There’s the megamerger, and then there are the numbers: $1.8 billion, 11.5 percent interest, 5 years, $300 million, 18 percent…and many more.

Investors, industry observers and wags have picked through the pieces of the Gatehouse/Gannett megamerger this week, and obsessed over those numbers. All to the question: Will this deal work?

That’s the financial/operational question here, easier to prophesize than the democratic one: What will be the impact in the hundreds of communities that are used to having one major (if flagging) daily serve their basic news and information needs?

The two — financial success and journalistic capacity — should tie together, of course. How they do is one of the great mysteries of this merger. How much money exactly will be saved, and what exactly will it be spent on?

That’s where these big numbers drive the conversation, occupying all the oxygen in the room, and obviously caused great palpitations on Wall Street.

Gannett’s and Gatehouse’s (ticker symbol NEWM) share prices both stabilized somewhat on Thursday, after the latter took a 30-percent-plus dive after the merger announcement. Both companies’ shareholders — and the same top institutional shareholders own lots of both companies — continue to reckon with the reality of the deal.

That led to some apparently premature alarm that the deal would go quickly south, but it had appeared through this week that the investors who bought in as the price took a dive supported the deal and wouldn’t oppose seeing it completed. Among the big players: Leon Cooperman, chair of Omega Advisors, continues to increase his NEWM stake, as others have sold.

On Friday morning, though, this drama took a new turn.

The dealmakers face a new — though known — fear: Alden Global president Heath Freeman. On Friday morning, Alden, through its MNG Enterprises newspaper chain, filed with the SEC, announcing a 9.4 percent stake in NEWM. The stated reason for its large purchase: “The Reporting Persons are evaluating the terms of the Merger Agreement and believe that the consummation of the Merger may not be in the best interest of the Issuer’s shareholders.”

What might Alden — which saw its hostile bid for Gannett defeated in the spring — now do?

The filing hints at loose threat: “Accordingly, the Reporting Persons reserve the right to take certain actions with respect to the Merger including, but not limited to, undertaking to vote against or campaign against the Merger and to propose or suggest strategic alternatives other than the Merger.”

What’s Alden’s real play here? It’s likely more than the spurned Heath Freeman spitting in the soup of the megamerger.

Will he come back with a new all-cash offer, if this deal continues to be met with skepticism from investors, who drove down NEWM stock by more than 10 percent again on Friday? Is he just trying to force the hand of Softbank, the parent of NEWM manager Fortress, to invest, raising the share price, and profiting Alden in the short term? Does he sense that if this megamerger goes through, his MNG Enterprises will be left lonely on the sidelines of the Consolidation Games dance hall, unable to find a suitor?

Softbank may indeed be entering the fray and supporting the deal, word on the street says. Expect numerous other moves in this chess game, which could go for months. Remember, shareholders won’t vote on the deal until late in the year, pending regulatory approval, so the jockeying could well intensify.

Meanwhile, NEWM CEO Mike Reed will be doing everything he can to save the deal. Five days after the deal was announced, a consensus has evolved: He could have done a better job to sell the story of the business synergies of the deal — and to justify the huge, high-priced debt burden the megamergered New Gannett would take on.

The question, then again, of the moment: Is this the best future for these companies?

“Look, it’s the best deal we could get,” one insider told me this week. And that, in a nutshell, sums it up. This current deal is far from ideal for either company, or its shareholders, or its employees, or its readers. And for Gannett, it’s better than being captured by Freeman.

For Gatehouse, it’s the best available alternative as the company has hit a strategic wall, its $1.1 billion-fueled acquisition-heavy strategy and good dividend no longer wowing investors. Fortress Investment Group, the money and strategy behind Gatehouse’s gargantuan growth, saw its next opportunity. It seized it — and now the private equity company will continue to manage the big merged company for the next two years, through CEO Mike Reed, its key employee (more details on that arrangement below).

As the newsprint dust settles, let’s take a quick look at the numbers and a couple of other points that now populate the industry conversation.

