comments will be tracked to see if they create a conversation between the reporter and the error submitter, and then show whether corrections or changes resulted. Based on a system that technology teams use when releasing software, this aggregation process will display trends in errors and show which news organizations are responsible to public questions and comments.

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Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Glaser is the editor of Idea Lab and PBS MediaShift. He is a longtime freelance journalist whose long and winding career include columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. Most recently, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review, and he still writes the OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. In past lives, Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column.

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Mark Surman

A community technology activist for almost 20 years, Mark Surman is currently the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, with a focus on innovation and next gen open Internet apps. Before joining Mozilla, he was founding director of telecentre.org and president of the Commons Group. Mark’s first real job was training social activists to make their own video documentaries in the early 1990s.

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Martin Keegan
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Martin Keegan is a software engineer and linguist, currently leading the Open Knowledge Foundation's OpenSpending project. He is also on the Open Knowledge Foundation's board, and has worked for SRI, Citrix, University of Cambridge and co-founded and worked for various civil society organizations.

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Martin Moore
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Martin Moore is the director of the Media Standards Trust, a nonprofit organization that aims to foster high quality journalism. He has been working in news and media for more than a decade, including for the BBC, Channel 4, NTL, IPC Media, Trinity Mirror and others. Moore studied history at Cambridge and holds a doctorate from the London School of Economics, where he was teaching and researching until summer 2006.

Project: With the copious amounts of information -- and misinformation -- on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of "source tagging." For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data -- the "story behind the story" -- to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase "Pakistan riots" for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by "eyewitness accounts" would yield a more selective list. Moore, Berners-Lee and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists' normal workflow.

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Mary Lou Fulton
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

strong>Mary Lou Fulton is Vice President of Audience Development at The Bakersfield Californian, where she leads the company's new product development and market research teams. Fulton is the founder of The Northwest Voice, one of the first citizen journalism publications in the newspaper industry, and The Californian's new product development work has been widely recognized as a positive example of innovation in the newspaper business. Fulton's background spans both newspapers and technology. She started out in the newsroom, working for the AP and later as a reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times. Fulton moved to the online world in 1995 when she joined The Washington Post's new media division and later became Managing Editor of washingtonpost.com. Fulton also held senior management positions at a number of online companies, including America Online, GeoCities and HomePage.com, before returning to the newspaper business in 2003 when she joined The Californian.

Project: Printcasting will allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information. The software will help aggregate feeds from news organizations, bloggers or newsletters, for example, so that would-be publishers can pick and choose among them to create a niche publication. The Printcasting model then will guide users through placing articles, photos and ads onto a template that either could be delivered by e-mail or printed at home and distributed. For example, a publication for reef-diving photographers could include ads for nearby dive shops or underwater cameras. The idea is to pair localized ads and content to create targeted publications.

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Mathew Lippincott
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mathew lives in Portland, Ore., where he works on design issues in sanitation through the Cloacina Project, is faculty at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and designs civic science tools as a founding member of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science.

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Matt Farwell
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Matt Farwell was a soldier in the US Army from 2005 to 2010. After infantry and airborne training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry, and deployed to Afghanistan for 16 months, earning the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Before enlisting, he studied government and history at the University of Virginia as an Echols Scholar and graduated from the United World College of the American West as Davis Scholar. Farwell’s writings about his Afghanistan deployment have been featured in “Generation What? Dispatches from the Quarterlife Crisis” and “The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction.” He currently divides his time between Virginia and Arkansas and war.

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Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Matt's a Research Assistant at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. He has spent his career at the intersection of technology and social change, mostly in Washington, D.C. He has advised numerous non-profits, startups, and socially responsible businesses on online strategy. Matt's interested in location, games, online tools, and other fun things. He's on Twitter @mstem.

