In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, editor and co-founder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

PLN operates in a unique media environment, where the very act of distributing a magazine to their customers might first require winning a lawsuit. You see, their primary audience is made up of prisoners themselves. Prison Legal News is the longest-running publication put together with the help of people who are incarcerated, and since its first issue in 1990, it has become a critical resource for discussing issues facing these populations. It's an independent, monthly magazine that reviews and analyzes prisoner rights, court rulings, and news about prison issues. PLN focuses on state and federal U.S. prisons, as well as some international coverage. Paul himself has become a distinguished advocate on behalf of the U.S. population. Asked whether we could blog his talk, Paul responded, "Secrecy is the antithesis of publishing."

From Newsletter to National Publication

Prison Legal News started as a newsletter, in 1990, covering only Washington state's prisons. It was 10 pages and hand-typed for 75 subscribers. It launched into the publishing world with a $50 budget. The organization was completely volunteer-run until 1996. The first run of six issues ended up becoming a 22-year, 224-issue run (and still going). Some of their earliest subscribers are still with them -- a great sign for the publication's longevity, but a less great reflection of these subscribers' sentences.

PLN's perseverance has paid off: In 1990, there were 30 or 40 prisoners' rights news publications, but many have since ceased publishing. Prison Legal News has expanded its coverage as its subscriber base expanded. At one point, they realized they had more subscribers in California than in Washington, and that they had graduated to a national publication. Yet Paul considers himself one of the few people in print publishing these days who welcomes competition. He wishes there were other publications and institutions engaged in this work.

Prison Legal News is not light reading -- there's no horoscope, no advice column, just hard news and information. But that's what their customers want. An annual reader survey draws a 30-40% reader survey response, and the feedback is consistently asking for more useful information rather than lighter fare. There was a publication in the 1990s called "Prison Life," which covered prison life and the prison experience, and they were somehow surprised when they were unsuccessful, because prisoners would rather not read about this in their leisure time.

An expansion into book titles has focused on self-help and non-fiction reference books for prisoners, especially titles that aren't viable for traditional book publishers. Paul mentions books including "How to File a Lawsuit and Win," and books on hepatitis C (a dangerous health threat within the incarcerated population). There's great interest in books on health, including "Our Bodies, Ourselves," which Paul notes has been banned in some prison systems. They also provide "radical critiques of the criminal justice system", including edited volumes titled "The Celling of America," "Prison Nation" and
"Prison Profiteers." Paul notes that the books reach a different audience than the magazine, that there are people who prefer reading the long form of arguments.

Who Reads Prison News?

Prison Legal News is a niche publication. It's not trying to reach the whole incarcerated population of the U.S. It's targeting activists and lifers interested in improving prisons. Paul said they want to reach the activists, the 1% of people who make change. Men are 95% of the U.S. prison population, and make up a higher percentage of PLN's readership compared with women. Paul attributed this to the fact that women generally receive shorter sentences, and their subscribers tend to have long sentences ahead of them. Paul has found that it's the people who are in prison for a long period of time that make things happen. These are the lifers, the ones filing the lawsuits and organizing other prisoners. These are people who have accepted that prison is their life now, and who are working to do something to improve it.

There are around 7,000 subscribers to the print publication, but the reach is much broader. Reader surveys suggest that copies reach more than 10 prisoners each -- Paul estimates a readership of 80,000-90,000 readers. Additionally, the website gets around 100,000 visitors per month. The subscriber base includes judges, court officers, lawyers, journalists and academics, including Noam Chomsky, who Paul told us proudly was one of the first subscribers. All the big investment banks subscribe, Paul told us, because they follow news on the private prison industry. "I was happy when Lehman Brothers went under, but we lost a subscriber," he said. Lehman Brothers had been one of the biggest bankrollers of the private prison industry, so it was a happy day when they went down.

Publication Litigation

A big focus these days is making sure the target audience in prisons can actually receive the magazine. This requires extensive litigation. Prison Legal News has obtained consent decrees in nine states, ordering state prisons to deliver the magazine. PLN is currently litigating in New York and Florida to enable subscribers to receive their publication, both the magazine and the books they publish.

Almost every state's prison system has censored and banned the magazine at one point or another, Paul told us. The organization has won nine lawsuits, receiving consent decrees that order state prison systems to deliver the publications. The bans are generally pretextual. They're bans based on postal rates used to deliver magazines, or whether prisoners are allowed to pay for the magazine from their trust accounts. Sometimes there are arbitrary blocks on sending publications to prisoners in certain types of custody. In Washington, PLN discovered they needed to become an "approved vendor" and had a very difficult time figuring out "who's brother-in-law we had to work with" to gain "approved vendor" status, Paul said.

It's not just PLN getting banned. In one case, in South Carolina, the American Civil Liberties Union had to sue when a prison banned all books except the Bible. These pretextual excuses can get pretty absurd -- Paul is currently facing an argument that the staples used to bind the magazine might be used as dangerous weapons. While we think it's funny, these are the issues PLN is forced to litigate (marshal the resources to sue the government, and win). "Think of every magazine held together by staples, delivered by mail. TIME, Newsweek. We're the only publisher in America who routinely challenges this censorship," he said.

Many of these rules are designed to prevent prisoners from having material to read, far beyond PLN's magazine. It would help if other American publishers would join in the fight to ensure publications are able to reach prison populations. When an Indiana judge upheld a ban on gay publications "Out" and "The Advocate," Paul asked the publishers to file suit, because it would stand up better in court than a suit from a prisoner. But publishers aren't seeking the prison population. "They tell us that they're not part of our targeted advertising demographic," he said. For PLN, the core audience is prisoners, and there's no point in publishing if the core audience can't get it. In recognition of this, they realized that funding staff attorney positions was a priority.

I noted that some critics of PLN have argued that it's as much a litigation platform as it is a publication. Paul countered that "our initial goal was always just to publish the magazine. But we got to to the point where we're just consuming ever greater amounts of organizational resources just getting the magazine into prisons." Paul estimated that he can spend as much as 40% of his time focusing on being able to distribute the publication, rather than producing and editing it. "The editor should be worried about being (an) editor, not worrying about why one prison system or another is censoring content," he said. For there to be any litigation, the government has to illegally censor the magazine, then PLN has to sue, and then they have to win. "If you don't like the consequences, don't break the law," Paul said.

Isolation from Society

Restrictions on what can be sent in and out of prison harm PLN in another way: It makes it very hard to hear from the incarcerated. In some prisons, prisoners can no longer send or receive information beyond what fits on a postcard. Other layers of draconian restriction include rules that postcard communication has to be in ink, can't use a label, etc. These mechanisms tend to be arbitrary and are designed, Paul argued, to prevent prisoners from having communication to and from the outside world. His organization has challenged a couple of these successfully, with a couple more pending. Paul told us that they are trying to nip this trend in the bud before it gets entrenched.

"Part of the goal is to get prisoners information. But conversely, we want to hear from them," he said. The bulk of the magazine's content is provided by contributing writers, who are mostly prisoners, some of whom have been working with PLN for over a decade. In the hopes of ensuring widespread distribution of the information, PLN doesn't demand exclusive publishing rights -- and people are free to copy and disseminate the information.