The Numbers

$1.792 billion: That’s the immediate financing in this deal. Led by Apollo Global Management, consider this huge sum of money a “bridge loan,” say those involved in the deal. As a bridge, it’s a costly one, set at 11.5 percent interest. Significantly, there’s no penalty for paying off the five-year note early refinancing it.

That’s a key part of the financial logic here. Apollo supplies the massive financing of this deal at 3.5 times or so the companies’ earnings; that’s a deal that doesn’t come cheap, so 11.5 percent is the best rate Gatehouse could get to get the deal done now. One reason that bigger Gannett isn’t the acquirer: it didn’t have the juice to get the financing.

That means that for the next couple of years, the New Gannett will be driven to pay off as much of that debt as possible. If it can get the debt down to two times earnings, then it can refinance at a more palatable interest rate of 8 percent or less. (That’s what McClatchy is paying in its latest refinancing.)  That would save the company millions in annual costs.

Apollo is is no stranger to the newspaper industry, and is described by those who know it as the keenest follower of the trade. While in its 2015 failed bid to buy Digital First Media, it intended to launch an aggressive digital-first strategy, its role here is simpler: financier. With its senior position in the deal, it could come to own the New Gannett if it defaults. For now, though, it will just rake in short-term dollars.

The other link to remember: Apollo and Fortress Investment Group.

“Remember, lots of banks were in on the reviewing deal,” says one significant holder of Gannett shares. “And no one would finance it.  It took Apollo and that high rate to get the deal done.”

Another said, “Without Fortress and its influence on Wall Street with the money it spreads around, this deal wouldn’t have worked.”

That’s pivotal to understand in this megamerger and to remember as we contemplate a McClatchy/Tribune merger or others. It’s really tough to get financing for an industry in such structural decline.

$300 million: That’s the annual cost savings synergy number that CEO Mike Reed is aiming for, as he announced $275–300 million as a target. Subtract $100 million or so the first year, due to lots of severance costs in reducing business side headcount and buying out of duplicative vendor contracts. Reed has emphasized that the $300 million is “only” 7.5 percent of the combined companies’ expenses, a lesser percentage than other merged companies’ executives have claimed.

That’s the big key to this deal: massive savings in combining two big companies, which then buys time for the digital transition solutions.

The savings, most observers believe, are real. The question is where do these savings go? Think Let’s Make a Deal’s three doors:

• Debt repayment. A must, of course, with that added incentive of getting the principal down for a cost-saving refi.
• Dividend: New Media Investment knows it needs its dividend to keep shareholders happy.
• Reinvestment in the business.

For a company whose revenue is only about 25 percent digital, the massive heavy lifting of “digital transformation” lies ahead. Witness the expense of those who are farther along nationally, led by the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Major reinvestment in both technology and talent have led the way. The new Gannett is much closer to the beginning of the digital transformation process than the end. That’s expensive.

So, the big question: With the major savings, especially after the first year (given the cost of getting those savings), how much money will go to each door? There’s already tension between the two companies on that question, as the deal proceeds with regulators, with Reed more focused on debt reduction and old Gannett on transition, say sources.

And the bigger question behind that: What’s the New Gannett’s theory of the case? What will the largest local news company need to do and be to be successful in the 2020s? Neither Gannett nor Gatehouse has offered any big vision of what that is, or could be, even fueled by new money. We know Heath Freeman’s theory: Local newspaper companies are a lost cause, so milk them ‘til the cows are dry.  What is the New Gannett’s theory?

Is there a plan to broadly embrace cutting of print days, as much of the industry models that idea? Is the combined digital marketing services business of New Gannett its primary commercial strategy? Can it make a bigger revenue stream out of Gatehouse’s industry-leading events business? Will the USA Today Network find stronger legs — in both digital ad revenue and shared national and investigative reporting — as Gatehouse properties are added to it?

We’ve heard no grand pronouncement about reinventing local news in the 2020s. If, say, The New York Times or Washington Post were the party bringing these two companies together and offering a grand turnaround future, we’d see a story that would capture imagination.  This story, one of economy, mainly registers shrugs.