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Matt Thompson
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Matt Thompson is an Editorial Product Manager for NPR’s Project Argo, consulting with 12 NPR member stations on the launch and execution of niche news sites. Before joining NPR, Matt built online communities for the Knight Foundation, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Fresno Bee. In 2008-09, Matt was a Donald W. Reynolds Fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, exploring how to deliver context alongside news on the Web. While working as an online reporter-producer for the Poynter Institute in 2004, Matt and his colleague Robin Sloan created the viral future-of-media video EPIC 2014, described in The Atlantic as a Zapruder film for the media industry. Matt graduated with honors in English from Harvard College in 2002.

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Melissa Ulbricht
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Melissa Ulbricht is a journalist currently based in New York City. In May 2010, Melissa received a master's degree in journalism from the Missouri School of Journalism. Melissa is the senior writer at MobileActive.org. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her undergraduate studies.

Project: With more than half the world owning a mobile device, the media industry, civil society groups and citizens yearn to use the technology to create and distribute news and information. Yet they often lack the knowledge and tools necessary. The Mobile Media Toolkit will offer media production tool sets for download and use on a variety of phones across regions of the world. The toolkit will include applications for video and audio recording, a distribution tool for mobile content to social media sites and detailed how-to information that outlines what users can do with the phones they have.

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Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Michael Wood-Lewis has been pulling neighbors together into community since his Indiana childhood spent organizing ball games and visiting neighbors on his evening paper route. Decades later, he founded Front Porch Forum, which hosts a pilot network of 140 online neighborhood forums that blankets 25 northwest Vermont towns. About 25,000 households subscribe, including nearly half of Burlington. The resulting news sharing and community building is attracting local, as well as national, recognition. Previously, he led an innovative trade association of New England utilities. Earlier, he guided a DC-based consortium of U.S. municipal leaders in developing environmental technologies, building on his experience as an inventor of high-tech recycling equipment. He earned a master’s in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as an MBA.

Project: To help neighbors connect and build community locally, this award will provide capital to rebuild and enhance a successful community news site, expand it to more towns and make the service available beyond its pilot region. Front Porch Forum, a virtual town hall space, helps residents share and discuss local news, build community and increase engagement. The site, currently serving 25 Vermont towns, will expand to 250.

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Miguel Paz
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Chilean journalist Miguel Paz is the CEO and founder of Poderopedia. He also works as assistant deputy editor of ElMostrador.cl, a news website about politics, business and public policy. He is the creative director of Premios WAW!, Chile's first online community voted award, and one of the creators of Hacks/Hackers Santiago.

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Mike Ivanov
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mike Ivanov is a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He co-founded DavisWiki.org in 2004. He, along with Philip Neustrom, was awarded the Excellence in Community Involvement Award by the City of Davis for his work on the DavisWiki, an honor usually reserved for traditional local media formats such as radio and television. He is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, with a bachelor’s in mathematics.

Project: Based on the successful DavisWiki.org in Davis, Calif., Local Wiki will create enhanced tools for local wikis, a new form of media that makes it easy for people to learn — and share — their own unique community knowledge. Members will be able to post articles about anything they like, edit others and upload photos and files. This grant will help create the specialized open-source software that makes the wiki possible and help communities develop, launch and sustain local wiki projects.

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Mitchel Resnick
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, explores how new technologies can help people (especially children) learn new things in new ways. His Lifelong Kindergarten research group developed the "programmable bricks" that were the basis for the LEGO MindStorms and PicoCricket construction kits. Resnick co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of after-school learning centers for youth from low-income communities. Resnick's group recently developed a new programming language, called Scratch, which makes it easier for kids to create their own interactive stories, games, music, and animations — and share their creations on the web. Resnick earned a BS in physics from Princeton, and an MS and PhD in computer science from MIT. Before pursuing his graduate degrees, he worked for five years as a science and technology journalist for Business Week magazine. He is the author or co-author of several books, including Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams.

Project: To create the Center for Future Civic Media, a leadership project designed to encourage community news experiments and new technologies and practices.

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Nathaniel James

Nathaniel James is the News Technology Program Manager on the Mozilla Drumbeat team and leads the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership.

Nathan’s career spans 10 years of non-profit administration and organizational development; advocacy and strategic communications; community organizing, engagement and field operations; and social research.