This is an area of close overlap with one of the Center for Civic Media's projects, "Between the Bars." BTB is a blogging platform for prisoners that gets around the lack of Internet access by scanning and publishing letters to a blog, and then mailing comments back to the authors on postcards. In addition to helping the incarcerated publish to the web, it helps the rest of the U.S. population by ensuring that we are able to hear from these voices, who comprise 1% of our entire populace.

Prison News Online

The Internet has greatly improved the visibility of Prison Legal News. Paul told us he conducts 3-4 interviews a week about the publication and the issues it raises. He's fluent in Spanish and noted that there's a great deal of interest in these issues from programs in Colombia and Venezuela. One of his associate gives interviews in Russian media, which seems to have an endless appetite for stories about the U.S. prison system. Some have observed that the U.S. prison system must be pretty bad when the Russians enjoy making fun of it.

The online presence of the magazine has allowed PLN to build a publication library online, with more than 6,000 documents available in its Brief Bank. "We've got the biggest, and I would say, the best, repository of prison documents online," Paul said. As a result, PLN generally shows up in Google's first page for prison-related queries, except sometimes when the "Prison Break" program is on TV.

Prisons can be a bit of a timeless place, said Paul, where the equipment you see is 50-60 years old. PLN's print publishing business still thrives here (advertising levels for the print magazine are actually going up), and web publishing is almost nonexistent. PLN hasn't figured out how to make money online, like other publishers. Its content performs poorly with online advertising. On the site, the news content is free, legal content is paid, and these fees cover basic staff time put into the site. Advertising and subscription income and book distribution bring in about the same amount. Payroll is the biggest expense. They get some foundation funding and donations, and when all of this revenue is cobbled together, it's enough to move forward.

Staying Human

The acts of reading and writing are core to helping prisoners maintain their humanity, especially when everything else in these punitive systems is working to degrade that humanity. A publication like PLN lets prisoners connect with others, when the rest of the system is designed to isolate and alienate.

Paul is wary of the dehumanization that takes place before genocides and in prisons. We lose sight of the people in prison. We need to keep in mind that they're someone's father, someone's son, regardless of what they've done. When someone's been murdered in a prison, it's almost always that person's mother who calls PLN.

Paul closed his presentation by noting that he's now 264 issues into this project, and that since 1990, "everything to do with the criminal justice system, by objective or subjective standard, has gotten worse."

There are 25 contested primaries in Illinois' 18 congressional districts, the first elections under newly drawn district boundaries. As a result of the decennial redistricting process, many people will be choosing among candidates they know little about. Many of the districts are huge, extending across the circulation areas of multiple newspapers and even different television markets. At a time when traditional news organizations are shrinking, it can't be good for democracy that it could take a reporter most of a day to travel from one end of a district to the other.

The mission of the Knight Lab, a joint program of Northwestern University's journalism and computer science programs, is to "accelerate media innovation" in the Chicago area. The primary elections initiative takes into account the new realities of media and politics today, including candidates' extensive use of social media and the fragmentation of the news audience.

The project's three main elements are:

• Candidate profiles from a social media perspective, including analysis of what the candidates tweet about and what their followers tweet about;
• An aggregation tool that collects coverage of individual congressional primary races from many sources;
• A simplified snapshot of campaign contributions that focuses on the geographical profile of each candidate's contributor base.

All of these components will go live on www.congressionalprimaries.org in early February. More importantly, they are being offered -- at no charge -- to web publishers large and small. The Lab's goal is to have the election coverage distributed through as many news outlets as possible.

News organizations can use the Lab's congressional coverage to serve their users, adding their own branding and navigation to pages hosted by the Lab. Or news organizations can use "widgets" that incorporate elements of the coverage into their websites. Either way, they get coverage of the campaigns that goes beyond what any one organization can provide itself.

The elections initiative incorporates technology approaches that my Northwestern computer science colleagues have specialized in for years: powerful web searching, content categorization and extraction of meaning from editorial content and social media. By making these technologies available to local news media in connection with an important news event, the Lab seeks to whet publishers' appetite for innovation and build their interest in collaborating with media they might also consider to be business competitors.

After the primary, the Lab's leadership team will review the results of the elections initiative and consider expanding on it for the November general election.

Details about the congressional primaries project are available in two PDF files on the Knight Lab website: a project overview and FAQ. The Lab is reaching out to potential partners throughout Illinois and adjacent media markets to explain the project in greater detail. Potential partners can also contact r-graff@northwestern.edu to get a head start on customizing the services. 

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.

"Beyond J-School 2011" is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry.

I had a brief exchange on Twitter recently with ProPublica's Scott Klein about how high school poets end up as journalists and how he hopes that high school mathletes start to follow the same path. The basic idea was that kids are turned onto something at a young age and then search for viable career paths to follow. So for a high school poet, they look around and think, "I like to write -- what professions are going to let me become a kick-ass writer?"

Traditionally, journalism has absorbed a lot of those folks and has been stronger for it. Now, posited Klein, with the ascendancy of data journalism and the growing need for high-level developers to break news by crunching numbers, the hope is that kids who are switched onto math will draw the same conclusion and wind up revolutionizing journalism. But, I countered, how many high school newspapers are doing data journalism right now? That is the first step. My guess? Not many -- and that's a loss.

Because Klein is right: There is ample space for math geeks, stats nerds, number-crunchers and many more in journalism. It's a place they should be playing. And you can see, with each stat-heavy report, with each number-savvy data visualization, that some are starting to. But nowhere near enough.

opportunities for learning

So how do we get them interested? I think we do it in two ways: Leading by example -- doing kick-ass, math-heavy journalism (of course) -- but also by creating opportunities for learning. It's really by demonstrating that the problem sets in journalism are compelling ones -- and offering avenues to learn more about them -- that we're going to start to attract the talent that we need.

But as someone who spent the last three years in journalism education, our J-schools aren't currently tooled to work with those problem sets. They are, by and large, teaching the other side of the equation: the writers.

Yet even on the writer's side we need to be teaching beyond the now accepted J-school norms of Soundslides, iMovie, and maybe a little (shudder) Flash. We need to be building out more fully realized skillsets that include basic coding, an understanding of editorial UX, working with data, and a lot more contextual understanding of storytelling and reporting that is of the web, and not simply an extension of print.

But again, the speed of change in the academy isn't meeting the speed of innovation on the web.

And this is true well beyond the high school and college level -- journalists at all levels are hungry to retool. We need to rethink how we approach these things: How can we do learning at scale that can speak fluently to these different constituencies (and there are plenty more beyond the two examples above), while also bringing them closer together -- not so that one can become the other (because, believe me, in the Hacks/Hackers equation, it's a much quicker route for the hacker to become the hack than vice versa), but because the two need to understand just how powerful they can be when they collaborate together?

