Visualization tool: ManyEyes from JD Lasica on Vimeo. At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from the co-creator of Many Eyes. Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall." Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and... continued...

The participants of "Media Mobilizing Project":http://www.mediamobilizing.org/ and "Juntos's":http://vamosjuntos.org/ Immigrant and Low-Wage worker video project have finished their first batch of videos. The videos tell a wide array of stories focusing on health in the community, discrimination against immigrants, the role of unions in protecting immigrant workers and community outreach. Please check out the first video "Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers":http://ourcityourvoices.blogspot.com/2008/06/trabajadores-imnigrantes-existe-la.html continued...

The Innovation Incubators project is moving into the industry testing phase. Teams of students from seven institutions, Ithaca College, Michigan State, University of Nevada--Las Vegas, St. Michael's College, Western Kentucky, University of Kansas, and Kansas State, worked together to develop three new ideas for community journalism which will be tested in the months ahead. It's a good time to reflect on the project so far and to share one of my observations about what we've discovered during the collaboration process. One of the great challenges for the Innovation Incubator students--undergraduate and graduate alike, and from all institutions--was pitching an innovative... continued...

Ryan Mark, one of the first two winners of our journalism scholarships for computer programmers, wonders why it's so hard to get usable government data. I wrapped up my second quarter of journalism school and my daily reporting class a couple of weeks ago. Learning firsthand what goes into a simple news article gave me a new-found respect for the work that's required. Making call after call, leaving messages with people who will never call you back, and then taking notes while paying attention to what somebody is saying is quite a difficult way to spend a day. The Internet... continued...

I believe IdeaLab readers would benefit from a wide range of posts related to important developments taking place in the participatory media movement. With that in mind, here are two interviews that bear on that subject: The first is an 11-minute talk with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com. Miro's an important, rapidly maturing application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by anyone with something to say (you can pull down any videos with an RSS feed, for example). You can also browse... continued...

Three and a half conferences (12 hours onsite training at Google counts as the half) in three weeks has about done me in. At various times, I inevitably ask myself, "Why am I here and not at home?" But I realize why I travel to these events when the light bulb goes off. Usually it's about connecting the dots in a way that with 20-20 hindsight seems like stating the obvious. I posted a blog in early May on the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on mapping and social activism; I noted that having a purpose (outside of making money and/or... continued...

A new laptop design for the one-laptop-per-child project is being worked out. They have removed the keyboard and replaced it by a touch screen. This turns into a touch sensitive keyboard during normal operation, and the laptop can be used as an e-book reader otherwise. The price is $75, which sounds too good to be true. I used to be very critical of the OLPC project during its earlier stages because I could not understand the rationale behind giving a personal laptop to each child, instead of having them access a shared PC in a kiosk for example. The kiosk... continued...

Halfway through his Medill graduate journalism education, programmer Brian Boyer reflects on the paths that might lie ahead: When I first spoke to Rich Gordon about becoming a "programmer-journalist," the meaning of the term was unclear. Not being the sort to be concerned by ambiguity, I dove into journalism school with no plans for what might come after. Six months into my re-education, I still don't know what to do with myself, but the potential jobs for which a programmer-journalist would be well suited are becoming clear. I will try and enumerate them here. Also, I will try and avoid... continued...

As summer speeds by, the MSU/Detroit News contingent has been working with a software developer on the Tandem Project. We are also creating an advisory council to seed Detroit neighborhoods to get the community involved in the process. At the suggestion of Nancy Hanus, online editor, and Jonathan Morgan, multi-platform editor, at The News, we have enlisted the directors and faculty of four Detroit area universities, Oakland, University of Detroit Mercy, University of Michigan Dearborn and Wayne State to join the project. Their students will enroll in Jonathan's JRN 408 Community Journalism Tandem course this fall along with, we hope,... continued...

So what happens when people with computer programming backgrounds are part of the same journalism class with more traditional students? Liza Kaufman Hogan, a former CNN.com senior producer, found out this spring when she taught the introductory new media journalism class at the Medill School of Journalism. The class, "Interactive Techniques," revolves around blogging. Students create their own blogs (using Wordpress software and a commercial ISP hosting account that they establish and pay for). Class sessions focus on the critical issues involved in online journalism, from copyright to business models. Between classes, the students are required to blog regularly and... continued...