18.5 percent: That’s how much print advertising was down, year over year, in this week’s announced second-quarter financial reporting at Gannett, with overall revenues down 9.9 percent. That number multiplies the difficulty of the math of this deal. If revenue were at least flattish, CEO Mike Reed could allocate those savings more easily through the three doors.  But it’s not.

The Monopoly board on which this strategy is being executed is shrinking as the game is played.  (Even Gatehouse, usually the best performer on a same-store basis the last couple of years was down 15.3 percent in print ads and 6.9 percent overall in the second quarter. McClatchy followed the same trend on Thursday, down 18.7 percent in print ads and 12.6 percent overall.)

In a deal that is all about cash flow, the merger partners face the fact that, on an operating basis, too much cash is flowing … backward.

263: That’s the total number of current daily operations now reported by the combined companies, but expect that number to change in 2020. First, the companies have to see what they must do to win the Department of Justice antitrust division’s approval of the deal. They’ve hired attorneys with DOJ experience to expedite the process and don’t expect big issues, given that they don’t own titles that go head-to-head in the same market. The antitrusters could take a wider view of regional price domination, but aren’t unexpected to.

At least for appearance’s sake, Gannett and Gatehouse might offer to sell some properties in areas that may seem monopolistic.

There’s one more good reason for the new Gannett to sell some properties: Cash, to repay that Apollo loan. The new Gannett will focus heavily on areas where it has great geographic domination — Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. After those, look for possible sales of properties that stand alone in their areas and may be prized by other publishers, who can themselves “cluster” newspapers together. That’s one arena in which the 2019 Consolidation Games may play on.

One thing Mike Reed will certainly do: Sell some of the surviving real estate sitting under Gannett properties. That, too, will bring quick cash.

Beyond the intriguing numbers, here are a few more questions:

Why the two-company structure? Observers of the Seussian corporate structure outlined in the merger announcement wonder why it’s being constructed that way. A set-up for further acquisitions, perhaps?

The reality is simpler. The new Gannett’s new corporate structure looks strikingly similar to New Media Investment Group/Gatehouse’s current one, and for a good reason: Fortress Investment Group, which bred the big Gatehouse, remains in the driver’s seat of the new Gannett. It’s no accident that NEWM shareholders retain 50.5 percent of the new company’s shares, with Gannett getting the minority 49.5 percent. That enables Fortress to maintain control of the board and the company.

Fortress, which brought Gatehouse through bankruptcy and assembled pools of acquisition capital in a market hungry to sell, gets to stay in charge of the new Gannett through 2021. Fortress, now owned by Japanese conglomerate Softbank, negotiated through last weekend to get its due in this deal.

Back in 2013, Fortress began taking hold of Gatehouse Media, out of bankruptcy. Its management contract to run the new company through CEO Mike Reed, a Fortress employee who became its Grand Acquisitor, enabled it to run the table, spending more than a billion dollars buying dailies and weeklies from usually long-time newspaper owners, many of them families, increasingly desperate to get out of the business.

Then, Fortress, seeing the business run into a wall within the last 18 months, and unlikely to find new money to make smaller acquisitions, smelled money in the chaos of Gannett. Though it only owns 1.1 percent of Gatehouse, through this deal, it protects its position quite well.

In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fortress’s continuing role is clarified. Essentially, the new Gannett, like the old Gatehouse, operates under the parent company — operated by Fortress, with Mike Reed, the new combined company’s CEO, still an employee of Fortress through the end of 2021.

“It’s extraordinarily odd,” said one significant investor in the company, speaking of the CEO of a public company being employed by a PE firm.

Fortress took in $21.8 million for its management of Gatehouse in 2018, and stands to make a similar sum for 2019. The merger agreement adjusts Fortress’s role and finally ends it in December 2021. We can see some of the financial/contractual adjustments in the filing, but it doesn’t provide a complete picture.