The baseline for learning

Of course, at the end of the day, we're fostering different skillsets that compliment each other in the way that the best multidisciplinary teams can. And so one thing to think about is what the baselines for those skillsets are. The math geek doesn't need a primer on statistics, but may need to know how an FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request works, or how to interpret census data, for instance. Meanwhile, the reporter may need to learn how to extend her database skills beyond Excel or how to take a map beyond Google MyMaps. These are simple examples -- the bare minimum of a bare minimum. What do you think the baseline of learning for these (and other) constituencies should be?

Because that's where we need to start: We need to start figuring out how engage different groups of people that are crucial to the advancement of journalism at their level, in their language, and then move them beyond. And I think we can't wait for the institutions to catch up; I think we have to actively recruit each other to do it. Because as individuals, we are brilliant, and we have the ability to share that brilliance with others.

That's a lot, to be sure, and there are plenty who are taking a stab at it. (It was exciting to read that Poynter's NewsU passed its 200,000 registered user mark.) But I think there are real strides possible at the peer-to-peer level, at journalistic learning that's driven by people excited about sharing their own knowledge to the types of folks who they're already comfortable speaking to. I want to see a ton of amazing classes bloom, and the outputs of those classes be new people in the journalism community.

There are a lot of different directions to take this. Where do you want to see learning go in journalism?

Image courtesy of Flickr user therobedscribe.

A version of this post first appeared here.

"Beyond J-School 2011" is sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers an intensive, cutting edge, three semester Master of Arts in Journalism; a unique one semester Advanced Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism; and the CUNY J-Camp series of Continuing Professional Development workshops focused on emerging trends and skill sets in the industry.

Today, the idea that journalism needs more software developers is mainstream. And that's why Medill and the Knight Foundation are announcing an extension of the scholarship program.

The three-year, $250,000 grant will enable Medill to provide scholarships to at least six more people with computer programming experience. The new grant supplements the original $639,000 grant, which has allowed nine computer programmers to earn journalism master's degrees since 2008.

What the first nine scholarship winners are doing now:

• Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark are key members of the Chicago Tribune's news applications team, which has earned a national reputation for developing and deploying new technologies that inform and engage online users.
• Manya Gupta is a web journalist for The World, a public radio program focusing on "global perspectives for an American audience."
• Shane Shifflett is a news apps developer for the Bay Citizen in San Francisco.
• Nick Allen and Andrew Paley work for Narrative Science, a startup company whose software constructs stories from data such as baseball box scores and economic trends.
• Geoff Hing is an independent software developer working on a variety of civic and social projects in Chicago.
• Jesse Young is a software engineer at Federated Media Publishing.
• Steven Melendez is working as a reporter for the BVI Beacon, a newspaper in the British Virgin Islands.

A lot has happened since the first round of scholarship funding was announced. Just a few months earlier, Mark Glaser had written on PBS Mediashift about a few newspapers that had hired computer programmers for newsroom positions.

Now there's a widely shared spreadsheet listing more than 40 jobs for "news developers." And Hacks/Hackers chapters -- devoted to meetups between journalists and technologists -- operating in almost 30 cities.

This past February in Raleigh, N.C., the Computer Assisted Reporting conference -- which in previous years mostly dealt with computer software as analytical tools -- featured numerous sessions on applying computer programming to mapping, data visualization and news applications. And the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns the company producing the Firefox browser, has launched a partnership with the Knight Foundation to "invent the future of news."

WHY TURN PROGRAMMERS INTO JOURNALISTS?
The premise of the Medill scholarship program is that software developers with an education in journalism can be more productive and successful in news organizations than those who enter the field without a journalism degree.

Under the new grant, scholarship winners will be encouraged to develop a curriculum tailored to their interests, meeting the requirements of Medill's MSJ degree while also having the option of incorporating advanced course work in computer science.

Medill plans to build partnerships with media companies that are interested in hiring journalists with computer programming expertise. Media partners will be asked to provide financial aid to supplement Knight's scholarship funding, and also offer paid internships for the scholarship winners.

Scholarship winners will also have the opportunity to work in the Knight News Innovation Laboratory and Medill's new Watchdog/Accountability Initiative. The Knight Lab, a joint project of Northwestern's journalism and engineering schools, is developing innovative technologies to be used by journalists and publishers in Chicago and beyond. The Watchdog/Accountability Initiative specializes in investigative reporting on systemic flaws in government and public institutions.

Scholarship recipients must meet Medill’s normal admissions requirements. They will complete the same core academic program as other MSJ students. The first academic quarter is spent learning reporting and storytelling skills in multiple media. At least one other quarter is spent in Medill’s Chicago newsroom, covering a beat and creating multimedia stories.

More information about the scholarship program can be found on the Medill website.

Image courtesy of Flickr user skyfaller.]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/11/knight-foundation-extends-medill-journalism-scholarships-for-programmers313.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/11/knight-foundation-extends-medill-journalism-scholarships-for-programmers313.html EducationTechnology computer programminggranthacker journalistsknight foundationmedill schoolscholarshipstechnology Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:20:11 -0500 bonnie@developmentseed.org (Eric Gundersen) This week I'm at Innovation Lab Pakistan, helping train journalists and media activists from Pakistan and Afghanistan on how to better leverage technology in their stories and media advocacy. We've blogged before about how maps can quickly tell the story behind complex issues like the famine in the Horn of Africa and violence against journalists in Afghanistan, and it's thrilling to be working with media folks directly and helping them learn how to do this themselves.

Specifically, I'm teaching folks how to use our open-source map-making tool TileMill, an easy-to-use toolkit for designing custom online maps with any available dataset. On Tuesday, I worked with Hameed Tasal, a member of the Jalalagood Geek Squad who works in technology development in the Nangarhar providence of Afghanistan, to take data he had collected on schools, hospitals, bus stops, gas stations, and other points of interest in Jalalabad and released publicly on OpenStreetMap, and turn that into an interactive online map. (Hat tip to Todd Huffman for building so much energy around OpenStreetMap on the ground in Afghanistan -- he and Hameed go back years.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible in local mapping efforts in this region. Folks here are collecting data on everything ranging from flood victims who still haven't been helped to reports of violence against women and local blood shortages -- and they're interested in mapping this data to better communicate about some of the problems their countries are facing.

The timing is fantastic. TileMill as a tool is reaching an incredible maturity point. It's easy enough to use that anyone with basic web development experience can quickly make a map, and this is only improving. This week we added support for uploading tabbed CSV files for easy map rendering, and we continue to write helpful scripts like the one that turns addresses in spreadsheets into ready-to-be-mapped geodata.

The biggest limitation to more people making their own maps with it is that TileMill currently doesn't run in Windows. This is a particular problem in developing countries where Windows machines dominate and people often don't have access to sufficient bandwidth to download workarounds like TileMill's virtual machine bundle (a whopping 3 gigs). This needs to change, and we are currently looking for investment resources to develop a Windows version of TileMill, to hopefully be completed within the next few months. Please reach out to us if Windows support is of interest and you would like to help make it happen.

In the meantime, you can download TileMill for Mac or Ubuntu and find documentation on how to use it and support at support.mapbox.com.

We at The Tiziano Project were shocked and honored last week to be named as finalists for the 2011 Online Journalism Awards in the categories of General Excellence in Online Journalism - Micro Site and Community Collaboration.

