After five years of doing community media in India, we've come to understand what Video Volunteers is good at. We're great at training -- the people we work with keep doing this for a long time after they're trained. And we're great at getting impact in the villages. We know how to produce the content that people in rural India want to see; the evidence for this is that people turn up in large numbers for the screenings and actually take action.

The Indian government has several major programs to bring Internet and information to rural areas -- one is the Common Service Centers, a program to bring fiber optic cables to every 10th village; another amazing one is the $35 video-enabled tablet computer.

We think these new government programs can give a huge boost to community media in India, and they can help us scale, provided we create the right partnerships. We're thinking about things like web channels for content aimed at rural audiences for the tablets, and citizen journalism reporting apps. The public screenings on projectors that the people in our Community Video Units do are immensely powerful, but in time, a similar effect will emerge as people are able to share videos in villages over their cell phones and watch them on computers.

So far, these programs are conceived as a way to push information out to the rural areas, so the poor get information on government programs and plans. We come in, because we can reverse the system -- we can bring the knowledge and ideas of the poor to the government. We can enable people to produce content for these new distribution pipelines. No one will use them if there is no locally available content.

So when we meet government officials, our message is this: Enabling the poor to produce content, to be heard, and to share their own knowledge is crucial for democracy.

Why funding matters

In Part 1 of this series, I focused on Video Volunteers' work with IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. But many other projects have kept us busy this year: We did a series of trainings for tribals in Gujarat, India on documenting local culture for a local museum; we provided support to a community radio station called Sramik Bharti; and we launched a very exciting program with UNDP in Eastern UP where 20 rural women are trained to use video to monitor their self-help groups and the use of funds that are earmarked for their investment.

We received visits from Semester at Sea, the University of Nebraska Journalism school, and several Indian NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We spoke about our work and showed our videos in numerous places: the WSSCC international water conference; the Dalit Solidarity Network Conference in Kathmandu; TEDx Mumbai; the India government's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting conference; and the University of Nebraska where I was an "Innovator in Residence."

Funding has continued to be hard, and we haven't been able to take on as many new community correspondents as we would like, because for the last year we've relied a lot on smaller donations that are harder to come by. We find that the obsession with "something new" is making it hard for us to fund projects that we've been running for more than a year, such as our Community Video Units program, which is 5 years old.

However, I've recently met with several foundations that seem to really see the value in creating a model to bring content out of all rural areas, and so I hope we'll be able to make the leap from a $300,000-a-year organization (where we've been for the last five years) to an organization with twice that budget. As I've said in the past, the costs of maintaining rural stringers for all of India are relatively low (around $400,000 a year), and we hope that someone will see the value in being able to make information flow from remote areas in a rational manner.

Watch a few of our best videos from the year:

Updated: Our recent Civic Media lunch at MIT featured the digital team from the Boston Globe, led by Jeff Moriarty, vice president of Digital Products. He was joined by Chris Marstall, Marck Chang, and Grace Woo. They've just launched a new standalone site for the Globe, spinning off from the Boston.com portal and its ubiquitous pop-up ads. It's not a redesign -- they got to design a newspaper site from scratch in the year 2011, and the benefits of having a blank slate are evident in their award-winning design. (Here's more background on that design from some of its designers.)

Like most things in Boston, the Globe has a rich history with many innovations throughout the years. Moriarty talked about Charles H. Taylor's prototypical content innovations in 1873, when the Globe added sports coverage, stocks, and many other sections that we now consider essential to a modern, family newspaper (and sections we may not expect today, like a separate section for women).

Boston.com launched in 1997, and is one of the largest regional websites in the country. BostonGlobe.com launched in 2011 to great accolades for its use of modern code and responsive web design.

The new design also came with a new pay wall. The Globe's strategy has been closely watched to see if a regional paper can convince online readers to pay for content (versus The New York Times' success as an international brand). Three months after going live, the newspaper has acquired 16,000 digital subscribers, making it the most successful paid website launch yet in the United States.

Traffic on the new Globe site is much higher than anticipated. They're seeing actual usage of more than 1 million users a month, and two distinct audiences have emerged. The newspaper audience skews older, with traffic spikes in the mornings and evenings as people sit down to read at length. Boston.com, meanwhile, is visited primarily by members of Generation X, who check it throughout the day, and is geared towards more page views, with photo galleries split across 10 pages.

John Davidow of WBUR notes that there's currently only one ad on BostonGlobe.com. It turns out that the Globe sold out of all of the available ad positions in their first quarter. Demand and page views have each been higher than anticipated.

A Portal or a Newspaper?

Before splitting the newspaper from the portal, Moriarty's team researched customers' brand awareness. Boston.com and the Boston Globe are both considered up to date, local, and community-focused. But readers like the Globe to be authoritative and serious, with a traditional journalistic mission, while Boston.com users expect a more dynamic, personal, and entertaining experience. For almost 15 years, one website strained to reach both audiences. Many Boston.com visitors didn't even know the Globe was associated with the site.

This led to the development of a two-brand strategy, culminating in a standalone site for the newspaper with its own pay wall, which went up in November of 2011. Sports and other features are still free on Boston.com, but the 300 professional journalists in the Globe newsroom generally publish behind the pay wall.

Surveys showed that paying readers wanted curation from editors, not a livestream of endless content. The hierarchy of news is important to paying customers: We pay for newspapers because someone else has done the thinking of what's most important each day, and printed it on the front page in the appropriate size font.

But what happens to the portal? Boston.com is also evolving: It's still free and heavily advertised upon. Some Globe content still gets "unlocked" on Boston.com, especially sports news. Boston.com now features a Groupon-style Deals section and more e-commerce. Since the newspaper split off, they've expanded their selection of content to 50 additional sources other than the Globe. But Boston.com is still trying to figure out the new normal, now that the Globe has split off. What role is there for a regional portal site in 2012?

Responsive web design

The site was designed from scratch with the understanding that mobile is the future, and new designs and websites should adapt naturally to whatever size screen you're using. This design movement was sparked by Ethan Marcotte (a.k.a. unstoppable robot ninja) and his manifesto on the changing nature of web design.

In the Globe's case, responsive web design meant building six different versions of the site, starting at 1,200 pixels, and working down through traditional monitor sizes, the iPad, the Kindle Fire, and mobile phones. The easiest way for a rookie to understand responsive web design is to go to the Globe's website, grab the diagonal corner of your browser window, and drag it back and forth, watching the content magically realign at your whim.

The site also detects and allows for your device's unique features like swipe capability and offline storage features. The goal is an app-like experience within the browser. The benefit is a single codebase to rule them all, not to mention that all of your traffic is going to the same URL, which has proven great for search engine optimization.

Why doesn't everyone build sites like this?

It's still an emerging concept, and advertisement blocks pose challenges to the dynamic resizing. Like Google, the Globe team has placed their bets on the browser winning over apps in the mobile space, and HTML 5 has made more things possible.

Few sites have implemented responsive design this aggressively, so the Globe team came across some new challenges. They had six months and two development teams, Filament Group and Upstatement (and many working weekends). It's still one of the most aggressive implementations of the responsive web design concept.

Future plans include making the site feel more app-like and offline use more natural. The Globe team feels like the browser lets them do most of what they want to do, as they don't need deep integration into the device's operating system.

The goal across the site is to let the journalism shine. They showed us some nice shrinkable galleries and 360-degree exploratory tools, none of it using Flash.

A Playlist for News

The Globe team paid close attention to how users acted on the Globe website. They noticed that people have a habit of opening many tabs of stories they want to read, and then progressing through them, closing them as they go. This discovery informed the design of My Saved, a sort of playlist for news content. Users have saved 60,000 stories across the site so far.

My Saved was built using the somewhat obscure Erlang programming language and Mnesia database, which allowed for high performance across every page on the site. Facebook Chat was built using the same languages.

Social Media

The Twitter accounts for the Globe and Boston.com combined have grown from 300,000 to 600,000 followers in the last year. They send out 30,000 tweets a month, and using TweetReach, they estimate they reach 20 million accounts each month.

Two genres of tweets have emerged at the Globe. First, there's people following reporters because they're interested in the beat. Then there's the tweet-of-the-moment at live events like the Whitey Bulger proceedings inside the courthouse, where cameras weren't allowed. They sought to capture details of the experience, from what kind of shoes he was wearing to the nature of his interaction with his establishment brother. News reporters outside the courthouse ended up reading the Globe's tweets on air.

The live tweeting genre has posed new questions about what's appropriate for a news outlet to write, for example, at former Mayor Kevin White's funeral. The procession might be fair game, while a tweet from inside the service would trigger a #toosoon tag.

Man, or Muppet?

Another transparency solution to courts barring television cameras comes from WOIO in Cleveland, where they've used puppets to re-enact transcriptions from trials. This leads to the obvious conclusion that we need a Bulger puppet, and likely a whole series of open-sourced public figure puppet designs (see also: NMA News, Bradley Manning puppet show, and BBC's "The Hour"). In some seriousness, MIT Center for Civic Media's Ethan Zuckerman noted, puppet lampoons work because it's really hard to do TV reporting without video. You need actualities to be able to report an event, or it doesn't get reported. Pastel court sketches don't do very well on TV these days.

Data Journalism

Reporters like Matt Carroll have helped lead the Globe into the open data era. The Globe has produced data-driven investigations like "Boston's Worst Towing Spots." In a feature like this one, an investigative team might spend weeks on a story, where some of that time is spent developing the dataset. What starts with public government data might develop into Carroll doing a stakeout in Allston.

Another data-driven news feature is the Globe's timeline of neighborhoods fragmented by public school divisions. As a parent in Boston, choosing a school for your child can be a stressful affair, as we previously learned from Nigel Jacobs at the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics. NUM's approach was to dramatically improve the school lottery website, while the Globe built an interactive feature showing the radii of school districts with a neighborhood map overlay.