We can estimate that Fortress will earn at least its $20 million annually, if not more, for the next two years. In exchange for ending the agreement, Fortress gets 4,205,607 shares of the new Gannett stock, sellable at the end of 2021. Further, it is granted options to buy 3,163,264 shares of new Gannett stock. (“These options will have an exercise price of $15.50 and become exercisable upon the first trading day immediately following the first 20 consecutive trading day period in which the closing price of the Company Common Stock [on its principal U.S. national securities exchange] is at or above $20 per share [subject to adjustment], and also upon a change in control and certain other extraordinary events.”)

“Let no one ever say that you can’t make money in the newspaper business,” one industry veteran observed this week.

And, yes, this reality: It is a private equity company that will manage — through newspaper veteran executive Mike Reed — one-sixth of the U.S.’s daily newspapers for the next two years.

How much smaller will the New Gannett be in a year? By the end of 2020, it will be likely be significantly smaller. Consider that about $75 million could be paid out in severance funds, as headcount — the big cuttable cost center of newspaper companies — gets reduced.

As we’ve noted, most of those cuts will focus on the business and production part of the enterprise. Two corporate headquarters become one at Gannett’s McLean, Virginia, location. Every division and process will be under scrutiny as surviving managers aim to cut $300 million. Fewer printing presses, fewer middle managers, elimination of redundant technologies.

Speculation has begun, of course, about who and what will survive in this process. Some think that Gannett, even though it was acquired, may exert more staying power than one might expect.

Undoubtedly, it’s going to be complex. Gannett has invested multiples of millions more than Gatehouse over the years in systems of every kind, from content management to ad serving to subscriptions management — and has more middle managers supporting them, though those ranks have seen lots of cutting in recent years. Already, some key Gatehouse managers are rankled at the perception they may lose out.

The top two executives in this new company will set the tone for all the coming cuts, and CEO Mike Reed is no stranger to efficiency management. He’s got a new partner, Paul Bascobert. Gannett named Bascobert its new CEO at the same time it made the merger announcement. The company had been courting him for awhile, and Reed agreed to take him as a #2 as the deal solidified. Alison Engel, Gannett’s CFO, will move to that job at the merged company.

Bascobert isn’t the household name that Gannett had hinted at in the long months of its search after CEO Bob Dickey announced his retirement in December. But former associates describe him as a solid, experienced executive. At Dow Jones, one of his key positions was streamlining the company, and that talent will come in handy as the next year is consumed by the most judicious cutting the company can accomplish.

Second, he’s got experience in one key area of company growth: digital marketing services. Both companies have touted their services (LocaliQ for Gannett and Upcurve and ThriveHive for Gatehouse) as routes to a turnaround future. Bascobert led Yodle, an early market services independent that competed with ReachLocal and was later bought by Gannett.

Putting together those marketing services businesses will be complex but it’s clearly in Bascobert’s comfort zone.

The big name missing from the merger announcement: Kirk Davis. CEO of Gatehouse Media and the clear #2 to Reed, Davis is his boss’ long-time business partner. Many read the absence of his name in merger announcement as a sign he’s out, though that may be premature.

(Of course, scale is relative. The merged company would control an unprecedentedly large share of American newspapers. But those newspapers, even when bought in bulk, are far weaker than they were in the industry’s glory days, with shrunken revenues, circulation, and influence. And no matter how big its combined digital audience, the new company’s share of attention will still be no match for Google, Facebook, and the lesser nobility of digital advertising. It’s a very big slice of a much smaller pie.)

As the company that has achieved the long-sought rollup of the daily press, the new Gannett will exert a profound impact on the news industry itself, hundreds of communities, millions of readers and on the very future of the craft of journalism.

This merger produces a new cascade of questions. The first: What are the next dominoes this transaction sets up in the consolidation of the newspaper industry this transaction? Eyes are focused squarely on McClatchy and Tribune, though both Lee Enterprises and MNG Enterprises — the latest name for the collection of papers owned by Alden Global Capital — are also drawing attention. Back in January, I dubbed the industry-wide urge to merge the 2019 Consolidation Games, and this deal certainly sits atop the medal podium just past mid-year.

The deal itself still looks to be along the lines I outlined two weeks ago — designed to generate $200 to 300 million in annual cost savings in an effort to give them more time to “figure out their digital transition,” as they like to say.