In addition to his work with Mozilla, he serves on the Board of Directors for the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (a.k.a. NAMAC).

Previously, Nathan served as the Executive Director of OneWebDay and earlier as Program and Outreach Manager at the Media and Democracy Coalition. He has managed field campaigns with FieldWorks, MoveOn, Grassroots Campaigns, Inc. and the Fund for Public Interest Research. He has also provided strategic consultation at Microsoft and for Greenpeace International, guiding them towards strategies that leveraged social networks and social media to achieve organizational goals.

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Nicola Hughes
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Nicola Hughes is a data journalism advocate at ScraperWiki and a trained journalist. Nicola worked at CNN as a digital media producer for TV. She focuses on understanding how journalists can work better with data and exploiting the possibilities of what can be done with it for a story, a visual and also using it to make data applications. Nicola is working on making the link between hacks (software developers) and hackers (journalists) effective and efficient since not only do they extract and use data day-to-day, but they also have knowledge of their local data landscape and in many cases the local language. Her objective is to help media professionals tap into this pool of specialist knowledge and skill. For more information on Nicola, please take a look at her blog DataMinerUK. Nicola has a BSc Theoretical Physics, Zoology (Trinity College Dublin), Pg Dip Broadcast Journalism (Cardiff) and has an MA Anthropology of Media (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)."

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Nonny de la Peña
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Nonny de la Peña is a senior research fellow in immersive journalism at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. At USC, she is pushing boundaries for entrepreneurial and technologically innovative journalistic endeavors. A graduate of Harvard University, she is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with 20 years of journalism experience including as a correspondent for Newsweek magazine and as a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Premiere magazine and others. Her films have screened on national television and at theatres in more than 50 cities around the globe, garnering praise from critics like the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, who called her work “a brave and necessary act of truth-telling.”

Project: To simplify the production of news video, Stroome will create a virtual video-editing studio. There, correspondents, editors and producers will be able to upload and share content, edit and remix with friends and colleagues – all without using expensive satellite truck technology. The site will launch as eyewitness video – often captured by mobile phones or webcams – is becoming a key component of news coverage, generating demand for supporting tools.

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Nora Paul
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Nora Paul is director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota. She previously taught at the Poynter Institute teaching news library management, computer-assisted research, and new media leadership from 1991 to 2000. She was editor for information services at the Miami Herald from 1979 to 1991. Paul (and Kathleen Hansen) are co-authors of "Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators." She is a member of the board of the World Press Institute, and has traveled worldwide presenting seminars and lectures on research methods and on innovation in online news. Her work at the University of Minnesota focuses on evolving digital storytelling forms.

Project: Playing the News is a news simulation environment which lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.

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Ory Okolloh
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ory Okolloh is the co-founder and executive director of Ushahidi. Okolloh graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Pittsburgh and graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She also writes one of the most popular blogs in the Kenyan sphere at KenyanPundit.com and is the co-founder of Mzalendo, a web site that tracks
the performance of Kenyan members of Parliament. She is a frequent speaker at conferences including TED Global and Pop!Tech on issues around citizen journalism, the role of technology in Africa and the role of young people in reshaping the future of Africa.

Project: The mainstream press is not big enough to be everywhere news breaks out. During crises, there rarely is a centralized point for reporting and searching for data about a particular situation. Ushahidi can help fill the gap by creating a free web map and timeline that journalists and citizens can use to contribute multiple reports of large news events. Contributed by web, e-mail or mobile phone, the reports will be displayed as locations on the map, as well as on the timeline. The
visual display of the source and type of information will help with trend analysis. The map has been tested in Kenya and will be rebuilt so that it can be used free
worldwide.

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Pam McAllister-Johnson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Pam McAllister-Johnson, Ph.D. is director of the Center for 21st Century Media, and School of Journalism & Broadcasting at Western Kentucky University. She has worked as both a print and broadcast reporter. During her 13-year term as president and publisher of the Ithaca (NY) Journal, a Gannett newspaper, McAllister-Johnson was the first black female publisher of a general circulation newspaper in the United States. McAllister-Johnson has a joint Ph.D. in Mass Communication and Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin where she also did her undergraduate and master's work.