Here is one vision of the mobile future aimed at one of the most (technologically) overlooked segments of the U.S. population...low income and ethnic communities. Imagine a Latino youth living in East Oakland, California - one of the toughest urban neighborhoods in America: "My name is Jose Gutierrez. I am 18 years old and live in East Oakland, off of International and 24th Streets. We don't have a computer in my house, and other than Spanish language TV and radio we get all of our information on our mobile phones on LOCOBEAT (fictional). -On my cell phone I have my... continued...

Some takeaways from the Future of Civic Media conference, showcasing Knight News Challenge winners, that ended yesterday at the MIT Media Lab in Boston: • All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years. The program grew stronger as it went along. • The Media Lab setting was inspirational. This was my first visit here, and the mix of astonishingly bright students and faculty meshed well with us ruffians from the outside world. One suggestion for future gatherings: Invite student and members of... continued...

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- I am in the swanky Stata Center at MIT for the conference on "The Future of Civic Media," put on by the new Center for Future Civic Media. Nearly all the Idea Lab bloggers are here in attendance as the Knight Foundation is using this gathering to help all News Challenge winners get to know each other and collaborate more. It's also a chance for this new Center at MIT (which got $5 million in funding from Knight) to show some off some of its early work and thinking. Mitch Resnick, another Idea Lab blogger who... continued...

I've just arrived at MIT in Boston, where the Future of Civic Media conference is being held over the next three days. Attendees are gathering to compare notes, soak up new ideas (including some smart technologies devised by students here) and tease out ways to maximize the impact of civic media in our lives. Here's a proposal that I'll be bouncing off the assorted thought leaders: Civic Media Innovation Camps. The camps would be one part road show — trainers and local new media experts sharing learnings around social media technologies, case studies, interesting experiments and success stories --... continued...

When the filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), her wish was to create one day where people across the world gathered at the same time to watch films produced by international filmmakers. Best known for her film Control Room(film), Noujaim believed the power of the films could help the audience see beyond our differences to the humanity that binds us together. Or, as the tag line declared, "4 hours. 24 films. A new way to see the world." Pangia Day, as it came to be called, took place on May 10th at 18:GMT, 11 am PDT, at... continued...

"Playing the News" Update - Distil Interactive I just returned from Ottawa where Nicole Rinerand I went to collaborate with Distil Interactive. We spent two days in their office and it was a positive learning experience. I should make a premise that Distil is trying to build a system that will allow non tech-savvy users, with little knowledge of coding, to create a game or game-like environment in a simple way and in a short time. The system is based off XML, flash and C. Right now the XML code is what controls what is being displayed on screen and... continued...

When thinking of Kingston, Jamaica, blogging and podcasting are far from the first words to come to mind. "Murder capital of the world", sure. Bob Marley and reggae music, of course. But a cutting edge prison rehabilitation program, which teaches prisoners at a maximum security correctional institute how to blog, podcast, and even participate in Second Life? Photo of Tower Street Correctional Facility by Christina Xu That is precisely what Students Expressing Truth (S.E.T.) has set out to accomplish with its new citizen media initiative, Prison Diaries. S.E.T. first began in 1999 when two former prisoners created the organization to... continued...

Western Kentucky University if one of seven academic programs working on a joint Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant (Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael's College, the Univeristy of Kansas, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas). Three student-developed projects were presented at the Online News Association conference last year. This summer, the innovative digital news projects are being tested at newspapers. We were instructed to use open-source software for our projects. Open-source is free. In the open-source community, there are comparable programs for every retail package produced by the big companies. Open-source software can be well- documented... continued...

It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications. Here's where we stand: Two scholarship winners are now almost midway through their Medill studies. A third candidate will enroll next month. And we still have the equivalent of six full scholarships yet to award. From the beginning, I've felt that this project's biggest challenge would... continued...

Finally I am able to post independetly, and after the semester is over I will have a chance to work more on the news project. As a matter of fact I already started working on it. I have an internship for the summer at the Johnson Simulation Center and I worked 3 days of this weeks on the news game. I mainly tried to understand the code, and try to implement some features in one of the mini-games, a breakout clone. The mini-game is still in an early stage, as well as the whole system actually. Other projects have been... continued...

Today, Gotham Gazette unveils the second of its news games: The Budget Maze. With challenges and a dash of humor, the game presents an entertaining way to educate New Yorkers about one of the eternal mysteries of policy and politics in the city: How the budget is determined. To make the topic engaging, we created three mazes. Players must navigate these labyrinths in a castle dungeon to try to win funding for a favored program or a tax cut. Each chamber presents a new challenge: How do you get information, who should you meet with, who holds the power? We... continued...