Other interactive pieces include an interactive audio piece where visitors can try their hand at a school spelling bee, and a timeline of occupy protests. The aforementioned paywall has made finding and linking to these features burdensome.

Competition Among Government, Journalists and Civic Hackers

This brings up the question of partnerships, fragmentation, and who maintains civic apps once they're built. Nick Grossman, managing director of Civic Commons, pointed out the Discover Boston Public Schools app built by Code for America, and wondered who will sustain the app. The Globe team responded that, as a newspaper, these questions generally interest them intensely, but only for a short period of time, while Boston.com and the government have different needs. The Globe is, however, planning a Hack Day Challenge with Mozilla, Harvard Business School, the Department of Urban Mechanics, and others in town. They're also building their own MBTA app using the public data, and expect it to be one of the best available.

The Globe also uses data to make intelligent decisions about content placement on the website. They have a tool that overlays clickthrough rates on the site, and as one might expect, their editors closely monitor these numbers throughout the day to determine which stories should get promoted. It has become one of many data points that goes into the editor algorithm.

The team lives by testing early and often. The My Saved feature came about this way, and user studies have shown that because BostonGlobe.com looks so much like a newspaper, visitors are often unclear that it's being updated frequently.

The website is live, but the Globe team is focused on innovating up, down, and across the chain of news gathering and distribution. beta.boston.com showcases some of these experiments.

Real-time News

The overarching goal is to be ubiquitous across Boston, no matter what screen you're looking on, in real-time. Chris showed us some real-time visualizations of Boston, some of them built by Grace Woo and the Viral Spaces group here at the Media Lab.

Grace also works in the Globe Lab. She took a real-time feed of geotagged Instagram photos and got them to pop up over a map of the city. The result was a very raw, honest window into Bostonians' lives: People don't necessarily know that their pictures are public when the submit them to Instagram. Tools like this replace the editor, and we see people's self-reporting of their lives rather than breaking news: their new pants, their latest meal, live events.

The Instagram map has to account for the fact that people in different areas of the city produce real-time data such as Instagram photos at varying rates. The MIT section of Cambridge, Mass., for example, uploads far more frequently than less tech-driven areas of Boston.

The Globe team has also built what they call "tweets on a pole." Six screens on a pole display what their people are discussing, what their competitors are saying, and so on. (Like Festivus, the pole sometimes displays grievances.)

The team is looking at various kinds of data they can use to tell the story of Boston in real time. They're curating Twitter lists for individual events, such as a Patriots game. There are roughly 200 people in the newsroom, including a social media editor, who curates these lists.

Ethan brought up SwiftRiver, a system that tries to deal with multiple information streams when you have a rapidly breaking event. This platform is designed for an event in Syria with no one on the ground and 200 semi-anonymous incoming streams. How do we take the flood of information and weight and prioritize them?

The Globe teams imported Cascade from the New York Times Lab. (The Times owns the Globe.) It shows how tweets and other content proliferates across the Internet. You see a tipping point where sharing explodes. The Globe is starting to apply these features to advertising products, but they can't go into detail on that yet.

More Fun Projects

Another project, Shim, allows you to load and view the same page on multiple devices at the same time. Node.js acts as a proxy that lets you take a bunch of devices and connect them all to one access point. They all stay in sync with one browser. (Click on a link on one, and all seven go to the link.) As you may have guessed, this project was developed while building the six versions of the new website. It lets news producers quickly see how a layout might work on, say, an iPhone.

Given the significant advances they've made in the emerging field of responsive web design, someone in the audience asked if they've though about open sourcing the design. They have, and, as a for-profit enterprise, they've also considered commercializing it.

Paper Eye lets people share articles with their phone by taking a photo of the physical newspaper. You take a photo of the print headline, and it fetches the digital link for you to share. Grace told us that Optical Character Recognition actually performed very poorly, so they're simply matching the headline against a finite database of headlines. The New York Times is using Paper Eye now as well. It could defeat the ugly QR code, and serve as an in-between technology, for those Sunday mornings when you're actively avoiding your laptop while you read the paper, but still want the link to the article you just read. I can't find it online, but Grace has built similar technology with Travis Rich, Stephanie Yu, and Andrew Lippman with NewsFlash.

NewsFlash from Travis Rich on Vimeo.

Journalists as Jacks of All Trades

Like other content industries, the news business has seen enormous fragmentation in devices and reading habits. Someone in the audience asked how the Globe manages where stories appear. On the production side, reporters are now writing stories with a web-first mentality. By default, stories now must include metadata and geo-coordinates. The first version of history is now written as a blog post, and may or may not go to print.

The editors have tried to divorce content creation from its final destination. At this point, that means ensuring that a traditional news article needs to have useful metadata, like location. Reporters now have to tweet, take video, write a story or blog post, and essentially act as jacks of all trade. The Globe has hosted trainings on individual skills as well as trainings on how to integrate all of these demands into your limited bandwidth at the scene of a story.

Local Expert or Global Citizen?

As a native Bostonian, growing up with the Globe every morning, I'm excited when I see the rest of the world linking to its content. By far the most common feature I see linked to elsewhere on the web is The Big Picture, the Globe's high-resolution photoblog. But otherwise, the trend among newspapers is to focus on local content at the expense of global coverage (see, for example, this Media Standards Trust paper, which found that international reporting had decreased in every measurable way, while overall newspaper content doubled).

The pressure is on the side of writing for a more local audience. When information is available a tab away, are people going to turn to their wire story on Russia? Big Picture was an anomaly, as it was so early, and so good. The blog receives comments from around the world instantly after publishing a new post, as it features very global content.

Ethan noted, from experience, that while it's very hard to start up a global news service, the local space is also extremely competitive. But, he asked, don't you lose anything in the long run by focusing mainly on local content?

Bennie, Boston Globe's managing editor, responded that the world is a big place, and that "New England is big enough for us." The Globe's readers trust them to curate and deliver what they need to know. A traffic jam at 6 o'clock will be a big headline on Boston.com, but not BostonGlobe.com.

The Globe has withdrawn from foreign bureaus, and now considers their Washington bureau their best stab at contributing to international press coverage. They focus on areas of core strength, like former Massachusetts Gov. (and now GOP presidential frontrunner) Mitt Romney.

Does it come in pulp?

The team says that the print edition of the Globe is here for the foreseeable future. Digital products have good margins, given that they're not shipping dead trees around town, which is why the Christian Science Monitor moved entirely online. The Times and Globe still see demand for a print version, but may need to price it differently to account for the cost of delivery.

The extremely recent shift in people being willing to pay for apps and websites is an encouraging development (their words), and one that might hasten the demise of the print edition (my words). The Globe saw 2 million visits from iPad users in January, representing 5% of Boston.com's traffic. As baby boomers pick up e-readers and tablets, print subscriptions might fall off beyond the point of profitability.

Correction: This post incorrectly stated the number of the Globe's Twitter followers. The Globe and Boston.com Twitter accounts combined have grown to 600,000 followers.

Part of our job here at the OpenRural project at UNC is to somehow get that paper out of the attic and onto the web, and do it in a way that's financially sustainable for the staff of small papers.

To find out just how often records are stored only on paper, I talked to officials in nine police departments in three rural counties and found that paper was the format that many of the departments -- and records requesters there -- preferred. At four of the departments, police incident and arrest reports are handwritten.

But we also found that every single one of the departments is highly digitized when it comes to internal records management. Employees at about two-thirds of the departments stated emphatically that they do not post any information on the Internet -- as though it would be bad public policy to do so -- and would only provide the information in print format if someone asked for it.

The driving force behind the creation of digital records isn't an interest in making public information widely available, but the ease of filing monthly data to the State Bureau of Investigation and sharing information with other agencies.

Only two departments -- Wilkesboro and North Wilkesboro -- post any digital information online. North Wilkesboro pays a Utah-based company called CrimeReports.com to post an index of its records on a map and Wilkesboro makes some of its reports through PoliceReports.US, where visitors are asked to pay $2.50 for each copy of a record. Because of the lack of transparency, though, it's impossible to determine whether records are being redacted or even withheld entirely.

paper still makes the cut

Even though digital records play an important internal role in most rural police departments, paper isn't giving up without a fight. There were only two agencies -- the sheriff departments in Columbus and Wilkes counties -- that I could determine are truly paperless. In fact, in three police departments where records both started digitally and were transmitted outside the station in digital format, the records were printed out and filed using paper somewhere in the process.

One secretary described printing and hand-filing every police report, explaining that when the year is finished, she boxes up the reports and takes them to the police station attic. Those pages destined for the attic are the records that local journalists, insurance agents and attorneys request and receive.

These interviews with local law enforcement have begun to reveal the scope of the public records portion of the OpenBlock Rural project. Even if we wanted to scrape the websites of police agencies, there isn't anything to scrape. On the other hand, it appears pretty likely that a good deal of digital records are going to be available to us. State law requires that public records must be provided in any format in which they are available and that agencies cannot use the need to redact some information from the digital file as an excuse for prohibiting access to any of it.

Eight of the 13 agencies in our sample all manage their records using a Microsoft SQL Server application built and maintained by Southern Software, which already has a function called something like "export for media." It also should be relatively easy to export data from the Microsoft SQL database to a CSV format that can be easily parsed by OpenBlock. When we asked the Columbus County Sheriff's department for incident and arrest reports in a digital format, they were very helpful in our initial meeting.

But we're not out of the woods yet. One police department has balked at giving us digital records. And there's still a ways to go between getting one day's worth of records and figuring out how to set up a system that's sustainable both for local government and newspapers. The good news is that we're not going to have to spend too much time in the attic.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Sonrisa Electrica.