Project: Create "incubator" at Western Kentucky University (along with six other schools) to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.

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Paul Goodman
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Paul is spending the summer with Development Seed, working on open data and mapping projects and building partnerships with development organizations. As a second year Master's student at the University of California, Berkeley, Paul is studying technology-enabled international development and social enterprise. Prior to joining Development Seed, Paul worked as an ICT Analyst with DAI where he advised projects and partners on the use of technology to reach development objectives. In that role, he worked on USAID-funded projects in Haiti, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other countries. He recently returned from a trip to Benin, where he helped Plan Benin improve its system for collecting and sharing reports of violence against children.

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Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Paul Grabowicz is Associate Dean, Senior Lecturer and Director of the New Media Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism where he teaches classes in multimedia reporting, new media publishing and video game storytelling. He is co-author of “California Inc.,” a book about how the entrepreneurial spirit shaped the politics, culture and economy of California. He spent most of his career as the investigative reporter at The Oakland Tribune, where he also served as night city editor and acting city editor and developed an early prototype of a web site for the paper. (It was rejected). He began his journalism career in 1973 working for local papers in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Bay Guardian and has written for publications such as The Washington Post, Esquire magazine, The Village Voice and Newsday.

The Knight News Challenge project is a re-creation of Oakland’s once vibrant blues and jazz club scene as an online video game and virtual world. The game allows players to experience the club scene as it was in its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, before it fell victim to redevelopment schemes and urban decay.

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Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Paul Lamb is a consultant and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in business, nonprofit management, technology and public policy. He is currently the Principal of Man on a Mission Consulting, a management consulting firm dedicated to leveraging technology for the social good. Paul is a founder and former Executive Director of The Stride Center, an award-winning program providing computer training and job placement for low-income and underserved youth in San Francisco’s East Bay. He has developed several other successful nonprofit programs and social enterprises in the areas of youth, workforce development, and technology.
Paul is also a frequent radio commentator and OpEd contributor on technology and social issues in a variety of publications. Paul is the co-author of the Be A Better Partner Handbook for Couples. He is also the founder of the Cool ‘n Conscientious blog, and is a contributing blogger on SmartMobs.com. He is a former Fellow with the ZeroDivide Foundation and is currently a Next Generation Fellow with the American Assembly at Columbia University.

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Philip Neustrom

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Phillip Smith

Phillip Smith is a digital publishing consultant. For more than a decade and a half he has focused on supporting the work of independent publishers and "movement media." He is currently focusing on the field of "news innovation" through Mozilla and The Tyee.

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Prabhas Pokharel
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Prabhas Pokharel graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelors in Computer Science, and is interested in exploring technology's role in furthering education and civic action in the developing world. His past projects have ranged from finding cheaper ways for embedded devices to communicate using the mobile phone network, to training children and teachers in Peru to better utilize laptops manufactured by the One Laptop per Child project, to exploring the role of steganography in adding security to SMS communications. He speaks English, Nepali, and Spanish.

Project: MobileActive.org, where he is managing the Mobile Media Toolkit. The Mobile Media Toolkit is a Knight-funded project that will aggregate and develop tools and resources for media production, dissemination, and consumption through mobile devices. The content will be be designed for an audience of journalists and media producers rather than technologists.

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Rekha Murthy
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rekha Murthy is Director of Projects + Partnerships at Public Radio Exchange (PRX), where she helps public media stations and producers grow their audiences on a range of digital platforms. She serves on the board of the Integrated Media Association, and advises various multimedia projects for public media. Before PRX, Rekha was a user experience designer for web and mobile. Her public radio career began at NPR, first at NPR.org and later as a producer for "All Things Considered." She received her master's from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where she examined physical and digital urban annotation practices.