The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives. We're nominated for our citizen journalism site, 360 | Kurdistan, a project that was produced on a shoestring budget, with a group of incredibly talented volunteers.

When I say shoestring, I mean it -- during our three months in Iraq, our web developer programmed more than 2,000 lines of code from a mat on the floor of our garage apartment in Erbil. By the end of our trip, we were rationing pancake mix for our meals and had just barely enough to hitch a ride out of Northern Iraq.

Kurdistan in code: The Tiziano Project's director of technology, Chris Mendez, spent two months developing our site from a garage in Erbil, Iraq.

Now, our tiny organization is competing with some pretty big (and historically better-funded) fish, including CNN, NPR, Yale and the University of Miami.

I'm asked a lot how we've managed to produce community journalism programs that place our work among such admirable company. My answer? When it comes to training, you don't have to be big to be great.

We've realized that foundations of groundbreaking journalism projects have a lot less to do with a packed wallet and more with paying attention. Because The Tiziano Project can't afford to make the mistakes of larger organizations -- building complicated news platforms or shipping off boxes of technology into the great unknown -- we've been able to simplify our method to success with a few basic tenets.

key success factors

1. Be where you're wanted. Want to know why community news often doesn't work? It's because many projects launch without considering who they're reporting on or with. Most importantly, citizen journalism shouldn't be an answer to cheap news production. Before you start thinking about a new project, make sure the community members you're working with want the project, are supportive of it, and are willing to help. If they're not, don't waste your time or money.

Communities that really want a reporting initiative in their area are often eager to make the program work. If your organization is on a tight budget, you shouldn't be afraid to turn to the community you're serving for resources -- whether it's sharing a workspace, administrative duties, equipment or connections. These things don't cost much, but can be a huge boon to the project's ultimate success.

2. Collaborate. We can't stress this enough. Along with partnering with the community you're serving, you should be looking to partner with other organizations that are doing similar or complementary things to save money, time and resources. For better or worse, citizen journalism projects are a dime a dozen, and many are teaching and distributing similar things.

The Tiziano Project was formed several years ago, when citizen journalism was the latest buzzword that was going to "save" the journalism industry. Over time, we had to take a hard look at ourselves and figure out what set us apart.

What we noticed was that nonprofit journalism organizations were treating each other like competing publications, rather than groups working toward a common goal. They were keeping their training materials and resources proprietary, and remained secretive about future plans.

It seemed silly to us -- after all, we're working on donor money to improve people's lives, not fatten our paychecks. So we decided to open-source everything -- our training materials, the stories we produce, even the websites we build to house them. With our recent Knight Foundation grant, we're working to make even more technology available for other nonprofit citizen journalism groups to use. It's been a very successful strategy for us -- because we give everything away, people keep coming back for more.

So figure out what you have to offer, and be the first to give things away to other organizations and groups that need them. You'll be surprised to find how much they can offer you in return.

3. Leave your parachute behind. In whatever community your reporting project is in, remember that you're there to help that community tell their stories, not what you think they should tell.

Our executive director, Jon Vidar, often tells this story: The first time The Tiziano Project went to Iraq, our instructors prepared a list of reporting topics they thought their students could choose from to get the project off the ground. Not surprisingly, the students had many more, much better ideas. When we let the students run with them, everyone was delighted with what they produced.

Also, don't be afraid of good news. Our second program of Iraqi students were eager to tell us they were sick of the doom and gloom stories that were coming out of their country. They wanted the world to know that Iraq was more than suicide bombings -- it was a place full of family picnics and spontaneous dancing, elaborate weddings, and intimate friendships. These kinds of stories don't make headlines, but they make an impression. Our student's story on Kurdish breakdancers remains one of the most popular on our site.

4. Forget what you know about journalism. Let the situation inform how you teach storytelling and the value of the tools you provide.

Like many of my colleagues, I am used to teaching basic journalistic structures. But in some places, media resembles nothing like what we in the West know. It's important to show students how to tell a great story, and then help them adapt it to the media structures popular in their region.

go beyond traditional journalism

Two personal anecdotes underscore that:

In Northern Iraq, opinion pieces are just as, if not more, popular than traditional news stories. This comes partly from the strong political party ties to major news outlets there, but even self-proclaimed "independent" sources maintain the bent toward opinion writing. So it baffled our Iraqi students, many of whom had worked with regional news outlets, when we told them to stop editorializing their pieces. We worked with them to get beyond traditional journalism structures and craft opinion pieces that compelled readers based on great narration and strong facts -- a simple twist on the usual master class, but one that helped them dive back into their jobs with gusto and accuracy.

Another quick story -- on a side job while in Iraq, I had the privilege of teaching a group of Southern Iraqi politicians about social media for their upcoming campaigns through a local NGO (non-governmental organization). The lesson was supposed to be a straight-out technical workshop, to give them the basics on how to set up Twitter and Facebook accounts, and how to use them to promote their messages and hear from their constituents. But about 15 minutes into the lecture, one politician raised his hand and challenged me: "Why do they need to hear our voice? The party decides everything anyway." Actually, this guy was right -- until that point, elections had always been party-based, rather than the public voting for an individual leader.

Suddenly our lesson on new media wasn't about how to have their voices heard in a new way, it was about the value of their voices to begin with. Needless to say, the direction of the lecture drastically changed for the remainder of the day and proved a lot more productive for the participants.

Reading a situation and teaching accordingly doesn't cost money. But I often speak to people who have participated in citizen journalism and storytelling classes who feel like their needs weren't met for their situations.

Instead, I think it's our first responsibility as trainers to shut up and listen.

5. Find out what the community wants from it. Who has spent 15 minutes working in journalism without someone asking: "Is it dead?" I always reply with "Yes. If it weren't, The Tiziano Project wouldn't be here."

It isn't worth teaching journalism if you hope that every student becomes a professional journalist. You might as well train people how to repair typewriters and printing presses. But new media journalism skills can set people up solidly in careers that are rewarding and lucrative -- from wedding photography to corporate communications. Find out what place the skills you're teaching have in the community your students are in and teach to that end, not just to have a nice portfolio of work when the program is over.

6. Work around ideas first, money later. As my colleague Chris Mendez says often, there has been no greater time in the history of journalism that has had more opportunity for reinvention than now. There have never been easier tools or greater accessibility for the "everyman" to reach a large audience. So it's time for everyone to start thinking more wildly and creatively about how they want to consume news and stories.

do it bigger and better

We've gotten a lot of credit for making really creative projects, but it's only because there's no one to tell us no -- and because a lot of people, especially the ones whose stories we're helping to tell, are encouraging us to do it bigger, better and differently from everyone else.

It doesn't cost anything to start a serious discussion with your colleagues, your students and your audience about reinventing storytelling -- how it's presented and valued. Then, it's just a matter of gathering together the right people who share your fundamental dedication to hard work and big goals to make something that's worth going to the ONAs for.

If you'd like to learn more about how we teach new media, we welcome you to join us for a pre-conference workshop at ONA on Thursday, Sept. 22 at 1:30 p.m. EDT. We'll be teaching the basics of multimedia and would be happy to start a brand-new conversation.