GateHouse, through its New Media Investment Group (NEWM) holding company, is the acquirer. That’s surprised many observers, given Gannett’s greater circulation, cash flow, revenue, and market cap. But New Media — led by the industry’s grand acquisitor, CEO Mike Reed, and having the deal energy and resources to bring the financing together — is squarely in the driver’s seat.

Gannett’s shareholders (with 114 million shares outstanding) will receive $6 or more per share in cash, plus shares in the new company, adding up to a price in the $12 range. That’s a little more than a dollar over Gannett’s Friday closing price of $10.75, but it’s four dollars a share more than the $7.90 Gannett was at before investors learned the deal was likely and speculated the price up.

(My efforts to reach both companies for official comment this weekend were unsuccessful.)

But there is one new big player in this story: Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm which will lead the financing of the merger, sources tell me. Apollo’s name had been heard around the industry for a while, most prominently four years ago when it came close to buying what was then branded as Digital First Media from Alden. That deal fell apart at the last minute over price. (If you’ve seen Apollo in the news lately, it was likely in the context of its founder distancing himself from the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein after a financial relationship spanning more than a decade.)

In this deal, Apollo is supplying much of the money to get the deal done, with financing that sources tell me could approach $2 billion and a major debt service to match in 2020 and beyond — limiting how much any cost savings can be invested into newspapers’ future. Financing in the merger must both pay off Gannett shareholders partly in cash and essentially refinance both companies’ debt. That debt, after cash on hand is subtracted, amounts to about another $1 billion. In its would-be DFM deal in 2015, Apollo saw itself as a strategic consolidator with a game plan throw the switch from print to digital more rapidly. (It’s worth re-reading my story Thursday on newspaper companies’ increasing plans to stop printing their products seven days a week.)

Mike Reed will be at the reins of the new company as New Media acquires Gannett. (“Acquisition” and “merger” are roughly synonymous terms in this transaction.) This deal represents his ascension to the top of the trade, reinforcing what he told Nieman Lab readers last year in lengthy interview: The rollup of the newspaper industry is inevitable. Reed built the GateHouse behemoth out of bankruptcy with strong financial backing, including lower-cost access to capital from the Fortress Investment Group. For its efforts, Fortress has already been rewarded well, taking in $21.8 million in management fees and incentive payments alone in 2018. Dealmakers in this merger face the financial reckoning of buying out Fortress’ contract; that’s been one of the last sticking points in final valuation talks, say sources.

So what will this new company, a supersized Gannett, look like? Don’t expect an unveiling of the daily operating head of the company (presumably someone reporting to Reed) when the deal is announced. Instead, sources tell me they’ll point to further announcements down the road as it moves through the regulatory approval process.

Will the feds quickly approve the deal?

The agreement does indeed require federal approval, with a HSR (Hart–Scott–Rodino) review for antitrust purposes ahead. Department of Justice antitrust review is unlikely to prevent the completion of the deal, but it could take it through some unanticipated turns. Tronc/Tribune found itself stymied by DOJ’s antitrust division in two deals — one for the Orange County Register, the other for the Chicago Sun-Times — a couple of years ago. Those two cases focused on claimed monopolistic limitation in regard to advertisers and/or subscribers in a single market. (In these cases, from uniting the L.A. Times with the Register or the Chicago Tribune with the Sun-Times.)

But GateHouse and Gannett’s holdings, as numerous as they are, may not be considered as competing head-to-head in any single market. The big question is how DOJ will look at the substantial regional clustering of properties this deal would bring. In south Florida and in Ohio, for instance, the regional clustering of Gannett/GateHouse papers would be profound. But it’s that sort of clustering there in many places across the country that drives the cost-saving synergies that form the entire financial purpose of the deal.

(In Florida, a combined company would own dailies in Jacksonville, West Palm Beach, Sarasota, St. Augustine, Naples, Brevard County, Fort Myers, Pensacola, Tallahassee, Gainesville, Lakeland, Daytona Beach, Ocala, Winter Haven, Panama City, the Treasure Coast, the Space Coast, and more. In Ohio, it would own Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Canton, and more — three of the state’s four largest papers by weekday circulation.)