We are charging ahead with the Tandem Project, developed by a team of students this past year as part of the Innovation Incubator Project. Partnering with The Detroit News on the project, we hope for a launch in summer if we can get software issues handled. Tandem hits at the very heart of community journalism. The idea is to have news stories percolate from local communities. Community members on a wiki-style site start discussing issues they are facing within their neighborhoods. It may be street lights that are not working, gang issues, or turning local vacant lots into farm gardens.... continued...

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the '$100 laptop') to recreate the student computer's user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. That decision led to the defection of Walter Bender who had been OLPC's president of software and content and a longtime colleague of Negroponte. It also led free software guru Richard Stallman, who ironically switched to a XO laptop himself just before the announcement, to ask out loud, "Can... continued...

At least once a day I ask myself how locative media can be used to more fully engage and connect folks to their communities. The question for this blog is a bit more focused: how can locative media and geo-localized content find form in the art and craft of journalism. And then to my surprise and excitement, LoJo, a new voice, enters the frey and expands the discussion. From www.lojoconnect.com: Shorthand for locative journalism, LoJo is the name of a project launched by a team of Northwestern University graduate students to study the intersection of journalism and emerging location-based technologies.... continued...

Today I'm publishing a guest post from Ryan Mark, one of the first two journalist-programmers attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship. Ryan is a 2004 graduate of Augustana College, where he earned a BA in computer science. He later served as technology director for ZapTel Corp., a company that sells prepaid long-distance phone cards. Ryan's guest post: One thing I’ve discovered through talking to people, including teachers and others in education, is that the Internet is encouraging more people to contribute. Well, obviously, right? I think we are just starting to learn how to... continued...

Are all the good Internet domain names already owned by someone? No -- only the obvious ones are taken. Every new enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, needs a domain name -- the identifier that shows up in a brower's address field. For example, the MediaShift Idea Lab blog lives inside the Public Broadcasting Service's pbs.org domain. The absolutely perfect name for your new project or company, or at least the simplest one, may well be owned by someone else. In fact, it probably is. The odds are definitely slim that you'll get a domain name that a random person would... continued...

Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, the first two programmer-journalists whose Medill education is being financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships, have begun their second academic quarter (of four). They are reporting in Medill's Chicago newsroom and taking our introductory new media class, Interactive Techniques. For the new media class, they (like all the other students) are required to identify a topic that they will monitor and blog about it at least five times per week. All the students are required to set up and manage the technology underpinning the blog as well -- using Wordpress. Ryan's blog is called Digital... continued...

Can a virtual world bring together young and old people to explore a community's history in a shared video game experience? This is a question we're pondering in the wake of some user testing of our Remembering 7th Street video game. We previously showed a video version of our game world to people who remembered Oakland's 7th Street blues and jazz club scene from the 1940s and 1950s, and were surprised by their generally positive reaction to the virtual re-creation of what they had actually lived. Several also said they hoped the game would help young people in Oakland learn... continued...

Here is another report from our research assistant Fabio Berzaghi on the progress we are making on "Playing the News." Our struggle is to come up with embedded games that do not clash with the content of the topic or issue being addressed by the news organization. One of our "test" issues is a feature-type article on whether a potential pet owner should consider getting a cat or a dog. Here is a glimpse into what Fabio and Jesse Crafts-Finch were testing. Today I finally had a chance to work closely with Jesse, the producer/game designer at the Johnson Simulation... continued...

The irony was deliberate when Steve Outing and Steve Kearsley soft-launched their new online comic strip, techGRL, a week ago today. It's a humor site, yes, but the goal -- "not just a comic strip, but also an online community" -- was no April Fools joke.Reinventing comics online is an expanding arena. Mark Fiore and other talented folks have been blazing digital paths to revive a once-tired form. Adding online community is a natural extension of going digital.Before I continue, several disclosures: Steve Outing (pictured at left) is a longtime associate and friend in the online journalism world. He's written about my work, and vice... continued...

As we continue to develop the "Playing the News" game, we wanted to share the inside workings of the process. Our partners at the Johnson Simulation Center submitted this report on their production process. An Overview of the JSC Production Process This is a short description of the Johnson Simulation Center's production process; that is, how we go about designing and then producing a game. There are two stages to this process, pre-production and production. Pre-production is a time during which everything about how the game will play and be built is written down on paper. We define the... continued...

Citizen journalism, the blogosphere, YouTube, Facebook and more...what do these social networks and new media forms have to do with journalism and mass communications? Often they refer to individuals, rather than traditional media organizations, playing an active role in collecting, reporting and disseminating news. * For example, students at Northern Illinois University took to the streets writing, shooting photos and blogging during the hours and days that followed the Valentines Day shooting. Kyle Yataes posted a video on UTube, providing more moving coverage of the events than the local news. Journalism as we know it today is becoming less confined... continued...