Hope to see you there!

Best known for the remarkable film "Man with a Movie Camera," Vertov also created the first newsreel program in Russia, each episode a new experiment. This was a time when people were thinking about displaying news and telling stories in totally new forms, like rolling out a camera on a horse and buggy in the town center and throwing up a sheet over some wires to create a projection screen.

Dziga Vertov: Excerpt from "Kino Pravda 10" from Zeega on Vimeo.

Similar to that time, today is a moment of dramatic media transformation. We see this as an opportunity for journalists, artists and the public to invent new ways to tell and gather stories.

Mapping Main Street
But before we get into what Zeega is, I wanted to share a little background. James Burns, Jesse Shapins and I started working together a couple of years ago on an interactive documentary called Mapping Main Street. We built it from scratch with the help of public radio producer Ann Heppermann and grants from the Association of Independents in Radio and the Berkman Center. Meanwhile, we were also producing stories for NPR.

Mapping Main Street from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

To jump start the project, we drove 15,000 miles across the United States, stopping at more than 100 Main Streets to take photos and gather material for the NPR stories. These stories covered streets as diverse as Main Street in Chattanooga, Tenn., where a large portion of the street is a prostitution strip, and San Luis, Ariz., the only Main Street in the United States that is a port of entry. We also commissioned four bands (High Places, Chain and the Gang, Calvin Johnson and Jason Cady) to create songs that used field recordings gathered on specific Main Streets.

In order to allow others to document Main Streets across the country, we built and designed www.mappingmainstreet.org, an online platform that displays these broadcast stories and photographs, and enables anyone to contribute photos, videos and stories of their own. To participate, people simply put a photo on Flickr or a video on Vimeo, tag it with the city and state, and it automatically appears on our site.

We see Mapping Main Street as a new form of documentary that combines all the different elements -- the broadcast stories, online interface design and citizen media contributions.

When we launched Mapping Main Street, people started using it in ways we never would have imagined. One of our most prolific contributors is Amy Fichter, who uses her iPhone and an antique twin lens reflex camera to capture images of often-overlooked details on Main Streets throughout Wisconsin. Her Main Street photos were later exhibited in a solo gallery show. The platform has also been widely adopted by journalism teachers at the high school and college level and youth media programs like WNYC's Radio Rookies.

A COMMUNITY AND PLATFORM FOR EXPERIMENTATION
Zeega will enable anyone to create participatory projects that combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio, data feeds and maps from across the web. But what makes Zeega different is that it's not just an online documentary toolkit. We've long had an interest in making digital projects physical, and integral to Zeega is the ability to bridge physical and digital worlds through tangible media such as signs, stickers or even networked receipt printers.

"Yellow Arrow: Capitol of Punk," a 2006 interactive documentary bridging physical and digital worlds.

Zeega will be a community and framework for creative invention, making it possible for people to pioneer new forms of storytelling that we have not yet imagined.

In the design world, Processing has been transformative in allowing people to experiment with interaction and visualization, ranging from working with physical objects to large-scale installations. However, Processing still requires a level of technical expertise. We're making Zeega into a flexible framework for people without programming knowledge. (Of course, as an open-source project there will be many ways for programmers to be involved, too).

This culture of experimentation is supported in large part through metaLAB (at) Harvard, a research unit housed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. So far, we're collaborating with librarians, journalists, artists and community groups. We're creating tools for people to create their own digital public libraries by bringing together collections of related materials from libraries and websites across the world.

We're also working with artists and reporters to create a platform for people living near any superfund site in the country to tell their stories. In Brooklyn, N.Y., we're working with the non-profit UnionDocs on a multi-year project called "Looking at Los Sures," which combines radio, film, interactive media and performance to expand upon a 1984 documentary film about what was once one of New York's poorest neighborhoods. And we're using Zeega to construct a living archive of the Japan earthquake and its aftermath that captures stories of people who have been affected.

AN ARCHIVE FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW
The archive also collects and interrelates documents, images, video, communications through social media and other data -- creating something useful for today as well as something that can be referenced 20 years from now.

Work-in-progress version of extraMUROS, a multimedia library without walls.

Zeega has also been supporting coursework at Harvard in new media documentary classes such as Media Archaeology of Place and the Mixed-Reality City, both collaborations with the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

One student, Kat Tang, wanted to create a project where people could stand outside of a building and hear the interior or inaccessible sounds of that particular space. She designed a system where people would see a sticker on a building with an invitation to text a unique code to a telephone number. When someone texts the code to the number, he or she gets a phone call back with an audio recording that Kat made inside that building. When one hangs up, he or she gets a text message that explains the audio recording. (While the project is meant to be experienced on location, you can test it from anywhere by following these instructions).

For us, this is a great example of how Zeega is open to experimenting with new approaches to documentary. Kat used the web-based Zeega interface to create this project by simply defining the sequence of interactions and adding her audio recordings and texts. She didn't do any programming. And now anyone can create similar projects combining stickers, audio and text via mobile phones to tell stories on location.

We want Zeega to make invention possible for anyone -- regardless of budget or technical knowledge. Shortly, we'll be announcing a call for journalists, news organizations, artists, community groups, filmmakers, librarians, scholars and others to create Zeega pilot projects. To sign up to get updates and become a beta tester, visit our website: zeega.org.

Freedom Fone provides a voice database with which users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or internet phones.

In August, Operation of Hope arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe. Operation of Hope is an American volunteer surgical team that travels to developing countries each year to perform cleft-lip and cleft-palate surgeries as well as other types of facial reconstructive surgery for children in need.

But because many of the people who might benefit from Operation of Hope don't have access to a computer or the Internet, we needed to figure our how to to alert Zimbabweans about the group's mission.

Sending Out Bulk Messages

Kubatana sent out a bulk text message to its network of members. The text message publicized a bank of telephone numbers that people could phone into for all the details relating to the surgery screening day in July. In addition, a series of classified advertisements were placed in all of Zimbabwe's national newspapers.

Freedom Fone ran the deployment for information on Operation of Hope in July. Our telephone lines went live July 4, offering basic audio information on surgeries scheduled for August.

After just two days following the deployment, Freedom Fone received 91 calls! Approximately 30 of these were connected for the duration of the audio content.

Hopefully, our technological assistance in broadening access to information about these free surgeries will bring a smile to some children who possibly wouldn't have known about this life-changing opportunity.

Image courtesy of Operation of Hope.

Listen to the people that have been down here, lived here, fished here, and camped here their whole entire lives and even their parents' lives, for generations. Because they know how these waters are, they know how the tides come and go, they know how the storms affect this area, they provide a lot of valuable information and a lot of valuable ways that people can accomplish what they want to do without destroying the things that we do ...

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) is a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. Resonating with Public Laboratory's vision of community engagement and leadership, a little over a year ago -- during the BP oil spill -- I began working with upwards of 100 Gulf Coast volunteers, as well as fellow team members Jeff Warren and Stewart Long, on Grassroots Mapping, a project to create aerial maps hand-in-hand with Gulf Coast residents that documented ecologically vulnerable sites before, during and after oil hit.