Just about anyone with a laptop or cell phone can use free technology to create quality media and reach audiences larger than any newspaper or television network. Indeed, we are all publishers now. But are we all journalists now, too?

Never has technology unraveled an industry so fast that its professionals no longer agree on what it is that they do. It's not surprising; the sharp line between journalist and non-journalist is so faded that few can see it anymore.

If someone happens to be at the right place at the right time and captures a significant event on his cell phone, it will be newsworthy to some audience. At the moment he tweets the image, does he magically transform from a bystander into a journalist? If he is an employee of The New York Times, most would have little trouble classifying him as a journalist. But if it also was his very first uploaded photo, then really what is the difference between the NY Times employee and the bystander? Who is the journalist?

Thought leader and colleague Dan Gillmor insists we've been asking the wrong question:

The way we frame this discussion is important. When anyone can publish, I'm often asked, who's a journalist, anyway? That's the wrong question, I believe. The vastly more relevant issue is this: What is journalism?

In other industries, the problem would resolve itself once the technological chaos subsided and a new world order emerged. Journalism doesn't have that luxury. The Crystal Cox case again highlighted what is at stake: the special legal protections that allow journalists to do their collective jobs. At the other end of the spectrum is the charming sentiment that everyone is a journalist.

One Less Journalist

In a recent popular article, GigaOm's Mathew Ingram  asked the question: "If we are all journalists, should we all be protected?"

I reject the premise. We are not all journalists. In fact, I may be the only remaining person in America who is not a journalist, despite making some of the same motions: I've been blogging since 1995 (when the creator of Wordpress was still in elementary school); I've written and published scores of papers and articles; I've worked for a few major media companies, and spent a few years on the faculty of the Cronkite School of Journalism. Yet I am certain that I am not a journalist.

Being formally educated in engineering, business and behavioral economics puts me about as far as you can get from the field of journalism. Perhaps for this very reason, my outsider's perspective might add some unique fuel to this debate.

First, I commend journalists on one unexpected bit of subtle collective behavior: Despite  witnessing the rapid demise of newspapers and broadcast news industries,  journalists -- far more than any profession -- have been particularly welcoming of the new class of content creators and publishers. Any other industry would have branded them as amateurs and interlopers -- blogging, tweeting or uploading on YouTube. Journalists have joined the newcomers in embracing new media, experimenting and extending journalism's frontiers without any class distinctions.

Other professions, especially those being affected by new technology, typically close ranks and erect many kinds of barriers to protect their closed societies from newcomers fast-tracked by technology.

Not so, with journalism. Journalists seem to be genuinely happy that technology allows everyone to participate in their craft.

But this virtue is also the heart of the problem.

Why does it matter?

Journalism and journalist: Many argue that the definitions don't matter. As long as my activities and their effects are the same as a professional journalist, and I am "committing an act of journalism," then I too am a journalist, they argue. Sooner or later, we either must agree on definitive answers or forever throw our hands up and declare: "It doesn't matter."

It matters. The Crystal Cox case reminds us that journalists need special protections, as a part of their work, to ensure their sources remain confidential. Occupy Wall Street represents countless examples where journalists are granted special access. Do we grant self-described "citizen journalists" access to the White House? Travel along with Air Force one?

As long as there needs to be special protections and privileges, it matters. As long as there is a need for standards of quality and ethics for journalists, it matters. And because it matters, we need to define "who is a journalist," and by logical extension define "what is journalism?"

Other Professions

As an engineer, I've seen my field(s) disrupted and again empowered by technology that is cheap, available and easy to use. There were loud objections to technologies in the hands of "non-engineers" (for instance, not everyone is thrilled with the prospects of journalists coding sophisticated software and web applications).

Despite the proliferation of easy-to-use tech tools, certain fields of engineering (as with medicine and law) are still subject to rigid standards and licensing in order to determine who can represent themselves as a member of these professions. We immediately can see the logic: Few people would want "citizen physicians" performing brain surgery, nor would we want merely any techie with a working knowledge of AutoCad to be building drawbridges or passenger planes.

In most cases, the professional standards are determined by the leaders and working professionals in these fields, and recommended to the licensing boards. All the certifications require academic degrees, rigorous exams, and a track record of apprentice-like work (e.g., residency) before one is granted the special rights and privileges that comes from being a recognized professional in these fields.

Why should the qualification of journalist be any less clear cut or less rigorous?

And yet, journalists seem to pride themselves on inclusiveness and lauding the category of citizen journalist.

Gillmor and his contemporaries stress the "acts of journalism" define the journalist. Intuitively, this seems to make perfect sense, but it certainly doesn't apply to any other field. As one person (Craig R) commented in response to Ingram's article: "Journalism is a trade, one that is learned through cadetships, training and study. I just painted my bedroom at home, that does not qualify me to be a painter."

And yet another (Rick Gregory) pointed out: "Short answer? We're not all journalists. Longer answer ... if the term covers everyone with a pulse it has no meaning."  

People from all sides of the debate seem to agree at least that some definitions are needed. Today there seem to be three camps, or "theories"  for trying to define journalism and the modern journalist.

The 'Infinite Monkeys' Theory

If I take enough video or photos, eventually I might capture something an audience might find newsworthy. For instance, if I am constantly shadowing the police with my camcorder rolling, I may capture an officer treating a suspect harshly -- fodder for a "caught on tape" abuse story. For the first 100 hours, I am just a annoying stalker, until I get that 30 seconds of video -- then am I a journalist? Before the first 100 hours, how is one to know the difference?

This camp maintains that the result is the defining evidence. If an accidental journalist happens to tweet important breaking news because his house happens to be in the flight path of a rescue mission, should he be afforded the same rights and protections as the professional journalist?

The emphasis of this theory is on the relatively skill-less talent of being at the right place and time -- blogging or taking enough video until you capture something noteworthy: pretty much the same strategy employed by anyone who has ever posted a cat video.

As journalists, perhaps you can set the bar a little higher?

The 'Magic Hat' Theory

While the Infinite Monkeys Theory defines the journalist only by the outcome of a relevant journalistic act, it does so regardless of the intent, the skills or work ethic. But very often we need to identify the journalist before the start of the journalistic act, or before the result is published.

New media technology has nearly eliminated the practical requirement that someone needs an affiliation with a publisher in order to be considered a journalist. Thus, anyone with a free WordPress account can "hang a shingle" and call themselves a journalist and publisher. Once this person puts on the magic hat of "journalist," or uses an injket to print a "press badge," how does one know the difference between the journalist and the non-journalist?

Once someone puts on the magic hat of journalist -- are they magically qualified to write about anything or anyone as an expert and with impunity?

Most other professions that affect the public's well-being have a higher bar to guard against self-described practitioners -- in order to maintain a higher quality of standards and ethics.

The citizen journalists camp is often with the Magic Hat Theory -- where anyone with a business card can call themselves a journalist.

As journalists, shouldn't the bar be a little higher?

The 'Anointed Priests' Theory

Here, the title of journalist is bestowed by the government or some other authority. From then on, every journalistic action is under special protections and enjoys special privileges.

I am pretty sure my journalist friends would quickly point out the First Amendment threats apparent in the Anointed Priests Theory. The prospects of having some committee or board dictate journalism would send some of them running to the Second Amendment to prevent this from happening. But these fears would be overstated. Being recognized by an "authority" as a journalist would not prevent anyone from creating content or publishing -- it would only determine who has special legal protections. And regardless of whether anyone wants this, by default, it is the way our system works today -- except that the authority is a legislature or a judge.

But the Anointed approach doesn't have to be a court, a government or even a small committee. Many other professions have formal peer review processes that serve the same purpose. The Bar association is a perfect example. The scientific community in almost any field has peer review systems that serve similar functions. Why not for journalism? Even bartenders and auto mechanics have some official requirements to pass before becoming a professional.

I get it. Even the remote possibility of blacklisting and censorship keeps journalists awake at night. But an official designation of some kind would also serve to provide a standard of ethics, integrity and quality -- giving the newcomers some standards and the courts a unified criteria for identifying journalists. As we were reminded recently, if journalists don't re-sharpen that line that separates the professional journalist from "other," then the courts will continue to do it for them.

We already have a model for peer reviewed "certification" for journalists. Most journalism schools are accredited by a board that's composed of journalism educators and professionals. They define the standards and requirements for graduating a student with a degree that says "journalism."

I am not suggesting that the journalism degree be the official legal designation for journalist. Arguably most of history's greatest journalists never had a journalism degree, but this was during an era where the publisher defined the journalist, when working for a newspaper, broadcast radio or TV network defined the journalist.

Today, journalists are no longer exclusively defined by their relationship to a publisher -- despite the many courts still clinging to this anachronistic definition. If journalism is "in the eye of the beholder" then soon the definition gets too diluted to have meaning. Journalists are still guardians and champions of freedom of the press. You should collectively, assertively and quickly define the profession of journalism. If not you, who else?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Lichfield Live.

We first unveiled our platform at USC Annenberg's pioneering Program for Online Communities in the fall of 2009. Nearly three years -- and probably a hundred presentations later -- we're still showing off our wares.

Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of Docstoc and a big supporter of the L.A. entrepreneurial community, if I had any tips for startups regarding making a memorable -- strike that -- making a killer presentation.

A short, 3-minute video response can be found at the bottom of this post, but I thought I'd share some key takeaways with you here:

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

Every startup starts with a vision. You need to sell that vision. But before you even think about climbing on stage, you need to remember who you're talking to is just as important as what you're talking about. In other words, you need to know your audience.

If you're talking to investors, for example, talk about the investment. How big is the market? What percentage do you plan to capture? How long will it take to become profitable? How much money will it take to get there? How do you plan to spend that money? And perhaps the most anticipated question of all for any investor: "When will I get my money back?"

Market assessment, product placement and ROI -- that's what's on the mind of any Angel or VC during an investor pitch. Make sure you speak to those issues.