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Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Retha Hill is the director of the New Media Innovation Lab and professor of practice at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The innovative laboratory conducts research and development for the media industry. She joined the Cronkite School in fall 2007. Previously, Hill was vice president for content development for BET Interactive, where she was the executive in charge of content strategy, convergence and integration with the BET Network. She worked for the Washington Post Company in a variety of capacities, including as a reporter and a founding editor of Washingtonpost.com. Hill also is the owner of Painted Desert Media, LLC, a Phoenix-based media consulting company.

Project: To inform and engage communities, CitySeed will be a mobile application that allows users to plant the "seed" of an idea and share it with others. For example, a person might come across a great spot for a community garden. At that moment, the person can use the CitySeed app to “geotag” the idea, which links it to an exact location. Others can look at the place-based ideas, debate and hopefully act on them. The project aims to increase the number of people informed about and engaged with their communities by breaking down community issues into bite-sized settings.

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Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Rich Gordon is an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Before coming to Medill, he served as the first new media director for The Miami Herald. He worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers in Virginia and Florida.

Project: Create an academic program blending computer science and journalism, designed to fill a staffing void at many digital news sites. By offering scholarships to Medill's graduate journalism program to people with education and/or expertise in computer programming, the goal is to turn out students who understand both journalism and technology, connect one to another in ways that build audiences and also enhance and protect the civic functions of journalism in a democratic society.

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Richard Anderson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Richard Anderson is president and owner of VillageSoup Inc., a company that provides places for residents to learn, share and shop in the neighborhoods, villages or towns in which they reside.
Before establishing VillageSoup, he spent five years teaching and 29 years developing and publishing elementary and high school textbooks. He was co-founder and eventual sole owner of Ligature Inc., a textbook production company. Anderson is an active community member who chairs and serves on various non-profit organization boards. He lives in Camden, Maine, as do he and his deceased wife's three children and families. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the University of Northern Iowa and a Ph.D. in educational administration from the University of Iowa.

Project: To create an open-source version of VillageSoup's successful community news software, combining professional journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and "reverse publishing" from online to print.

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Robert Soden
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Robert Soden is the senior GIS developer at Development Seed where he leads the development of major data projects like AfghanistanElectionData.org and HaitiAidMap.org. In addition to his work on data projects, Robert plays a key role in the development of MapBox, a suite of open source tools that make it easier to create data powered custom maps and host them in the cloud. He is also a member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team that provides training on using and contributing to OpenStreetMap to aid and local government workers helping with recovery efforts in Haiti.

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Ryan Jones
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan began his work with FrontlineSMS in 2009, working with FrontlineSMS:Credit, where he was instrumental in putting together their successful application for the Vodafone Wireless Innovation project. Since joining the FrontlineSMS team, Ryan’s work has led to significant new partnerships and support both from grant making organizations and NGOs, not only broadening our base of supporters and implementers, but also the scope of our work and expertise. Prior to FrontlineSMS, Ryan had worked with a variety of projects seeking funding for new or innovative models, in fields from ICTD to sustainable energy. Ryan is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Fordham University’s International Political Economy and Development Program.

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Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Sholin is the director of news innovation at Publish2, where he helps news organizations bring the best of the Web to their readers, and the best from their readers into the newsroom. He also writes about the future of news and journalism education at his blog, Invisible Inkling, and is one of the co-founders of Wired Journalists, a social network promoting best practices in online news.

ReportingOn is a backchannel for beat reporters to connect with colleagues, peers, and mentors working on similar stories in different towns.

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Ryan Thornburg
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Thornburg researches and teaches online news writing, editing, producing and reporting as an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has helped news organizations on four continents develop digital editorial products and use new media to hold powerful people accountable, shine light in dark places and explain a complex world. Previously, Thornburg was managing editor of USNews.com, managing editor for Congressional Quarterly’s website and national/international editor for washingtonpost.com. He has a master’s degree from George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management and a bachelor’s from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sandra Ekong is a co-founder of The Beanstockd Project. After graduating from Harvard in 2008 with a degree in political science, Sandra dove into the world of social entrepreneurship, officially launching the Beanstockd Project. Beanstockd, currently headquartered in NYC, was created with the simple goal of making "green" accessible and relevant to the youth generation. She currently resides in Baltimore.