In the late fall of 2010, Jeff, Stewart and myself, as well as Sara Wylie, Adam Griffith, Liz Barry and Mathew Lippincott, formed the core working team behind Public Laboratory, our expertise spanning a number of different fields from geography, biology and anthropology to technology, design and urban planning.

Our vision in forming Public Lab has been to rethink the way that people interact with information production and analysis, believing that lasting engagement with science can be generated through actually doing it rigorously in people's everyday environments.

putting science at the center of civic life

So how are we re-imagining civic science? PLOTS argues that civic science places scientific inquiry at the heart of civic life. The ability to test the coherence of ideas about the world is no longer limited by technical barriers to recording, validating, analyzing or sharing data which originally necessitated the "professionalization" of science.

Through our work, however, we've learned that people who are paying attention to their local environment have a limited set of ways to respond to received information, primarily either resisting or over-reacting; this is the audience we have identified as lacking tools and methods to do rigorous investigation on their own.

Many contemporary "citizen science" projects give non-experts only token opportunities to participate in the process of scientific inquiry -- typically performing data collection and record-keeping for someone else's research. PLOTS offers a more open and inclusive process for civic science projects. Members of a particular community are involved in every step of the process, from framing research questions to innovating new research tools to gathering and interpreting data using open-source software.

Experts and other participants learn together -- and from each other -- all along the way. Participants are never "trained" to "do science." Instead, they are invited to find their own latent capacity to ask meaningful and relevant questions about the places they call home and to leverage their innate rich understanding of local processes and priorities.

Using the BP oil spill mapping project as a pilot, Public Laboratory has already begun a series of new collaborations focused on locally produced environmental and civic data. During the last year, we've been working at the Gowanus Canal Superfund site to monitor green infrastructure improvements and sewage and coal tar contamination in the canal. In Butte, Mont., we've set up a flight lab and began a project on historical mapping of mountain-top removal sites, and we worked with activists in Ein Kareem, Jerusalem to balloon map a protest for Palestinian independence.

What's next

Over the next three years, we'll be setting up site-based projects across the United States to support community action with new low-cost, accessible tools and technologies. These projects, ranging from infrared vegetation monitoring to thermal photography for home insulation, will be developed in collaboration with local community and advocacy groups to address specific local issues. Drawing from the participatory and do-it-yourself techniques which have generated hundreds of gigabytes of citizen-produced environmental map data in the Gulf of Mexico, the Public Lab plans to tackle new problems in new places, while developing a long-term approach for jump-starting and sustaining such efforts on a broader scale.

For more information, or if you are interested in getting involved with the Public Laboratory or want to start your own project with Public Lab, please visit our website at publiclaboratory.org or contact us at team@publiclaboratory.org. You can also follow us on Twitter @PublicLab.

Somewhere along the way, however, the concept got washed over by a sea of organizations simply distributing Flip Video cameras and expecting amazing content. Who needed a journalism degree?

Promoting local voices is important, and it's easier than ever to have those views be heard. However, "community journalism" has another important word in the phrase -- journalism.

The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives. We knew early on that we wanted to focus as much on the journalism component as the tools and have since developed an online Classroom filled with openly available training curricula and lesson plans to help easily infuse journalism into any project.

For each of our in-field training programs, we send professional journalists to instruct on everything from ethics, to interviewing techniques, to how to write an article before we even pick up a camera. By the time our students get their hands on the gear, they already have a solid understanding of exactly what it means to be a journalist.

The Tiziano Project 360 Platform

But obviously, it's not just about training. Running a community journalism program is also about promotion and distribution.

Last summer, we conducted our second program in Iraqi Kurdistan and worked with 12 students of Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian decent. The workshop culminated in the launch of The Tiziano Project | 360º Kurdistan -- an immersive, nonlinear platform for exploring the culture of the region from the perspectives of both local and professional journalists.

We like to think of the website as a "Documentary 2.0" model -- a choose-your-own-adventure way to explore the stories produced during our program.

An award from the Knight Foundation is going to allow us to further develop the 360 technology into a scalable platform that other organizations can use around the world. 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.

Our goal with this platform is to provide other organizations like ours with quality tools for disseminating locally produced content, while at a global level, we seek to foster direct lines of communication and information sharing to help change perceptions of conflict and post-conflict regions.

From Online to Offline

One of our best moments came just after we launched, when an American student emailed us saying he planned to volunteer in Iraqi Kurdistan during the upcoming summer. His parents were understandably upset and more than a little concerned about his decision.

He sent them a link to the 360 Kurdistan.

His parents explored the site for more than an hour and, in the end, were not only excited for him to go, but actually wanted to visit. The community voices in the 360 Kurdistan had actually shifted his parent's perception of Iraq.

We love the idea that our work can actually influence the way people perceive these regions, and one of our goals is to further this effect by bringing what we do online into a real-world exhibition space.

Our first multimedia exhibit is currently at the Iraqi Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.'s Dupont Circle. The exhibit features 32 images and 16 video displays.

At the opening reception, one of our students addressed the crowd of nearly 200 people via videoconference from Iraq, and I was excited to hear numerous people citing that as one of the evening's highlights.

For future exhibits, we hope to host virtual office hours in which patrons will be able to communicate live with our students in real time through the duration of the installation. For now, we'll settle for a quick Skype conference.

If you're in D.C., the exhibit will run at the Iraqi Cultural Center (1630 Connecticut Ave NW # 200) until Sept. 1. Hope you can stop by to check it out!

Sweatshop is a new browser game, developed by Littleloud for Channel 4 Education, in which players fill the role of a factory floor manager in a developing nation. Taking design cues from the tower defense genre, the game tasks you with placing skilled workers and child laborers along a conveyor belt. It's also one of the most compelling and effective political games I've seen in recent years.

Orders for different kinds of garments -- including hats, shirts, bags and shoes -- come down the line, and laborers assemble these products at varying speeds according to their specialty (or lack thereof, in the case of the children). For each completed garment, the player receives a small amount of cash that is then reinvested into hiring more workers or purchasing support items such as water coolers, fans and portable toilets. Some support items increase the speed or profitability of workers within their zone of effect, while others are required to prevent their inevitable exhaustion and (later in the game) bodily harm.

Over the course of 30 stages, players are scored on the efficiency and, ultimately, character of their management decisions. This is reinforced by a trophy system, a karma meter, and a version of the classic shoulder angel/devil duo: a pitiable Child working in the factory and the comically inhumane Boss.

The Child, who is always placed on the line for free at the beginning of each stage, explains how new support items can be used to help keep workers safe. In between stages, the Child presents brief factoids on sweatshop labor around the world. The Boss harangues players at the beginning and end of each work day, only taking a break from shouting and spewing his bad-taste humor to take phone calls from the pompous fashion industry moguls who send in orders.