If it's a demo, show the product; don't talk about it. The focus of a product demonstration is different than an investor pitch. And so is the audience. A good way to structure a demo of your product is to address these three questions: 1) What's the market like now; 2) What does your product do (this is where you show the product if you have a prototype); and 3) How will the market/consumer behavior change (presumably for the better) when your product goes live?

Let's face it-- product demos are much sexier than investor pitches. They're also better attended. Investors, potential business partners, future employees, unsuspecting customers, the press-- all are typically in attendance. Which brings us to point two...

SPEAK IN BITE-SIZE CHUNKS

The easier it is for your presentation to be digested by your audience, the better. So you need to condense your message to as few words as possible. And if you plan to use slides, put those words -- and only those words -- on your slides. People tend to read the slides, not listen to you. And chances are your audience is dividing its time between you and that cell phone they're surreptitiously trying to hide from view anyway. So why not give them a "tweetable" moment, and get the focus back on you.

How, you ask? Limit the text on your slides to 140 characters. That's right, actually write the tweet on the slide.

Think about it. By writing a few choice words on your slide, you've just killed two birds with one stone. You've given the people in the room your pitch in a way they can remember it, and you've gotten them to push it out across the social web for you.

TELL A STORY THROUGH A NARRATIVE

I've talked about this in a previous post, but it's worth repeating. When you're presenting, all you are really doing is telling a story. And stories are composed of three parts: a beginning, a middle and an end.

The beginning is the setup. This is where you talk about the marketplace pain and how your product plans to assuage it.

The middle is the solution. This is where you actually show off your product in a demo. But be careful. Many presenters tend to get sidetracked here talking about the nuances of the product. Your audience is more interested in what problem your product is going to solve, not the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of how it works.

The end is your salvo. This is your final parting shot, your big finish. This is where you want to talk about the upcoming launch, make the financial "ask," wow your audience with your long-term vision.

Of course, every good story needs a villain. And if you have one -- maybe it's a competitor, a really big problem in the marketplace that has yet to be addressed, a previously insurmountable technical obstacle you've overcome -- my advice is to play it up. Don't skirt the big obstacles before you.

You're David; they're Goliath. So tell your audience how you're going to slay the giant. Whether it's a special tool set you've created, or a unique knowledge of the market that gives you an unfair advantage, you are the one who will solve this problem and save the day. Because at the end of the day, you are the hero of your story.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

Don't fall into the trap that just because you know more than anyone else in the room about your business that you can wing it when you get up there. That's a recipe for disaster.

Even the most gifted actors have to know their lines. It's out of that constraint that confidence and comfort emerge. It's what makes their performance seem so natural and effortless. Knowing your "lines" can make you come off the same way. But the only way that's going to happen is if you practice.

DON'T RELY ON TECHNOLOGY

It will fail.

A FINAL THOUGHT

Don't worry, I'm not going to leave you with a hanging dongle (sorry, PC aficionados -- that's a Mac joke). Giving a killer presentation is within your grasp.

Just remember these five things and you'll knock 'em dead every time: 1) Know your audience; 2) have a compelling story; 3) tell that story succinctly; 4) tell it with the confidence that comes from practice; and 5) don't rely on bells and whistles.

Because in the end, you are the presentation, not what's on the screen behind you.

This article is the fifth of 10 video segments in which digital entrepreneur Tom Grasty talks about his experience building an Internet startup, and is part of a larger initiative sponsored by docstoc.videos, which features advice from small business owners who offer their views on how to launch a new business or grow your existing one altogether.

It's the wondrous API (application programming interface). At ScraperWiki, we provide the tools to custom fit your wand to your magical purpose. Learn a couple of incantations in either Ruby, Python or PHP and you can concoct an API of web data -- only the relevant data, in the way you want to use it.

The real power in this way of using data is the ability to fuse APIs from other services and build a whole new tool. For example, this was done by a new startup called Tropo, and here you can see a screencast on how to use Tropo and ScraperWiki to quickly and easily build an airport information system for the Philadelphia International Airport.

A lot of journalists are using our site to tap into the Twitter API. We think that many more might take up a bit of programming wizardry if they could cast their spells under cloak and dagger. So we have created vaults for making your scrapers invisible to everyone else on the web. Here's what one looks like. It's not self-service at the moment, but if you're interested in gathering and managing data for embargoed stories then get in touch with us here.

Also, if you want to work some data magic with developers, journalists, social scientists and the data-curious, keep an eye on our events. The first Journalism Data Camp kicks off at Columbia School of Journalism on February 3.

Our tagline for the Public Media Accelerator is "seeking mission-driven entrepreneurs changing media for good." We're in a time of remarkable technology innovation, and our goal is to channel the forces driving that growth towards public service media.

The two forces, the tech sector and public media, need each other: The tech sector will gain from public media's high-quality content, commitment to community, and public service mission; and public media will gain from technology's network efficiencies, professional and social connections, and radical new distribution paths.

As we spend the early weeks of this venture fleshing out our thinking and surveying the landscape, I thought I'd share both a snapshot of the accelerator scene and some of the issues triggering discussion at the Public Media Accelerator.

What's an accelerator?

Accelerators are organizations focused on early stage investment in technology startups, providing a mix of financing, mentorship and other support to help launch new companies with the potential for explosive growth.

Most accelerators boil down to a few essentials:

1. Funding -- Typically for-profit accelerators provide $20k-$50k and take approximately 5% in equity.
2. Founding teams -- The participants are small teams, often 2-3 people, who are proto-founders of a company organized around a product/service vision.
3. Program and process -- The accelerator creates a structure and curriculum, typically offered in an intensive residential 2-3 month sprint.
4. Networking and expertise -- There's enormous value in the accelerator's ability to match teams with experienced mentors, advisers and investors who assist the teams on design, product, marketing, business development, and more.
5. Space and logistical support -- Often there is co-working space and light infrastructure support for the teams during the in-person sessions.
6. Demo day -- The process culminates in a showcase of the team's products at a "demo day" for investors and press.

Accelerators are popping up all over. TechStars, one of the leaders in the field, has even franchised the model to support new accelerators around the world. Xconomy tracks 64 of them in its latest annual report. Budding entrepreneurs, faced with so many options, can use the "Unified Seed Accelerator Application" form to apply to numerous accelerators in one fell swoop.

A growing trend that includes the Public Media Accelerator is "vertical" accelerators that focus on a particular industry, platform or other niche. Examples include Rockhealth, which targets startups in health care and FinTech for financial tech. There are a growing number with social missions, including one of my favorites, the Unreasonable Institute. And just last week Code for America announced a forthcoming accelerator targeting "civic startups."

accelerators shifting into high gear

With so many groups with money and advice to give, are there enough takers? The answer is yes -- plenty, in fact -- although there is growing competition for the best teams and ideas. The fact is that today the costs of creating a startup are much lower by virtue of cloud computing and other tech efficiencies; the growth of Internet and mobile access has created a global market and means of distribution; entrepreneurial culture has taken root among enterprising developers; the high-profile successes of Internet startups and Y Combinator/TechStars alumni have inspired follow-on models.

The most obvious and meaningful benchmark of success is the number of companies in the accelerator's portfolio that secure follow-on financing, and, further downstream, a successful "exit" in an acquisition, IPO or profitability.

While the ingredients for what goes into an accelerator can be broken out and reassembled, the special sauce is the unique mix of the accelerator management team's judgment, talent, relationships, experience, and pure luck of the draw in shepherding companies through to further funding, growth and profit.

It's clear that public media needs its own accelerator -- attuned to the needs and assets of the industry and connected to the talent and energy in the broader technology and media world.

The PRX Knight team has our own special sauce, but our measure of success is not profits and exits per se -- it's furthering the values and impact of public service media, with sustainability and revenue being critical to create a lasting effect. We decided early on that the Public Media Accelerator would look for both for-profit and non-profit opportunities (something Knight Foundation has started to explore recently through its Enterprise Fund).

There are a number of for-profit organizations in public media -- production companies, service providers, subsidiaries, etc. But the vast majority of the system -- local stations, distributors, and national networks including PRX itself -- are non-profits. And many of the sources of revenue are contingent upon non-profit status -- CPB grants, foundation and government funding, individual donations, FCC-regulated broadcast sponsorship. To my knowledge, there are no venture-backed companies focused on public media, in part because a traditional definition of the market is too small to target.

finding the right mix of for-profit and non-profit

So why would the Public Media Accelerator be open to for-profit investments? Would the same ingredients hold together in a purely non-profit context? How do we harness the for-profit energy that attracts top talent and aligns incentives in the standard accelerator model, while advancing the mission-driven principles at the core of the venture?

First, while we will not restrict the accelerator to one funding path, we recognize that for-profits and non-profits require different structures and approaches to be effective. In some cases we will help pioneer new hybrid models that straddle both.

Second, we want to overcome the inherent weaknesses of the grant-driven, project-based funding that has been the means of innovation funding in the industry to date. These efforts tend to be incremental, short-lived, and at best result in "sustaining" rather than "disruptive" innovation (using Clayton Christensen's well-known construct). It's not hard to see why disruptive innovations tend to come from outside successful organizations and industries rather than from within. The Public Media Accelerator has the opportunity to change this dynamic: Knight and PRX have significant standing and relationships in public media, but are also accomplished risk-takers without the legacies and limits of many public media institutions.

Third, we see the accelerator model as a way to attract new talent into the field. While we anticipate working with a number of the current forward-leaning teams within the industry, our opportunity is to expand the pool, and inspire and enable a new cadre of public media entrepreneurs (also address the developer gap I blogged about here recently). We take our own inspiration from Mozilla, Wikipedia, Code for America, and the growing number of mission-driven technology efforts that aspire to and achieve success on an Internet scale. Technologists and entrepreneurs want to make meaningful things, and public media should embrace them.