Thanks to the Knight News Challenge, the Medill School of Journalism can offer full scholarships to our master's program to people with computer programming backgrounds. The first two are on campus now. We're looking for seven more -- and they're not easy to find. Part of the problem lies in the nature of what we're trying to do: attract people to journalism school who might not even be thinking about journalism school as an option. And part of the problem is that journalism school requires students to do things -- like interview strangers and do a lot of writing --... continued...

One of our goals at the Center for Future Civic Media is to identify best practices from existing projects which might inform those initiatives which will emerge from the Center. We want to understand how people out there are using the tools available to them right now to enhance civic awareness, to play informal watchdog functions within the culture, to call attention to problems and force governments and other institutions to respond, to skirt around censorship and other kinds of regulation over communication, and so forth. We are looking at a range of different models -- from serious games to... continued...

From cataloguing books to training users how to blog At least six times a week, Gabriel Venegas, a dedicated and underpaid librarian in Medellin, Colombia, rises from bed while the world outside is still dark royal blue and heavy with the silence of early morning to in order to make the 45-minute bus ride that begins in the valley center and eventually climbs up the city's northern slope to the isolated community of San Javier La Loma. Five years ago it was Vanegas' responsibility to make sure that the library's book collection was catalogued and well-organized. Occasionally he would help... continued...

As we work to create a news game that will engage readers, we are exploring what types of incentives we can use to meet the "gaming" expectations of hard-core players. We've decided to try embedding "mini-games" into the news game scenario. For example, a news game might create an environment where the reader is exploring the different aspects of the use of ethanol fuel. The player moves from one NPC to another to talk about the pros and cons. But before the player can talk to each of the NPCs, he or she will have to successfully complete a mini-game... continued...

The city of Shanghai is geo-tagging over 1500 registered ancient tress with the plan to use gps devices to monitor and protect the trees in ways they couldn't before. Not unlike many cities, modernization poses enormous risks (and has exacted quite a toll) to nature and the natural. So often our built environment doesn't take into account what has been here for so long. Shanghai's gps monitoring allows the trees to be tracked in real time and the government to move quickly if the location of the tree changes. The system also enables construction companies to get location data early... continued...

In response to this week's Newsweek article Revenge of the Experts suggesting the expert is back and user-created content is on the wane, columnist Tom Regan offers this in today's Christian Science Monitor: Credible Web? It's where we click most. Expertise is essential online, but the Internet's real 'killer app' is choice. (Jay Rosen and I are quoted in the piece.) An expert in the Newsweek article said, the world is "too dangerous a place for faulty information." People can deal with vetting information in two ways: rely solely on experts and authority figures. Or become a fact-checker, treating unverified... continued...

For those of us working on creating "serious games," the experience we've had with the "Playing the News" project might be instructive. We are working with the Johnson Simulation Center at Pine Technical College in Pine City, MN to develop a tool that will allow journalists (read, non-techies) create engaging games built from news coverage of ongoing coverage in a community. After much to-ing and fro-ing, we think we've hit on a strategy for the type of utility that will work. But it has taken some "technical fortitude" to get to this point. The JSC folks are working on what... continued...

On Friday Dan Gillmor wrote here about bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to today's journalism. On Friday, Dan's former employer, the San Jose Mercury News, laid off 15 newsroom staffers and lost five other editors through buyouts, shaving the editorial staff by about 10 percent, on top of a larger set of layoffs a few months ago. Or, to be more precise, the paper's corporate owners, MediaNews, did so. This is at once both troubling and ironic. Troubling, because the downsizing is indicative of deep-seated financial and circulation troubles in the newspaper industry as a whole. (As newspaper analyst Dave Morgan... continued...

(Note: I wrote this initially for PR Week magazine. What follows is slightly updated.) A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it's hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth. But something has changed, and it has profound meaning for the future of media and communications, including journalism, entertainment and PR. Digital technologies are dramatically reducing the cost of entree for creating new products and services, and, in the case of digital media, those costs can be close to zero.... continued...

The first Computation + Journalism Symposium, held Friday and Saturday at Georgia Tech, is over. It's been widely covered in the blogosphere -- you'll find some of the most thoughtful reflections here and here and here and here. As I said before the panel I moderated (on "Advances in Newsgathering"), the event was truly remarkable. More than 200 people -- a mix of academics and professionals, editors and reporters, journalists and Web developers (including the two Knight Challenge journalist-programmer scholarship winners) -- came together to talk about the ways technology is changing journalism and what journalism needs to do to... continued...