A full-featured political game

Littleloud and Channel 4 previously worked together on Bow Street Runner and last year's The Curfew. The latter was essentially an interactive drama that depicts the dangers of a potential future police state in the U.K., written by comics author (and game journalism alumnus) Kieron Gillen. Because The Curfew only featured mini-games tangentially related to its full-motion video acting, I didn't know what (or how much) to expect from Sweatshop. What I found was one of the most subtle and full-featured political games that I've come across in the past few years.

For American readers who aren't exactly sure how Channel 4 works, it is a state-owned broadcaster established in the United Kingdom (UPDATE: corrected misunderstanding that it was the "fourth" UK state-owned broadcaster). Channel 4 commissions all of its programming from external companies, meaning its content has often been eclectic and cutting-edge, and over the years it has established the "4" brand as a significant name in culture and entertainment. Channel 4 Education, the department that published Sweatshop, is primarily tasked with providing entertaining pedagogical content to U.K. teenagers. Each year, C4E picks themes especially relevant to contemporary teens and invites indie games developers from around the United Kingdom to a pitch session.

"Sweatshop was Littleloud's pitch for a game about the fashion industry, one of the key topics suggested by the broadcaster for its 2011 slate," said Simon Parkin, the game's designer, writer, and producer. "As young people generally have limited disposable income, they are likely to buy cheap, fashionable clothes from high street retailers who drive down their prices by employing sweatshop labor."

During the first five to ten levels of the game, play isn't particularly difficult enough to raise any obvious alarms about the unfair labor practices that become necessary evils in sweatshop economics. As Parkin explained, "There's no leap of abstraction to view workers as 'towers' working on targets when they enter their 'area of effect.'" (In fact, the pairing of theme and play here is so strong that you might not even notice that it's a tower defense game at first.)

But that isn't the extent of the game's argument. For this early phase of Sweatshop, the factoid text bubbles at the score screen deliver most of the crucial information about sweatshop practices. If the game stopped here, it would be comparable to PETA's Mama Kills Animals; the latter doesn't actually encapsulate its social message about the inhumanity of factory farming in play itself, relying on external links and short documentary clips.

Increasingly complex

But Sweatshop is a game that, in accordance with the genre conventions of tower defense, becomes gradually more and more complex to control over time. As its play deepens, so too does its procedural rhetoric.

The first thing players will notice is that, in order to attain gold medals on each stage, they must almost constantly run the conveyor belt at double speed. At this pace, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep on top of worker fatigue and a proper mix of skilled labor for each type of garment.

My first "a-ha" moment came when I realized that I could nab a gold medal on many levels -- and minimize the amount of clicking and thinking I needed to do -- simply by covering the belt in child labor, rather than planning for and maintaining a large force of skilled workers. These workers are cheap and replaceable, meaning they also contribute to build speed and a high "money saved" score at the end of a level.

Of course, you'll still end up scoring closer to 100 percent if you replay a level many times to figure out the ideal build order for skilled workers. But why would you, if you can attain a satisfactory score with so much less effort?

The next layer of the game's rhetoric unfolds more slowly. The fact is that you can't really convey the extent of the hardships faced during a long, underpaying shift on a factory line in any medium. (You could craft a time-accurate simulation, but it would be difficult to rope many into playing it.) Instead, Sweatshop's strategy is to pull you into the antagonist's mindset; it forces you into the cold logic of sweatshop management and leaves you to reflect on your own descent into it. In the design of Sweatshop, Parkin and the others at Littleloud struck upon what Ian Bogost calls "tight coupling." According to Parkin:

It was one of those rare cases where the mechanics and the message seemed to align neatly, and once we began speaking to experts in the field of sweatshop labor it became clear that there was a huge amount of relevant content that we could bake into the game mechanics.

Baking in real-world content

Essentially, the game begins as a cartoon sketch of factory labor. You don't need to worry about worker fatigue, safety and morale. But Littleloud gradually "bakes in" more and more of this real-world content. By the end, you need to keep the floor stocked with water coolers, repairmen and fire marshals to keep your workforce alive.

And then, if you're taking the game seriously, you really start to hold it against them. You cut corners, gambling on the low odds that one or two workers outside the repairman's safety zone might harm themselves. Instead of blaming yourself for demanding too much from them, or for not planning ahead in your support item infrastructure, you get angry at your sim-workers for getting tired at the most inopportune times. It is this reduction of human beings to numbers, pesky weak flesh in the way of the profit, that is Sweatshop's frightening strength.

Of course, not everything about Sweatshop works as well as it could. For instance: radios, fans and portable toilets all contribute in some way to worker productivity. While we can certainly see the case for radios increasing morale and fans reducing fatigue, one of the game's factoid texts explicitly critiques many sweatshops for not allowing workers to use the restroom in order to maximize productivity. The support items are so helpful that, at the end of any given level, your floor is likely to look a lot more hospitable than most actual sweatshops would be.

But incongruities such as this are only a minor problem. The biggest obstacle I see is that, because it is so full-featured and modeled after commercially viable tower defense games, Sweatshop's rhetoric burns so slowly that many players might never encounter it. Even if you play to the end, it really requires a desire to attain gold medals on your part for much of its skillful mental manipulation to take effect.

That said, Sweatshop's many animated cut scenes and factual texts will arguably hit harder for the intended teenage audience than they did with me. There's not as much of a direct causal link between the game and the practice of buying cheap clothes (the stated target of the project) as one might like, but it's a huge step in the right direction for Littleloud as a studio.

Although Parkin couldn't provide details on the game's budget, he did offer a timetable for the game's production. It was pitched to Channel 4 last summer, but it didn't enter production until January. The development cycle lasted around six months with a small team of four, though other members of the studio provided ongoing support. These rough numbers attest to the thoroughness and determination of both Littleloud and Channel 4, showing what can be done when one waits until a game is fully realized before pushing it to press.

In the first week, we heard lab interface designer Aza Raskin speak about the power of the prototype; Storify co-founder Burt Herman offered up the ingredients of a successful news startup; and New York Times graphics editor Amanda Cox demonstrated the power of data and visualizations.

In the second week, Chris Heilmann, Mozilla's international developer evangelist, discussed increasingly influential web technologies; jQuery creator John Resig offered guidelines for creating successful open-source projects; and Adaptive Path co-founder Jesse James Garrett detailed the significance of user experience design in product development.

Each lab participant is required to post a weekly "thinking out loud" blog, as well as a final software product proposal. As MoJo faculty team member Phillip Smith pointed out in an earlier Idea Lab post, the goal of the entire Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is to "stop yammering and start hammering." And with paper, video, prototyping software and code, that's exactly what many of the Learning Lab participants have already been up to.

So, as a tribute to the prototyping/brainstorming theme of the first week's lectures, here's a rundown of some prototypes and visualizations that emerged in the first "thinking out loud" blog assignment. Help grow the community by checking out these thought experiments, offering your feedback, or adding onto them with your own twist:

• Participant Michael Wells conceived of a tagging interface for comments.
• Computer engineer Manuel Pinto offered up a working prototype for a people-powered news platform.
• Filmmaker and journalist Jason Spingarn-Koff offered a glimpse into crowd-powered video feeds.
• Nicole Cifani, a new media producer, sketched a quick flip concept for discovering content.
• Amy Zerba, an assistant professor at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications, created a video to demonstrate her idea for consolidating news, social media and work into a single space.