What are we looking for?

We've said two areas of interest are mobile and monetization, but we are also intentionally leaving a wide open door for ideas that break the mold. Our evolving list of criteria includes:

Mission-driven: The ideas should encompass public media's mission and values as an impact goal, not merely a side effect.

Disruptive: We're excited about ideas that change the game through some systemic or business model insight, more so than smart improvements to the way things already work.

Scalable/replicable: Ideas should have the potential to scale to significant impact and business sustainability or be replicable by others.

The Public Media Accelerator is not a content fund, but we'll seek to connect content in ways that deepen its value and impact and address the business model of its production and distribution.

We still have a number of open questions as we get underway, but rather than attempt to answer them all, we're taking our own advice and launching the Public Media Accelerator as a lean startup of its own -- building as we go, trusting in a talented team, being ready to pivot, actively networking and learning from advisers and mentors, and relentlessly focused on the mission of transforming public media. (We are still accepting applications for the director position, a terrific opportunity to help lead the media revolution.)

Follow us on Twitter (@publicmediax and on the Public Media Accelerator site.

Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of Docstoc and a big supporter of the L.A. entrepreneurial community, if I had any tips for startups regarding choosing a name for their product.

A short, 3-minute video response can be found at the bottom of this post, but I thought I'd share some key takeaways with you here:

MAKE SURE THE DOMAIN NAME IS AVAILABLE

Let's face it: We live in a digital age. The fact that a record $35.3 billion was spent online this past holiday season is evidence of that. And in this digital age, the proverbial "open for business" sign that used to dangle in the front shop-window has been replaced with the search bar.

So the first thing to think about when naming your product is this: If the domain isn't available, you don't have squat (more on the concept of "domain squatting" in minute).

But finding an available '.com' is just the beginning. As the web becomes increasingly crowded, a myriad of domain extensions have emerged. A few of the more popular ones include: .tv, .me, .biz. And this doesn't even take into consideration domains for foreign territories.

With all these new extensions emerging, a natural question many entrepreneurs ask is: "Does a place exist that will check all the available domain extensions at the same time?" Actually, there are several.

If you just want to search the "big three" -- .com, .net, .org -- I suggest a site called Instant Domain Search. Just type in the name you want, and the website does the rest.

If you want to search all the extensions, give Check Domains a shot. Not only will it instantly tell you all the domains that are available, when you're done it even takes you to GoDaddy.com, a popular registry site that lets you purchase those extensions you've selected.

Because you never know which domain extension is going to be the next one to take off, my advice is to purchase as many domain extensions as possible. I know .cc (the domain for the Coco Islands) may seem completely unnecessary today, but the last thing you want to do is be held hostage by some domain squatter who had the foresight to buy your domain before you did.

YOU DON'T BE EXACT; YOU CAN ALLUDE TO YOUR PRODUCT

As your business grows, chances are your product line will expand as well. You want to make sure your name grows with it, too. It's okay to leave something to the imagination of your customers. In the "name game," being allusive can be a powerful attribute.

Take the word, "Amazon," for example. For Jeff Bezos, books always were just the beginning. From the very outset, the forward-thinking entrepreneur saw his company expanding well beyond the written word.

Don't kid yourself. The selection of the name "Amazon" was hardly happenstance. Bezos deliberately chose a word that alluded to the business he saw downstream, rather than the actual entrepreneurial waters he set out to navigate in 1995.

Inspired by the seemingly endless South American river with its countless tributaries, the notion of a continuous flow of consumer goods feeding into a massive marketplace perfectly aligned with Bezos' vision to create the world's largest e-commerce site.

Today, when we think of Amazon the first thought that pops into our mind is retail, not a river in South America. Apparently, the Googleplex agrees. Just search the word "Amazon" (preferably after you're done reading this blog).

The first mention of a river or rain forest doesn't appear until page three.

CREATE A NEW WORD THAT CAN DEFINE YOUR COMPANY

Google ... Yahoo ... Facebook ... Twitter ... These words may have existed before they found their way into the pantheon of contemporary popular culture. ("Googol" is the digit 1 followed by 100 zeros; a "yahoo" is a rude, noisy or violent person; "Facebook" is the nickname for the student directory at Phillips Exeter Academy, where Mark Zuckerberg went to high school; "twitter" is a short burst of inconsequential information.)

But the brilliance of the entrepreneurs behind the companies that bear those names is that those words are now so far removed from the original meaning associated with them that they are effectively new words altogether.

Yet just coming up with a catchy name isn't really the trick. The real magic is coming up with a word that's connected with your product in such a way that it becomes both a noun and a verb -- at the same time.

Let me give you an example from my own experience--

When we were coming up with the name for Stroome, we wanted a name that would work as both a noun and a verb. Much in the same way people now say, "Google it," we wanted people to say, "Stroome me," when they had some great content they wanted to share. Of course, we didn't have the word "Stroome" yet. But the Dutch did -- "Strømme."

It means "to move freely," which is exactly what we want our site to facilitate -- the movement of ideas, points of view and content freely between people. We played with the spelling a bit, but the name was perfect.

A FINAL THOUGHT

Without question, naming your product is important. But it's also a great opportunity. The right name can distinguish you from the competition, as well as differentiate your product from seemingly similar offerings.

So when naming your product here are three things to remember. First, make sure the name you chose is available across as many domains extensions as possible. And if the domains aren't available, don't get discouraged. Instead, get creative. Second, come up with a name that alludes to who you are, but doesn't specifically say what you do. And finally, if you do have to come up with a entirely new word, don't be afraid to really think outside the box.

Who knows, you might not just be naming your product. You may just end up defining an entire new product category.

This article is the fourth of 10 video segments in which digital entrepreneur Tom Grasty talks about his experience building an Internet startup, and is part of a larger initiative sponsored by docstoc.videos, which features advice from small business owners who offer their views on how to launch a new business or grow your existing one altogether.

By contrast, on that very same day, my office was buzzing with students seemingly in no hurry to pack up for the holidays and head home. And, interestingly, only one of them was my actual student. One was a Cronkite School of Journalism freshman who had heard me speak to her class and wanted to run an idea past me. A Cronkite sophomore had a major media company interested in a Microsoft Word plug-in he had come up with and wanted to make sure it was actually doable. Another was a business major at Arizona State University's Carey School who needed some advice on developing an iPad application that he got $5,000 in seed money to build. An ASU engineering major wanted to make sure he could get on my schedule before the end of the year to talk through plans for his new business for the coming year.

As I was looking into the earnest faces of the students who paraded in and out of my office that day, with their Power Point presentations and legal yellow pads filled with sketches for their big ideas, I thought about what made the difference between my friend's institution of higher education and my own.

encouraging innovation

At ASU, innovation and entrepreneurship are being pushed everywhere you go. Funding contests abound such as the Edson Student Entrepreneurship Initiative, which funds up to $20,000 per student team; the ASU Innovation Challenge, in which each student team can win up to $10,000 for an idea; the Performing Arts Venture Experience gives away up to $5,000 for student ideas, and the new 10,000 Solutions provides up to $10,000 to fund good ideas from students, staff, faculty and community members on how to impact local and global communities.

Additionally, Cronkite School students (and faculty) are encouraged to submit ideas for Knight News Challenge and J-Lab Women Entrepreneurs grants, and those winners are heralded as much as winners of journalism contests.

Professors at Cronkite and other schools bake pitch session into their syllabi so students are thinking of the practical as well as the theoretical. I recently sat in on a pitch session at the College of Nursing and Health Innovation where nutrition and health majors were trying to answer two questions with fresh ideas: How do we get Americans to drink more water, and how do we get sedentary office workers to move more?

The university also tries to make it easier for like-minded entrepreneurs to find each other. Each of the four ASU campuses have Changemaker Centers where students from different majors can hang out and kick around the "what if" questions. I've always kept an open door policy at my own lab, Cronkite's Digital Media and Entrepreneurship Lab, where students from any major can pop in to talk, and they do. In the past academic year, I've helped a public policy major think through an iPhone app to help track lost pets and a social work major create a proposal for a volunteer matching site for high school students and non-profits. Journalists for local media companies stop by to hash out ideas as well, and I am really excited about a couple of projects in the works.

University President Michael Crow employs Entrepreneurs-in-Residence who help student startups get their footing but who also help faculty working on innovation and entrepreneurship at such a large university find and support each other. It helps that professors at the College of Technology and Innovation know that I'm looking for Objective C engineers to hire or that faculty at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning might be interested in collaborating on a mapping project.

like minds unite

Lastly, like minds like being around each other. At Cronkite, we've hosted News Foo for two years running, and a fall Where Camp attracted several dozens of data nerds for a weekend hack fest. Cronkite students are encouraged to attend local startup weekends around the area and conferences out at the university's Sky Song business incubator. It was at such a startup weekend last spring that one of my graphic design students hacked together his latest venture that is attracting angel investments; a few weeks ago, he dropped out of school to move to Silicon Valley to give it a try.

Several adjunct professors at Cronkite are working on startups, and the school employs both a technologist-in-residence and an entrepreneur-in-residence. Next door to my lab, a startup Network, Magicdust Television, has launched a hybrid digital media/television show called RightThisMinute that is produced in the Cronkite building and employs Cronkite students.

So it's no wonder that a lot of students at Cronkite and other ASU schools have the entrepreneurship bug, and especially a penchant for social entrepreneurship. Yeah, it's a cold, cruel world and a god-awful economy, but the message over here, at least, is that such a reality only provides another opportunity to do something about it.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Nick Bastian.

It's been an eventful year on MediaShift's Idea Lab, marked by mergers, beta releases and site redesigns for the many innovators in digital media. This past year also saw the Knight Foundation announce 16 winners of its News Challenge contest, up from 12 grantees in 2010 -- and the total prize money hit $4.7 million, thanks in part to a $1 million contribution from Google.