When the Knight News Challenge awarded me (and the Medill School of Journalism) a grant to offer journalism scholarships to computer programmers, I thought teaching journalism to technologists was a pretty novel idea. But it turns out some faculty at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing were thinking along similar lines. Last spring, Prof. Irfan Essa and Ph.D. candidate Nick Diakopoulos taught an experimental course, "Computational Journalism," for computer science students at Georgia Tech. The course is being offered again during the current (spring) semester. Through readings and guest lectures, students in the two classes have learned how journalism is... continued...

The nature of our project at Duke University, the Next Newsroom Project, is to try to design the "newsroom of the future." But the other day on our project site, Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, started a discussion around the first, most obvious question we confronted: "Does the newsroom of the future really need to be a brick and mortar newsroom?" You can view the various responses, and some relevant links that got posted there. I wanted to withhold my reply until folks had their say. Naturally, it's not the first time I've heard that question since our work... continued...

"On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It's an amazing thing to watch--at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn't get to witness the miracle of birth every day. But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal's Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student's XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine's arrival at... continued...

After reading Paul Grabowicz's post Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games, I thought I'd chime in and riff off of that statement and ask: What is the value of video games in education, formal and informal, and in the delivery of information. Paul makes great point about who determines perspective. In my field of digital storytelling, we often talk about what I call "the fading glory of the third person editorial overlay." Just look at community-created content; it's a form whose hallmark is the lack of editorial overlay, which may or may not be appropriate, but often the lack of... continued...

The Next Newsroom Project began last summer with a question: If you could build the ideal newsroom from scratch, what would it look like? We were asking that question on behalf of The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University. Since receiving our News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation, we've interviewed journalists, digital media experts, architects, campus media advisers, academics, and innovation specialists. We profiled professional and campus newsrooms (and some organizations that had no newsroom). And we looked for ideas outside journalism from folks like innovation consultants Jump Associates . And we studied buildings like the Stata... continued...

Anyone interested in the challenges facing college media, especially independent college media, should check out a series that ran this week in The Daily Bruin, UCLA's independent student newspaper. There are three stories posted so far, including one that features The Chronicle Duke University, and its editor David Graham: "We were seeing all of the dire predictions about the future: We have to go online, do multimedia, blog, do video," said The Chronicle's Editor-in-Chief David Graham. "Those who are interested in journalism as a career realized we had to be pragmatic and be aware of this." But: But until the... continued...

Hi folks. Our top-flight research assistant, Fabio Berzaghi, has written a narrative of the work we've been doing on the "Playing the News" project. Our goal is to design a game creation tool that allows news professionals to author engaging games around ongoing news issues in a community. The intention of the tool is to allow journalists to create a game that takes no more than 20 - 30 minutes to play through. We've been through quite a number of iterations on game design and Fabio provides the background. "The very first idea for our project was to focus on... continued...

Should virtual world video games offer a parallel game experience in the real world? This is something we've discussed adding to our Remembering 7th Street video game project, possibly using GPS devices, such as GPS-enabled cellphones. Our game currently exists entirely inside a virtual world - a re-creation of the jazz and blues club scene on Oakland's 7th Street in the 1940s and 1950s. Game play is confined to that virtual world, with the player exploring the jazz and blues clubs and engaging in game-play quests to learn about the history of 7th Street and its music. Adding a GPS-component... continued...

Just three years ago, 'citizen journalism' and 'citizen media' were unknown phrases for more than 99% of the world's population. Slowly, but surely, a considerable movement is starting to help change that. Many of the Knight News Challenge winners are at the forefront of this movement. The Media Mobilizing Project of Philadelphia just recently finished their first round of video production training for a group of 20 Spanish-speaking immigrants poised to take advantage of the city's free wi-fi cloud. Similarly, Chi-Town Daily News will recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists - one in each Chicago neighborhood -... continued...

Google, UNICEF, and One Laptop Per Child recently announced the launching of the Our Stories project. The effort records the stories of children from different parts of the world and places them on a Google Map. But more than just an oral/video history project combined with geotagging, the effort claims to be: A joint initiative to preserve and share the histories and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using laptops, mobile phones and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends.... continued...

The first two "journalist-programmers" -- experienced Web developers who won Knight News Challenge scholarships to attend the one-year master's program at the Medill School of Journalism -- will start their studies here at Northwestern University