Will DOJ take a stand on such regional clustering? Will it find that print advertisers could be priced unfairly? Will it make an argument that the continuing spikes in the price of a print subscription is unfair to those print readers who remain? One fundamental determination: Do weakened newspapers, even if merged, really still have the ability to dominate a market to an extent that would be unfair?

Also: Since this is the first deal to create a truly national newspaper company footprint, might DOJ consider national market domination along the same lines?

Neither GateHouse nor Gannett expect such review to be a major stumbling block. Failing that kind of unexpected outcome, expect the new company to be ready to set up shop by January.

If DOJ expresses concern within its first 30-day review period, the new Gannett could agree to sell off a few titles in contested locations. It’s also quite possible that Reed has already anticipated such sales, both to satisfy DOJ and/or to reduce the debt necessary to get this deal done. Other newspaper chains would likely be interested in buying individual properties that could help them cluster.

Watch the dominoes

Will this announcement push others back to the merger table?

Close observers of the industry now expect the Tribune board to feel more pressure to make a deal. Tribune, along with its past pursuer McClatchy, is one of several companies set to report earnings this week. With the GateHouse/Gannett deal, Tribune loses a potential dance partner. Tribune/Tronc had a long and often bitter battle to tie up with Gannett (a deal semi-negotiated last summer). That presumably leaves it turning its eyes back to Sacramento, where McClatchy will likely be prepared to pitch another iteration of a deal.

McClatchy may well be able to shave a dollar or two off of its rejected December offer and get a deal done. The continuing stumbling block, sources say: Michael Ferro, whose group still controls a quarter of Tribune and who nixed the December deal. Both companies’ need consolidation for the same reasons Gannett and GateHouse do: cost savings to buy time.

(Observers noted McClatchy’s recent filing of a “waiver” request with the IRS to put off payments into its underfunded pension fund and wondered whether it is a sign of financial weakness. That filing indeed indicates tight liquidity, though that barely counts as news for McClatchy, which has been managing down/deferring its still-substantial debt pile of $816 million. While these tight finances do point to the short-term value of merger, they don’t likely indicate an imminent issue. History will note that McClatchy, unlike GateHouse and Tribune, never declared bankruptcy in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Neither did Gannett.)

Then there’s Alden. As I wrote earlier in the year, it probably stands to make some money off its supposed hostile takeover attempt of Gannett in January, depending on how much Gannett stock it retains. Alden president Heath Freeman, vilified as he is in the press, appears to have worked a successful strategy. Did he ever really intend to buy Gannett, as clumsy as his effort ended up being? Or did he just want to put it in play — as he clearly succeeded in doing — to make some money on the Gannett share holdings he had?

So what does Alden do now with its MNG papers — especially in California, where it owns more than 20 papers, including in San Jose, Oakland, Orange County, Long Beach, and Riverside? Will it find a new partner, or some other way to exit the struggling business? And then there’s Lee Enterprises, itself dealing with debt-refinancing issues and maybe another company to add to the would-be consolidation mix.

Where will the $200 to $300 million in synergies come from?

For the journalists inside what will become the new Gannett, and for their readers, the immediate future is hard to chart. Financial realities drive this deal — and that means cutting. We’ll hear the two companies talk about synergies in that $200 to 300 million range. How do those numbers work?

At the low end, “figure $200 million minus $100 million the first year,” explains one savvy financial insider. “It will cost them about $100 million in severance-plus to get the savings they want. Then there’s a savings of $200 million net a year.”

But wait: That might sound good if newspaper revenues were stable. They’re not, expected to drop another 5-plus percent in 2020 and likely continued decline after that. That could add up to another $100 million vanished from top-line revenues in 2020.