A couple of themes that ran big among the winners this year were data and mobile. We saw the rise of the hacker-journalist, and many projects were focused on making sense of the stream of data -- think PANDA, ScraperWiki, OpenBlock Rural, Overview, SwiftRiver and DocumentCloud.

We also saw new interpretations of journalism, such as NextDrop, a mobile platform that helps people in India find out when water is available; Poderopedia, a crowdsourced database that visualizes the relationships among Chile's elite; and the Awesome Foundation, which not only has an awesome name, but is using mini-grants to give others a chance to start up projects of their own.

Here's a look back at just some of the highlights on Idea Lab in 2011.

Just out of beta

Several Knight News Challenge winners announced considerable strides in their projects. The PANDA project, which aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, pushed out a first, and then a second, alpha, adding a login/registration system, dataset search, and complex query support, among other features. It has also been working to integrate directly with fellow News Challenge winner ScraperWiki. "This is speculative at the moment, but has the potential to make the API useful even to novice developers who might not be entirely comfortable writing shell scripts or cron jobs," explained PANDA's Christopher Groskopf.

In December, LocalWiki, a 2010 Knight News Challenge winner, announced the first major release of its new LocalWiki software and launched its first focus community, serving Denton, Texas. The LocalWiki project is an ambitious effort to create community-owned, living information repositories that will provide much-needed context behind the people, places, and events that shape our communities.

In addition, SocMap.com, another 2010 Knight News Challenge winner, launched a "tweets" and "places" features on its site, along with plans to debut "local initiatives," "local questions," and a city-planning game in early 2012. And the Cartoonist, which aims to bring newsgames to the masses, showed off a working prototype of the Cartoonist engine for the first time during a demo day hosted by a Georgia Tech research center.

m&a alive and well

There's been no shortage of examples of innovation on Idea Lab, and innovation can, and did this year, lead to acquisitions. Spot.Us, a journalism crowdfunding project that was launched in November of 2008, announced that it was acquired by the Public Insight Network, which is part of American Public Media. "I hope that as Spot.Us and PIN merge, we can continue to push the boundaries in transparency and participation in the process of journalism so that media organizations can better serve the public," Spot.Us founder David Cohn wrote in a post announcing the acquisition.

And earlier in the year, DocumentCloud announced that it had found a long-term home for its project. The startup, which is a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, merged operations with Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a non-profit grassroots organization committed to fostering excellence in investigative journalism. "IRE has a long and established history of supporting investigative reporting, and we'll be a proud part of their ongoing work to provide journalists with tools that support their reporting," Amanda Hickman, DocumentCloud's former program director, announced.

hacking away

The end of September brought with it a four-day hackathon in Berlin organized by Knight-Mozilla, and bringing together programmers and journalists from all over the world. Dan Sinker, who heads up the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership for Mozilla, wrote about the event, which jokingly became known as "Hacktoberfest," and followed up with some reflections on data journalism and opportunities for learning.

Just weeks later, Zeega participated in WFMU's Radiovision Festival, where creative developers and digital storytellers came together for a day of hacking and coding called "Re-Inventing Radio." At the festival, Zeega shared an ultra-early alpha version of its Zeega editor and three projects for people to experiment with.

Brought to you live

In November, we decided to host a live chat on Twitter on the use of SMS and texting technology by journalists, news organizations, radio shows and more. MobileActive's Melissa Ulbricht and Sean McDonald of FrontlineSMS were two Knight News Challenge winners who participated in the live chat, in an effort to explain how services and projects are using SMS to help connect people to important news and information in communities where Internet access is limited.

MobileActive released its Mobile Media Toolkit earlier this year, which provides how-to guides, wireless tools, and case studies on how mobile phones are being used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media.

awards and accolades

A key lesson learned this year was that bigger doesn't necessarily mean better when it comes to new media. The Tiziano Project beat out both CNN and NPR at the 2011 Online Journalism Awards, taking home the Community Collaboration award for its project 360 Kurdistan -- an immersive, nonlinear platform for exploring the culture of the region from the perspectives of both local and professional journalists.

The 2011 award from the Knight Foundation will help the Tiziano Project further develop the 360 technology into a scalable platform that other organizations can use, according to Jon Vidar, the project's executive director. "We will then curate these future 360s on an interactive map and develop a communication layer that will sit on top, allowing visitors to participate in a universal dialog with our students," he wrote in a post.

And November saw Knight-Mozilla announce its 2011/12 News Technology fellows. ScraperWiki's Nicola Hughes and Dan Schultz, a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner and tech wizard extraordinaire for our MediaShift and Idea Lab sites, were two of the innovators who were selected to participate in helping newsrooms around the world develop prototypes for digitally delivering news and information.

No doubt there will be more fantastic innovations and awards to come in 2012! We're looking forward to sharing them with you here on Idea Lab.

I'd reframe the question slightly. If you work in digital media, you know how much this world is still in flux. The pace of change means that trends, tenets and ideas can spring up, calcify into conventional wisdom, and fade away all in the span of two years or less. So instead, I'll lay out a few things we might change if we were starting the pilot in January 2012, and some of the ideas that we hope to push on in our work with stations over the next year.

1. PLAY MORE WITH LENGTH AND FREQUENCY

Although we emphasized the importance of a considered take from the get-go with Argo, we also stressed that the bread-and-butter of blogging is writing short and often. But as many have remarked, the quickest of quick takes have migrated into status updates on Facebook and Twitter, or blips on Tumblr. And alongside that migration, we've seen blogs become less about the instant and more about the Instapaper. A steady rise in popularity for Argo's highest-trafficked site, MindShift, accompanied its move to less-frequent, longer-form blogging. CommonHealth, another of the network's most popular sites, has scored some of its biggest audience hits with 4,000-word opuses like this one.

2. FIND PARTNERS AND BUILD TEAMS

Part of the Argo team's aim was to replicate a pattern we'd seen again and again in our combined decades of working in independent and commercial news organizations: A single person with a singular vision builds a sizable community around a topic from the ground up. And we saw plenty of that this year. But several of our stations also tweaked the model of the single, full-time blogger that we began with, splitting the position between two part-time bloggers, or augmenting the site with contributions from freelancers. And by and large, this has worked quite well for the stations that have taken this approach. In the meantime, we've seen several popular veteran bloggers expand their operations into teams. Ezra Klein's eponymous one-man operation at the Washington Post became the four-person micro-site Wonkblog. Politico's legendary Ben Smith added Dylan Byers to his roster (very shortly before announcing a move to Buzzfeed). And, of course, "Andrew Sullivan" has been the euphemism for a multi-headed team of collaborators for some years now.

That single person with a singular vision can still make a hell of a splash, of course. (Obligatory year-end reflection shoutout to my colleague @acarvin and my daily inspiration, Maria Popova.) And it's easy to convince yourself you're actually collaborating when all you're doing is sharing one another's widgets. But among the things we'll be looking for in 2012 are opportunities to foment genuine, effective partnerships.

3. LOOK FOR EDITORS

When we were hiring our set of reporter-bloggers for Argo, we stressed that it was vital to hire rock stars to helm these sites. In their quest to find rock stars, hiring managers asked variants on one question over and over -- "Is it more important to hire someone with strong, proven reporting chops, or native bloggers who live and breathe the medium?" (Understanding, of course, that it's not a dichotomy. Plenty of folks have both traits.) Today, though, the advice I'd give is, "Find folks who could be awesome editors." As I told Andrew Phelps at the Nieman Journalism Lab, I shifted from calling our site hosts "reporter-bloggers" at the outset of the project to calling them "reporter-editors."* They do have to be strong, speedy writers. And they must be able to report. But the qualities that lift the best blogs to a higher plane are news judgment, pattern recognition, and an instinct for planning and programming -- the hallmarks, in short, of terrific editors.

When I look at the amazing strides the Atlantic has accomplished online over the last few years, I suspect that much of it comes from having a masthead of double-threats who edit as well as they write -- folks like Alexis Madrigal (and very soon -- permit me a squeal -- Megan Garber).**

4. TREAT CONTEXT AS CONTENT

The three people who paid attention to what I was writing and thinking about just before I started working on Argo probably got some severe whiplash as I took on this role. One of my passions in journalism as far back as I can remember -- the thing I spent a year at the Reynolds Journalism Institute studying -- has been context. For years, I'd been writing about the need to invent a timeless journalism, deeply embedded in context, that eschewed the hyperactive, short-term-obsessed imperatives of news and took advantage of the web's capacity to unite episodic and systemic information. Suddenly, these lofty thoughts gave way to paeans to the listicle and headline-writing tips. I'm happy to trace for you how this effort relates to that larger quest, but I can't deny that the future-of-context mantra has been on the back burner during this effort to build successful niche communities.

This is why it makes me so thrilled to see Argo's sister project, StateImpact, double down on context in their approach to blogging. They are proving that marrying well-tended topic page overviews with regular blog posts can be a formula for success. While Argo's prominent "skybox" promotion modules highlight blog posts, a similar convention in the StateImpact design is engineered to highlight topic pages instead. StateImpact reporters take care in producing these pages, writing authoritative, attention-grabbing headlines for them, promoting them with strong thumbnail images, and treating them, generally, as content (not merely as archives, sidebars, or after-matter for users who want to know more). Partly as a result, the topic pages have become some of the most popular material on the StateImpact sites. And instead of fading away once the initial rush of interest in a story is over, these pages grow more valuable over time.

StateImpact joins sites like Salon and SBNation in starting to blur the line between stories and topic pages. And I like it. I don't think we have a silver-bullet successor to "the article" yet, but I'm eager to move this vein of experimentation forward.