• Sofware developer Laurian Gridinoc served up photographic evidence of the thought process behind an attempt to parse through the diverse information in news articles.
• Web/mobile developer David Bello experimented with an interface for extracting elements of a news story and allowing users to play with data.
• Kersten A. Riechers, co-founder of quäntchen + glück, gave a peek of what a crowd-powered error-reporting system could look like.
• Open-source guru John Tynan visualized a way to improve Public Radio Roadtrip.
• Web developer Artem Dudarev had a working prototype of Locovidi, which connects video to locations.
• Regnard Raquedan, a Philippines-based writer, gave us a "wiki-fied news dashboard."
• Journalist and web developer Seth Vincent looked to social media for inspiration about how users can contribute to news beats.
• And yours truly toyed with what one aspect of a "news hover box" tool could look like.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, merely those that came out in the week's first assignment; plenty of awesome visual aides were in the original Project Mojo entries, and you can find a list of all Learning Lab participant blog entries here. Comment liberally if I missed any good visualizations of cool product ideas, and keep an eye on what emerges in the second week of blog posts!

Mohammed Nanabhay from Al Jazeera English (AJE) spoke about how Al Jazeera covered the Egyptian revolution. Political consultant Chris Faulkner spoke about Tea Party activism; Yesenia Sanchez, an organizer for the P.A.S.O./Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, talked about the "Undocumented, Unafraid and Unapologetic" campaign; NPR's Andy Carvin spoke about curating and verifying tweets from Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab Spring; and Baratunde Thurston, digital director of The Onion, gave a tremendous riff about his own -- and his mother's -- activism.

If discussions were not actually about Tahrir Square, Tunisia or the Gay Girl in Damascus, they were infused by the same spirit.

Given this activist spirit, it was highly fitting that, at the start of the conference last week, Chris Csikszentmihalyi announced that Ethan Zuckerman would be succeeding him as director of MIT's Center for Civic Media (where the conference was held). Zuckerman has been a central figure nurturing, filtering and aggregating civic media over the last decade at Harvard's Berkman Center and particularly through Global Voices Online that he set up with Rebecca McKinnon in 2005.

Civic media is hard to define, Zuckerman told the audience. It combines at least three elements:

• Organizing in a virtual and physical space simultaneously
• Self-documentation using participatory media
• Use of broadcast media as an amplifier

Digital Tools for Civic Purposes

In Tunisia, for example, people recorded themselves protesting and then published their recordings on Facebook. In Egypt, Facebook helped people organize political meetings and support groups. Zuckerman referred to other examples across the world where people were using digital tools for civic purposes. In Russia, people have been tracking wildfires using Ushahidi at Russian-Fires.ru. (Ushahidi is a Knight News Challenge winner.) In the United States, at LandmanReportcard.com, farmers and landowners have been keeping records of visits from "Landmen," negotiators for oil and gas companies, to expose disinformation and make sure they get a fair deal.

In Egypt, the public and the media learned from one another, AJE's Nanabhay told the conference attendees. People recorded themselves protesting and published it online. Al Jazeera amplified those recordings. As a consequence, people recorded themselves more. It was a self-perpetuating cycle of public media that grew and grew.

People are now all too conscious of the power of self-produced media, Nanabhay said. In the past, people committed dramatic "spectacles of dissent" in the belief that this was the only way of grabbing the attention of mainstream media. Now they stand with "a rock in one hand and a cell phone in the other," recording, publishing and promoting themselves and their causes, he said.

In the United States, the grown-up children of illegal immigrants have been taking videos of themselves "coming out" as having no documentation. The more people who take videos of themselves and publish them on the Net, the more empowered they feel, and the more others join them. See, for example, this YouTube video of an Undocumented, Unafraid and Unapologetic rally in March.

NPR's Carvin spoke about how many of his connections and sources in Syria, who had started tweeting anonymously, were now using their real names and pictures. They had crossed a line, they said, and there was no going back. If they were to die, then they wanted others to know who they were.

The conference captured the flavor of how people are now using digital tools to empower themselves and give volume to their dissent -- though this is by no means all about public anger and protest. Cronicas de Heroes Juarez, a project that came out of the Center for Future Civic Media, gathers and projects good news stories from the town of Juarez, Mexico. It was set up to balance the many bad news stories coming from the town that were creating an impression of a place in hopeless decline.

Public empowerment

A number of this year's Knight News Challenge prizes reflected this feeling of public empowerment, of people taking control of their own representation and information.

The biggest prize winner was The Public Laboratory, a project that initially appeared less digital and more paper, scissors, stone. The project uses string, balloons, kites and cameras to take aerial photographs of landscapes. These photographs are then threaded together digitally to provide detailed information about land use, pollution, and the progress of environmental initiatives. The project found its calling after the Gulf oil spill when satellite photographs simply were not detailed enough to see the spread of oil or its impact on the environment.

Zeega, another of this year's big winners, will help people video their own stories and edit them together on its open-source HTML5 platform. NextDrop gets even more practical still. It will provide a service that will tell communities on the ground in Hubli, Karnataka, India when water is available. The Tiziano project emerged from work done in Kurdistan and is intended to give communities the equipment, tools and training to illustrate their own lives.

These projects are highly pragmatic, focused on the public, not media professionals, and apply existing technologies to real-world problems. They don't start with the technology and then figure out what you might do with it.

In this world, in which the public organizes and records themselves, the role of the news media changes. Mainstream media shifts from recording media content itself to gathering existing material, verifying it, contextualizing it, and amplifying it. Other Knight News prizes recognized and were directed at this shift: iWitness and SwiftRiver, and -- for data -- Overview and Panda.

The Knight News Challenge has evolved a lot since its inauguration in 2006. But its strength lies in the consistency of its aims, and in the growing relevance of those aims: helping to inform and engage communities. Long may it continue.

We have made great progress on the Ushahidi Kenya evaluation. Jennifer has been back at the iHub continuing to build the 3-part assessment and self-evaluation tool. The goal of this toolbox is to help interested organizations learn about the Ushahidi platform using a web-based interactive tool. There's also a low bandwidth and no bandwidth option as detailed in our earlier post.

In Nairobi, Jennifer met with organizations and individuals that have used the Ushahidi platform for election monitoring, peace campaigns, crisis response and other community programs.

She also met with new organizations interested in the toolbox. They will be testing Toolbox #1 and #2 for their projects and also providing recommendations on how to improve them.

Here are some examples of what they look like. Each toolbox will have different sections that will help you work through different stages of your project. Like this one from the Toolbox #2:

In Toolbox #1 you can select a type that best fits your program, and click on links to other Ushahidi instances to learn more about what people have done in the past or even doing right now.

You can also take a technology assessment. There will be rotating panels where you see the RED circle arrow that will show you more tips and examples.

Thank you everyone for sharing very helpful tips and examples and for testing out the tools! It's still a work in-progress but we're looking for more people to test the toolbox, especially if you have used Ushahidi in the past. Please let us know if you would like to help out by adding a comment to this post.