Where will the synergistic efficiencies come from? In order, consider these the sources:

• Corporate and shared services. Two big public companies turned into one can save tens of millions in costs. Finance, HR, technology, and more offer lots of cost savings as two systems become one.
• Old iron, the rationalization of printing, production, and distribution facilities. Already underway all across the industry, this deal enables the next efficient mapping of the old means of production. (And, yes, that means still earlier deadlines for those print readers, with 36-hour-old news becoming a front-page standard.)
• Ad and digital marketing services combinations. Expect cuts and a combination of both traditional ad sales forces and those in the companies’ newer digital marketing services (Gannett’s LOCALiQ and GateHouse’s ThriveHive and UpCurve) that both companies have pointed to as growth drivers.
• Vendor savings. Gannett is already the industry’s savviest buyer of newsprint and ink. More scale means even better materials pricing.
• And yes, newsrooms. Both companies understand how thin their editorial staffing has become and how that complicates the sale of digital subscriptions. But expect more editorial consolidation as well. Regional clustering — another big movement I’ve covered — will mean more consolidation of top regional editorial management positions, and the companies have two major shared design/editing operations to combine in some form.

Let’s remember: These synergies are the point of the deal. But the financing required to put the deal together means paying off a lot of debt — up to that $2 billion number. That could cost the new company something in the neighborhood of $150 million or more in annual debt service, given the high rate of interest Apollo has likely extracted in its term sheet. That annual payment will significantly constrain the new company’s ability to invest in its future — remember, that “digital transition” they keep talking about.

As this deal get finalized and then dissected — by the market and by those who care about local journalism — we’re left with this point from one in-the-fray source to ponder: “If executed well, this company will be much more likely to lead to the further rollup of the industry.” The further rollup.

The merger of GateHouse and Gannett is not the checkered flag at the end of the race. It’s more of a starting gun.

Among the projects receiving new funding: Code2040 gets the bulk of the funding, $3 million, to expand its program to more people of color working in tech. Columbia Journalism School’s “Workbench,” a collaborative platform that lets reporters “produce sophisticated data journalism without coding,” is receiving $250,000. The Data & Society Research Institute gets $250,000 to launch the Disinformation Action Lab, “a project to study and analyze propaganda and disinformation threats and develop solutions to address them.” The full list of winners is below.

Knight also commissioned Arabella Advisors to prepare a report on how the Knight News Challenge (KNC), founded in 2006, “impacted winners, their projects, and the broader fields of news, media, and journalism.” The report covers 139 projects. Among its findings:

— Of all the winners, 84 percent are still working in the field of journalism, technology, and media.

— Nearly half the winning projects (43 percent) were hosted by nonprofits; 22 percent were hosted by for-profit businesses, and 21 percent by individuals.

— “Of the projects that the KNC seeded and supported for which we have data (103 projects), 73 percent remained active at the end of the grant year (according to final grant reports).” (The analysis didn’t include 18 current grants, and another 18 had no data available.)

— “The most prevalent impediments winners reported during their grant period were a lack of technical expertise (37 percent) and difficulty acquiring users (31 percent).” Knight began screening for technical experience in 2011:

From 2007 to 2010, 45 percent of 55 projects reported technical expertise as a hurdle. Once Knight Foundation began screening for technical experience at the outset of the KNC in 2011, this decreased to only 32 percent of 84 projects from 2011 to 2016. Projects also cannot survive without getting traction with intended users. 24 percent of all projects reported they had trouble penetrating the market or acquiring users.

— Funding remains a challenge:

During their grant period, only 13 percent of the KNC winners flagged funding as an obstacle, likely because Knight’s support was generous enough for them to carry out their work. However, 65 percent of winners reported in our 2017 survey that funding has been a significant challenge. Furthermore, of those who remained at their projects after the Challenge (39 respondents), nearly a third say they are dependent on a small number of funders (with some noting that the overall pool of potential funders is small). Another 26 percent report they have had trouble securing new funding.

Winners also found, though (not surprisingly), that the award made them appear more credible and did make it easier to raise funding.