5. THINK BEYOND THE RIGHT RAIL

The "right rail" or "sidebar" has been a mainstay of the news story page for years. Often-automated, haphazardly programmed, it tends to be the dumping ground for material that organizational politics and wishful thinking deem to be essential. Over the years, that space has gotten freighted with more and more stuff -- random widgets, text ads, house promos -- further subdividing the thin trickle of attention that usually accrues to it.

When we started the Argo sites, we tried to keep the right rail on our pages fairly tight. But as time went on, that space began to sprawl (as it's wont to do on every website). We stuck widgets there; stations added their own widgets; partnerships yielded new widgets; all despite scant evidence that the space was capturing much user interest.

Now, with mobile devices on the uptick, we can no longer take for granted that the right rail gets even a token eye fixation from users. And designers have been quietly snuffing it out. When NPR redesigned its Shots blog earlier in 2011, the right rail became a much more minimalist enterprise, both on the front page and on story pages. (The redesign has correlated with a healthy uptick in all our favorite metrics for the blog.) Adweek's gorgeous story page design integrates sidebar material much more organically throughout the page. Recently launched tech site The Verge is doing something altogether different with the concept of the story page, and the right rail is not a part of it.

CONCLUSION

Again, not all of these thoughts would have led us down a different path in 2010, when we launched Argo. But they point towards some differences in the type of project we'd launch today. I ran this list by my confreres Joel Sucherman and Wes Lindamood, and they liked it, but I'm sure they'd each pick a different set of points.

A consistently astonishing aspect of working in digital journalism is that you always feel like you're at the beginning of something. And in a way, you always are. May our world shift even more in the year to come.

* Yes. I know. And I agree. "Reporter-bloggers" pains me as a term; it risks reinforcing the false dichotomy between "bloggers" and "journalists" that drives all sensible people crazy. But many folks still need reassurances that even we Micro-Aggregated Cyberpeople place great value on reporting, and if a little hyphenation can spare me from having to engage with a 12-year-old stereotype involving pajamas, so be it.

** Alexis himself reminds us all once a week on Twitter that the secret sauce behind the Atlantic's steady march of awesomeness online is actually J.J. Gould and Bob Cohn.

Over the course of the next several posts, I'm going to give you an X-ray view into the guts of the OpenBlock application. Together, we're going to watch how data gets ingested and processed into information and insights that residents of rural communities can use to make decisions about their daily lives.

We knew basically two things when we started this project. First, we knew that public data went into OpenBlock. And we knew that digital public data is for the most part in a poor condition to be easily digested. Second, we knew that the meaningful geographies of rural areas were going to be different than the geographies of urban areas. But beyond that, the anatomy of OpenBlock remained almost completely obscured. No instances of the application lived in the wild, and the code itself was still missing significant documentation.

Step 1: Getting data into OpenBlock

Our first step was to figure out how to get data into OpenBlock. And while many of us probably think about data as being some sort of news event -- a transaction, creation, deletion, inspection, election, rejection, incarceration or some other function of government that takes place at a specific time -- the initial data you need for OpenBlock is about a location. You have to tell it where it is. And you do that by ingesting data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau is an amazing resource of geographic data, which it calls TIGER/Line files. The bureau provides TIGER/Line files that show information about various "layers" of geography -- most of which aren't relevant to OpenBlock. Each layer actually consists of several files that you download from the Census website as a single zip file. And inside that zip file is a file with a .shp extension -- that's a shapefile, and it is the only one that has nutritious value as far as OpenBlock is concerned.

Several layers are important -- one file contains data about the boundaries of all ZIP codes in a state. Even though most ZIP codes aren't going to be relevant, you need them anyway. And while loading ZIP code shapefiles into OpenBlock may not be simple for people who don't have at least some familiarity with Django, it doesn't require a lot of human judgment. Plug in some code and you're done.

But nobody lives their lives by ZIP codes. We care about geographies like counties and cities and streets. And knowing which geographic data to load next does require some editorial thinking. Most of us are familiar with counties as political entities that have some meaning. But counties are different in each state. For example, in Virginia there is a City of Fairfax and County of Fairfax. Fairfax City isn't in Fairfax County or any county. They touch each other, but one does not have jurisdiction over the other. Now, here in North Carolina we have Durham County and Durham City. Durham City is inside Durham County -- mostly -- except for the part of Durham City that is in Orange County. Orange County is the home of Chapel Hill, except for the part of Chapel Hill that's in Durham County. And both Durham and Orange counties contain large parts of land that aren't in any city at all.

teaching journalism to programmers and vice versa

So when we talk about teaching journalism to programmers and programming to journalists -- this is really the kind of thing we're talking about. Somewhere here we have to have someone who knows the political geography of North Carolina and who can also describe the rules of that geography to a computer program so that it doesn't leave out anything it shouldn't and also includes everything it should.

Let's say we want to show the locations of all new business that have been incorporated in Orange County. The N.C. Secretary of State, which records new businesses, may have the address of the business, but not the county. We're going to have to tell the OpenBlock application which addresses are inside Orange County -- regardless of whether they are in Chapel Hill, Durham City or no city. If we tell it just to grab the Chapel Hill addresses, we will erroneously include the businesses that are in the part of Chapel Hill that's in Durham County. Or, since most people think of Chapel Hill as being an Orange County city and they might be confused if they know a business has opened but isn't listed on our website, we may want to tell OpenBlock to include all Orange County addresses, but not the ones that are in Durham City, and also include the Durham County addresses if they are in Chapel Hill.

And then we have to write for the reader an explanation of whatever assumptions we're making in our data, and it has to be brief and clear.

Once you've made your editorial decisions, county bounders can also be downloaded from the Census Bureau as well. Just to be proper, Census calls this layer "County and Equivalent."

Cities, however, are a more delicate matter that again require some knowledge of Census terminology and local political geography. There is no Census layer called "cities."

Until recently, the practice among the OpenBlock community had been to look for geographic information about city boundaries from local governments. Most county governments are pretty good about publishing their geographic data on the web. Many large public universities have a GIS (geographic information system) section in their library, such as this one at N.C. State University that indexes links to the geographic data source for many of the state's county governments.

lesson learned: local data varies

The problem with local data is that poor and rural counties are less likely to have the online GIS data. And you will also find yourself dealing with a wide variety of standards. We spent a few days flummoxed by our inability to load Columbus County data. For whatever reason, the county decided not to include the necessary .prj projection file you need to make a shapefile work in OpenBlock. It's a lesson that's going to be important for us to remember throughout this project -- local data varies widely in quality. And sometimes it's not obvious to the layperson's eye what is missing.

Our thinking right now is that we're going to be able to turn back to the Census Bureau for city information. But we're not using the Census layer called "Consolidated Cities." Nor the one called "County subdivisions." We're using the "Places" layer.

You can read more about our "city" solution on the OpenBlock discussion group. But there are a few bits worth mentioning here:

• Places do not cover 100 percent of a county. So we're going to need to be on guard that events happening outside the boundaries of one of our places doesn't somehow get left out of the search results.
• Some of the places in Columbus County probably have little or no meaning to the audience there. In the "Government" navigation of our partner site, Whiteville.com, not all of the Census places are listed. That said, several of them show up occasionally as the location of obituaries that run on the site.

Geography is hardly the dynamic data we think of as news. But we've already seen several road bumps that are big enough to deter almost all small news organizations from using the OpenBlock application. So post this as one of our goals: to automate the process of loading basic ZIP, county and city geographic data about your community. Again, you can read more in the OpenBlock discussion group about how we might use FIPS codes -- the unique number given by the Census Bureau to each state, county and "place" -- to do that.

And there's still a big elephant in the room -- the geography of "blocks" that is one of the core concepts of OpenBlock. That topic is big enough for its own post a few weeks from now. Before then, I'm going to walk you through some of our experiences loading "news" data into OpenBlock and how we're hoping we might be able to work with fellow Knight News Challenge winner ScraperWiki to build our own API for North Carolina state government.

Understanding each step of the set-up, production and editing process involved with OpenBlock is critical to our ability to describe the expense side of the equation, which we hope and expect will lead to the financial viability of the application as a tool to fill the information needs of rural communities.

Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of Docstoc and a big supporter of the L.A. entrepreneurial community, if I had any tips for startups regarding the pros and cons of bringing in a third-party vendor.

A short, 3-minute video response can be found at the bottom of this post, but I thought I'd share some key takeaways with you here:

HOW DEPENDENT ARE YOU ON PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGY?
When debating whether to hire a third-party vendor, the first thing you need to assess is your offering itself. And the key question you want to ask yourself is this: "Is the service or platform I'm providing a specific piece, or is it a lot of pieces comprising a larger, more comprehensive process?"

If it's a process (i.e., there are several pieces in the value chain), letting someone else add that piece is probably something you can live with. After all, your value proposition is more about consolidating the pieces, not providing that allusive, "killer" piece of technology everyone is searching for.

If your core offering, however, is a very specific service or a single piece of technology that fits into someone else's value chain (or more to the point is the piece that makes the chain work in the first place), I would highly advise that you develop the technology yourself.

Clearly, in a perfect world, everyone would like to have some proprietary technology as part of their IP portfolio. After all, proprietary technology distinguishes you from your competition. But if making your technology proprietary is your competitive advantage then you must built it yourself.

HOW IMPORTANT IS IT THAT YOU GET TO MARKET IN A TIMELY FASHION?
It's often said that "time" is the entrepreneur's most precious commodity. So is timing. Sometimes there's a red-hot opportunity out there, and you've GOT to get into the market before someone else. This is an instance where I would highly recommend you think twice before bringing in a third-party vendor.

In a time-to-market scenario, you are engaged in a sprint, not a marathon, and you cannot have anything or anyone slowing you down. Developing your product internally will go a long way to ensuring that you can control the entire product cycle from start to finish.