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Sara Wylie
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sara Wylie, a Public Laboratory co-founder, developed webtools for community monitoring of the oil and gas industry for her doctoral work at MIT in History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society. As part of this research, she co-founded and co-directed MIT Center for Future Civic Media's ExtrAct Project with Chris Csikszentmihalyi. Presently, Sara is Public Laboratory’s director of Toxics and Health Research as well as visiting faculty in Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) Digital + Media Department. At RISD, Sara teaches social theory and anthropology of science and technology to artists and designers in order to develop new “in practice” methods for Social Studies of Science.

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Scott Rosenberg
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Scott Rosenberg co-founded Salon.com in 1995, where he served for 11 years as a writer, editor and managing editor. Over three decades as a journalist, he has written award-winning theater criticism at the San Francisco Examiner and Boston Phoenix as well as reporting and criticism for The New York Times, Washington Post, Wired and many other publications. He is the author of two books: Dreaming in Code (Crown, 2007) and Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming and Why It Matters (Crown, 2009). He lives in Berkeley, Calif. Advisers include Dan Gillmor, Bill Gannon, and Lane Becker.

Project: All journalists make mistakes, but they sometimes view admitting errors as a mark of shame. MediaBugs aims to change this climate, by promoting transparency and providing recognition for those who admit and fix their mistakes. MediaBugs will create a public test web site in a U.S. city for people to report errors in any news report – online or off-line. Comments will be tracked to see if they create a conversation between the reporter and the error submitter, and then show whether corrections or changes resulted. Based on a system that technology teams use when releasing software, this aggregation process will display trends in errors and show which news organizations are responsible to public questions and comments.

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Sean Dalby
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sean Dalby is a researcher at Development Seed. He vets the data sources we use in our projects, researching key topics and issues related to our work and investigating which data sources are most accurate and relevant to it. He prepares and cleans this data and then embeds with our development team to serve as a subject matter expert while the final maps and data visualizations are prepared. Prior to joining Development Seed, Sean researched Wittgenstein's semantics and studied the foraging behavior of birds around the Shenandoah river. He received dual Bachelor's degrees in mathematics and philosophy from The College of William and Mary.

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Sean McDonald
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sean Martin McDonald, director of operations - Americas for FrontlineSMS, has worked with nonprofits for more than 10 years, specializing in information and communications technology and alternative dispute and conflict resolution. Previously, he worked at MetroStar Systems, International Relief & Development, United States Agency for International Development, Public International Law and Policy Group, Center for Peacebuilding International and office of Sen. Barbara Mikulski -- gaining experience in international contexts, including Sri Lanka, Armenia, Ukraine, Romania and Honduras. He holds a law degree and a master’s in international peace and conflict resolution from American University. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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Shannon Dosemagen
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A co-founder of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Shannon is based in New Orleans as the Director of Community Engagement, Education and Outreach. Shannon has worked with Public Laboratory (formerly Grassroots Mapping) for the last year as the Gulf Coast project lead, organizing volunteers as they collected aerial images of the Gulf Coast. Shannon also works with the Anthropology and Geography Department at Louisiana State University as an Ethnographer and Community Researcher on a study about the social impacts of the spill in coastal Louisiana communities. Prior to working with Public Laboratory, she was the Oil Spill Response Coordinator at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, directing projects such as the first on-the-ground health and economic impact report in Louisiana post-oil spill. Shannon has an MS in Anthropology, a BFA in Photography and Anthropology and has worked with nonprofits for over 10 years.

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Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Simon Ferrari is a videogame designer, researcher and critic. He is a doctoral student in the Digital Media program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Simon has worked as a research assistant on Ian Bogost's Newsgames project for three years, serving as an editor for the project blog. Along with Bogost and Bobby Schweizer, he is the co-author of "Newsgames: Journalism at Play." Simon also writes freelance criticism for Kill Screen and Paste magazines.

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Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Steven Clift is a public speaker and consultant who has worked across 25 countries, tapping the extremely small market of governments willing to pay for advice on how to listen to people online. A one time Visiting Fellow at the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, he is a new Ashoka Fellow now focused full-time on expanding non-profit E-Democracy.org's local network of volunteer-based forums on public issues. Through E-Democracy.Org, Clift fosters conversations that create news in local communities in Minnesota, England, and New Zealand. In 1994, with the launch of the world's first election information website, he coined the term "e-democracy." He coordinated Minnesota's early e-government efforts through 1997 while volunteering with E-Democracy.Org. Democracies Online, Clift's blog/wiki/online community of practice opened in 1998 at DoWire.Org and his past speeches and articles are available at Publicus.Net.

Blogging About: The Ideas Factory, which will generate and share big ideas from the world of citizen engagement online.

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Stewart Long
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A founding member of The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Stewart is a geographer that is focused on making aerial image maps. Inspired by the digital age of map making and virtual globes, his work centers around making maps with both new technology and classic field techniques. As Director of Geography and Data for Public Laboratory, Stewart coordinates and executes mapmaking projects while managing the Public Laboratory Archive.

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Ted Han
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ted Han took on development of DocumentCloud in 2011 when the project merged with Investigative Reporters & Editors. A linguist by degree and programmer by trade, he's interested in interdisciplinary projects, especially ones involving open data, digital life, and civics. Ted is a contributor to and advocate for open-source software. He also claims to have 14 years of online social media experience.

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Teru Kuwayama
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Teru Kuwayama is a photographer who has spent most of the past decade reporting on conflict and humanitarian crisis. He has reported in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir and Iraq—traveling both independently and as an embedded reporter with military forces. His photographs have appeared in publications including Time, Newsweek, Outside and National Geographic. Kuwayama is the co-founder of Lightstalkers.org, a web-based network of media, military, aid and development personnel serving more than 40,000 members. He is currently a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Kuwayama received a bachelor's degree from the State University of New York at Albany.

Project: Broadening the perspectives that surround military operations in Afghanistan, One-Eight will chronicle the deployment of a battalion of U.S. Marines by using an online journal and the social web to report on America's longest war. The troops and their families have the potential to be interactive audiences for the journal -- challenging and augmenting coverage, and distributing content through their own social media channels. The approach will directly serve the stakeholders and inform the wider public by bringing in on-the-ground views on military issues and the execution of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. Marines were recently authorized to use social media on military networks, and this project will also examine the impact of that policy shift.

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Tim Hwang
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tim Hwang is co-founder of the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, and is provost at the Institute for Higher Awesome Studies. Along with Christina, he is co-founder of ROFLCon, a biennial conference bringing together various internet celebrities, scholars, and commentators to discuss the past, present, and future of memes and web culture. Formerly, he served as a research associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and was founder of the Web Ecology Project, a global research community devoted to building a quantitative science around the spread of ideas online. For his work, he has previously appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Wired Magazine. He loves Choco Tacos.

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Tina Rolfe
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Christina Rolfe is head of administration and logistics for Freedom Fone. Keeping a project on track in the challenging environment that Zimbabwe presents is no mean feat! An aspiring writer, Christina blogs for Kubatana.net.

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Todd Wolfson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Todd Wolfson is finishing a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the role of new information and communication technologies on social movement building. Correspondingly he is one of the founders of the Media Mobilizing Project, which attempts to take advantage of new technologies as a way to give voice to those left out of mainstream media.

Project: To develop online digital newscasts for Philadelphia's immigrant community and to distribute them via the new citywide wireless platform.

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Tom Grasty
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently named an "Innovator to Watch" by the University of Southern California’s (USC) Stevens Institute for Innovation, Tom Grasty is an entrepreneurial digital and media strategist with a diverse 15-year background across the entertainment, advertising, public relations and Internet industries. Most recently, Grasty was head of creative development at Blaze Television, where he was responsible for the company’s digital business and content development strategy. With a proven track record in strategic partnerships and content monetization across traditional and new media platforms, Grasty has overseen the development of more than 100 hours of film, television, documentary and digital properties. Grasty has a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a master’s from USC‘s pioneering program in online communities.