Ironically, constructing everything from scratch may actually cost you the opportunity. Sure, you developed everything in-house. But it took awhile, and by the time you were done, the market opportunity passed you by.

If that's the case -- and the technology already exists -- you might consider licensing it from a third-party vendor. It makes sense, if you think about it. Sometimes it's faster to take receipt of an "off the shelf" piece, rather than building your own. Just remember, if you decide to go down this path, you'll want to lock in the rights so that you don't get hung up down the road (more on rights-retention below).

HOW MANY AVAILABLE RESOURCES DO YOU HAVE?
The third and final consideration when determining whether or not to bring in a third-party vendor is resource allocation. This is often referred to as "bandwidth," and it's a close cousin to the timing concept discussed above.

Outsourcing minor development tasks or farming out simple administrative duties can free your team to think more strategically and your developers to work in a more focused fashion. But what if you don't know how to build the technology? All teams have core competencies, or areas in which they excel. It's rare, however, that your team knows how to do everything. In this instance, it makes total sense to outsource.

If you're going to outsource, however, make sure you don't outsource key proprietary pieces of technology. (Those pitfalls are covered above.) And if you're outsourcing administrative functions, make sure you can replicate the services the third-party vendor is providing so that you can replicate them internally when your business starts to scale.

RETAIN OWNERSHIP OF ALL WORK YOU OUTSOURCE
OK, you've weighed all the pros and cons, and you've come to the conclusion that you're going to have to go outside the company to get the piece you need to complete your product offering. A question that frequently comes up at that point is, "Can I still own the code I outsource?" The answer is, "yes." In fact, the answer should always be "yes."

It's called "work for hire," and it means that you retain all the intellectual property (IP) of the work you develop with an outside vendor. Here are three key scenarios to consider: First, you need to own whatever your third-party vendor is coding outright. Second, if the code already exists and you are licensing it from a third party, you need to license the code in perpetuity. And third, if you are reselling the technology you are licensing (this is different than just licensing the code for your own purposes), then it's imperative that you have the right to do that as well.

A FINAL THOUGHT
Rarely does a startup have all the tools in its toolbox when starting out. Sometimes you have to engage a third-party vendor. The three most common reasons are: 1) the technology you need is too expensive to develop in-house (cost); 2) it's going to take too long to build the technology (time to market); 3) you simply don't know how to build the technology. As a result, you are left with little choice: You have to hire a third-party vendor.

But you NEVER want to build your business on a third-party vendor. You don't want your business to be the third-party vendor. They can control your pricing; they can control your ability to adapt to the market; and they could become a competitor.

Or they could go out of business ... and take you with them.

This article is the third of 10 video segments in which digital entrepreneur Tom Grasty talks about his experience building an Internet startup, and is part of a larger initiative sponsored by docstoc.videos, which features advice from small business owners who offer their views on how to launch a new business or grow your existing one.

Our Latvia program is a dramatic change from our usual digs -- instead of teaching in rolling blackouts in 130-degree heat, we've had the delight of kicking off our program in two castle-cum-classrooms, to three groups of highly motivated Latvian high schoolers.

As we stroll the Christmas markets on the way to school, we've been delighted with how beautiful it is here, but we're also fascinated by Latvian culture and history -- things that, until now, we didn't know much about.

Latvia is working hard to define itself as a vibrant state out of the shadow of the Soviet regime. But as with any new democracy, there are still old wounds, dramatic stories, and powerful lessons of perseverance that hum under the rote actions of everyday life here.

Our program, launched in conjunction with The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and The National History Museum of Latvia in Riga is designed to help Latvian students learn more about their own history (our students weren't born until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union) and to help students both in Latvia and in the U.S. learn more about each other.

capturing stories

We're in Latvia to help them capture their stories, of the country as it was 20 years ago and today.

I was reminded powerfully of the importance of this mission recently as we rambled through the city to see the Christmas lights on display. Riga is the self-proclaimed birthplace of the decorated Christmas tree. (Don't ask residents of Tallinn, Estonia about this though; they're in a competition to claim this particular fame!) However, during Soviet times, while countries around the world blanketed their town squares with lights and people gathered in their homes around trees of their own, Latvians were forbidden to celebrate Christmas, especially with the quintessential symbol they had invented. In the last 20 years, the tradition has returned, but, as our local counterpart told us, it still feels foreign and geared mainly toward holiday tourists.

This strange disconnect from history made me also think of a story we did in Iraq about how farming, which originated in the fertile crescent, is quickly disappearing from the country that pioneered it.

So often, we take our traditions, inventions and customs for granted. It is in situations like these when we are reminded that but for our collective memory and the people who work to record it, we stand to lose even the most meaningful symbols of our times.

So, from The Tiziano Project, we wish you the happiest of holidays and ask that while you busily prepare for your own festivities you take the time to notice the things that are most meaningful to you in your own lives and preserve them for future memory by passing your stories on to new ears.

Museums & Community Collaborations Abroad (MCCA) is made possible by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and is administered by the American Association of Museums.

At the Table: Connecting Culture, Conversation and Service in Latvia and the US was funded [in part] by a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author[s] and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.

NextDrop informs residents in India about the availability of piped water in order to help them lead more productive, less stressful lives. After three months of providing text message updates to residents in Hubli, using information sourced from utility employees who operate local valves, we believe we've created a service that people want and are willing to pay for. Never was this clearer to us than after what happened recently.

'Is this nextdrop?'

It was around 11 a.m. in the morning, a hot day in Hubli. Four members of our six-person team were working in our office in Lingrajnagar. Our office is on a dirt road in a residential neighborhood, about half a mile back from the main two-lane highway that connects the twin cities of Hubli and Dharwad. From the dirt road, it's difficult to see our office. The only thing to distinguish it from the other residences is a NextDrop sticker on the door.

"Namascara," a man said, appearing at our open door. "Is this NextDrop company?"

B.V. Nadgir, a branch manager at a local bank, had come by our office because he wanted to sign up for our service. Why did he take the trouble to come looking for us, we wondered? Why now?

The day before, water had been provided to his area. Because of a scheduled pipe repair, the utility had provided water to his area one day early in the late afternoon. It would normally have reached his home the following morning. Because of that change, his family had missed most of the water, only collecting water for half an hour. For many of our customers, it seems that knowing about a single disruption in the schedule is worth the cost of 10 rupees for a monthly subscription.

What we've learned

In the spirit of sharing our progress on testing our leaps of faith, below is a comprehensive update on our progress and current status since our Knight News Challenge award last June. We've learned a lot already, but there's a long way still go!

Leaps of Faith:

• Customers will want/use the NextDrop service
• Customers will pay for the service
• Utilities will want/use the NextDrop service
• Utilities will pay for NextDrop
• Valvemen will inform the NextDrop system in a timely manner
• We will find ways to verify the accuracy of this information

Customer (Household) Facts:

• 1,027 registered customers receiving NextDrop service as of November 18
• Collected revenues from 95 paying customers (10 rupees per month for service)

Customer (Household) Learnings/Conclusions:

• Acquisition Costs (costs to NextDrop to register customers for a free one-month trial): 50 rupees
• Key drivers of the costs: Intern/employee salaries
• Main reason some households did not sign up for NextDrop service: Did not trust NextDrop

Utility Facts:

• Partnership signed with Hubli Municipal Corp. on Sept. 30, 2011 acknowledging NextDrop as an officially sponsored value-added service
• Utility live Dashboard launched October 28

NextDrop Product Facts:

• 662 Water events reported in 22 separate valve areas (as of November 11)
• Nine active valvemen reporting water events

Challenges:

• Changing government mobile regulations: Shut down service for 12 days (Sept. 27-Oct. 9). Resolution: Found loophole/exemption from new regulations and convinced SMS provider to let us continue service.

• Shifting water schedules: The water is now being provided once every three days, and in some areas every other day (as opposed to once every five days). This could make the NextDrop service less valuable to households. Resolution: Hubli is a testing ground for the service and our proof of concept. We anticipate learning enough in Hubli to move to at least two other cities by June 2012.

• Verifications: To verify the accuracy of reports from utility employees, we tried calling random people as soon as we received a valve open notification. However, people picked up the call but immediately put it down. We found out that since water came at 5 a.m., people were not paying attention to what they were doing. So when they received a random call, they would pick up and hang up. Resolution: We are now signing up six to eight people per valve area (~250 people) to be official NextDrop "verifiers." Our hypothesis is that if they know to expect a call, they will answer and verify. We'll have to find ways to incentivize the verifiers to do this. We're also looking into low-cost sensors as an alternative strategy.

Social Impact:

• Because we're committed to understanding the impact of the NextDrop service on households, in November we found a Ph.D. student from UC Berkeley to run a rigorous impact evaluation for us starting June 2012.

• Customer feedback, taken from a phone survey in June 2011:

"My father and mother both are employees and I am going to college, we don't know water supply schedule, while getting your SMS we came to know water supply, on that time we call to the neighbor fill the drinking water. Always we open the tank valve but drinking water we will inform to the neighbor."

"I am going to college on that and my parents are employees, when I get the SMS from NextDrop I will inform to my parents then they will come to home and fill the water"

"When we are in the home we will know water flowing, but if we in outside and night time your SMS is very useful."

"Once all the family members went to marriage party in near to Hubli (one hour journey), when I get the SMS from NextDrop I came to know that water is flowing, suddenly I send my younger brother to home and fill the water because next day all the relatives are coming to the home, if we missed the water we have to wait again 6 to 8 days. Your service is very useful on that time."

"Once we went for relatives' function, so we are waiting bus in bus station when I get your SMS on that time we send one person to home and fill the water."

"Once I went for market I got SMS from NextDrop then I called my son (he was in outside) go to home and fill the water. On that it's useful."