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Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Tony Shawcross is the founder and executive director of Deproduction, a nonprofit media production organization. After graduating magna cum laude with a degree in marketing and business administration from the University of Colorado, he worked briefly in marketing and advertising for the IT industry before leaving to focus entirely on socially relevant film and video production, working with Little Voice Productions, the Colorado State House of Representatives, the Pan African Arts Society and Free Speech TV. Shawcross has presented more than 100 media education courses with Indymedia, Denver Open Media, the Alliance for Community Media, and at various conferences, schools and universities. He has produced hundreds of films and videos produced for local and national television, film festivals and community screenings.

Project: The idea is to enable public access TV stations and community technology centers to use common tools to create websites that enable the transfer of video between the website and the TV station. Together, public access TV and community technology centers can engage disadvantaged communities in new media platforms. While there are thousands of public access stations and community technology centers country-wide that provide media education and equipment, they don't share a tool-set enabling them to become part of a collective, user-driven, online media network.

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Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Val Wang is the producer of a new WBUR project funded by the Knight News Challenge to increase court transparency through digital technology. She will oversee the production of the daily stream of written and video content originating out of Quincy District Court and lead the project's social media outreach. Val is an experienced writer and multimedia producer who has worked for Reuters Television, NBC News, and UNICEF in both New York and Beijing. She has also produced documentaries on sustainable architecture airing on PBS.

Project: To foster greater access to the judicial process, this project will create a laboratory in a Boston courtroom to help establish best practices for digital coverage that can be replicated and adopted throughout the nation. While the legislative and executive branches have incorporated new technologies and social media, the courts still operate under the video and audio recording standards established in the 1970s and 80s. The courtroom will have a designated area for live blogging via a wifi network and the ability to live-stream court proceedings to the public. Working in conjunction with the Massachusetts court system, the project will publish the daily docket on the web and build a knowledge wiki for the public with common legal terms.

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Victoria Fine
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Victoria Fine is the director of advancement and outreach for The Tiziano Project, where she leads programs to train citizen journalists how to tell their stories and change their lives through new media. As a humanitarian journalist and editor, she most recently served as managing editor of the Impact & Education sections of The Huffington Post.

Victoria is the managing editor of Counterspill.org, a global intervention for nonrenewable energy disasters and Modern Overland, an eco-friendly and socially sustainable guidebook series for tech-savvy travelers. She is the author of three books, and her work has been featured by Al Jazeera, the Chicago Tribune and AOL.com, among others. Victoria holds a master’s degree in new media journalism and a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

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Vincent Stehle

Vincent Stehle is currently a consultant with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Previously, Stehle was Program Director for Nonprofit Sector Support at the Surdna Foundation, a family foundation based in New York City with assets approaching $700 million. Before joining Surdna, Stehle worked for ten years as a reporter for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where he covered a broad range of management issues for the nonprofit sector. Stehle has served as Chairperson of Philanthropy New York (formerly the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers) and on the governing boards of YouthNoise, VolunteerMatch, and the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN). Currently he serves on the board of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media.

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Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Waldo Jaquith has been a website developer for 18 years and an open-government technology activist for 16 years. He holds a degree in political science from Virginia Tech and was a 2005 fellow at the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. He and his wife live on a small farm near Charlottesville, Va., where he works for the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. He was received a "Champion of Change" award at the White House earlier this month.

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Zahir Koradia
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Zahir Koradia is a PhD student in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and is the lead developer for the multiplanar platform for Gram Vaani. Zahir is passionate in using ICT for social development: his Masters from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur was also focused on building low-cost systems for Internet connectivity in rural areas. Zahir brings the much needed technical expertise and versatility to deliver on Gram Vaani’s technology, research, and social development agenda. Gram Vaani was a winner in the 2008 Knight News Challenge, and is focused on the development of appropriate technology for community radio stations in rural areas of developing countries.

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