Here are the eight projects receiving new funding:

Code2040 | Project lead: Laura Weidman Powers | $3 million | Twitter: @Code2040, @laurawp | San Francisco: ($3 million): Funding will support the growth and sustainability of Code2040, a nonprofit that seeks to build a more equitable, inclusive, and prosperous economy by diversifying tech. Code2040 will expand programs that connect Black and Latinx tech talent with leading companies and broaden its focus beyond technology enterprises to work with industries that are becoming more tech-driven such as finance and media. It will grow its advisory services, which help companies create more inclusive workplaces, while increasing its communications and evaluation capacities. Through these efforts, by 2020, Code2040 will have 40,000 students, professionals, companies, and volunteers in its network, who will work to diversify tech and create economic opportunity. Code2040 is a 2014 winner of the Knight News Challenge on Strengthening the Internet and received additional funding from Knight in 2015.

Columbia Journalism School | Project leads: Jonathan Stray and Pierre Forcioli-Conti | $250,000 | Twitter: @cjworkbench, @jonathanstray and @pierreconti | New York: Columbia Journalism School will enable reporters to produce sophisticated data journalism without coding through an innovative collaborative platform called Workbench. The tool allows reporters to scrape, clean, analyze and visualize data by snapping together community-built modules, then share both the results and the process behind them. The team will work to establish a community of journalists and developers that use and contribute to Workbench. Jonathan Stray is a 2011 winner of the Knight News Challenge on Data.

Emblematic Group | Project lead: Nonny de la Peña | $250,000 | Twitter: @emblematicgroup | Santa Monica, California: Emblematic Group will design and build REACH, a platform for hosting and distributing 3D models of locations that news organizations can use to create innovative and cost-effective ‘walk around’ VR content. Emblematic will seed the platform with five prototypical locations, exterior and interior, captured via photogrammetry; the platform will also include a simple interface that allows journalists to insert their own material, such as interviews with individuals who will appear to have volumetric depth inside the environment. Nonny de la Peña is a 2010 News Challenge winner.

mRelief | Project lead: Rose Afriyie | $250,000 | Twitter: @mrelief_form | Chicago: mRelief will promote efficient and responsive government interactions through the use of technology, by developing the Benefits Information Project, a system designed to make it easier for individuals to check their eligibility and apply for government programs. The team will build a tool in which application data can be loaded and then standardized; the data can then be shared with agencies responsible for delivering benefits, thereby streamlining the process. In addition, they will introduce speech-to-text transcription to provide end-to-end social services support to people in need of benefits. mRelief is a 2016 winner of the Knight News Challenge on Data, they also received initial support from Knight through the Prototype Fund.

Data & Society Research Institute | Project lead: Janet Haven | $250,000 | Twitter: @datasociety | New York: Data & Society will launch the Disinformation Action Lab, a project to study and analyze propaganda and disinformation threats and develop solutions to address them. The lab will use research to explore issues such as: how fake news narratives propagate, how to detect coordinated social media campaigns; and how to limit adversaries who are deliberately spreading misinformation. To understand where online manipulation is headed, it will analyze the technology and tactics being used by players at the international and domestic level. Data & Society is a 2016 winner of the Knight News Challenge on Data, they also received additional funding from Knight in 2016.

Historypin | Project lead: Jon Voss | $250,000 | Twitter: @jonvoss, @Historypin | New Orleans: Funding will support the national rollout of Historypin’s Storybox project, a kit designed to strengthen communities through shared personal stories. Against the backdrop of an increasingly polarized nation, the small story-sharing sessions bring strangers together in ways that help participants focus on commonalities, bridging divides between generations, cultures, and rural and urban locations. By partnering with local libraries, Historypin’s Storybox helps leverage and support a national network of trusted institutions and dynamic civic meeting places. The project will make available free-to-download kits, kits for purchase, subscription services, training, and customizations. The Historypin.org platform also provides content gathering and curation tools, together with evaluation tools and data dashboards that help organizers show the social impact of the program.

DocumentCloud | Project lead: Aron Pilhofer | $50,000 | Twitter: @documentcloud | Philadelphia: DocumentCloud, an open-source platform used by thousands of newsrooms to share, analyze and publish documents, will help create innovative tools for journalists by opening its platform to a select number of contributors, through a program called News Nerds in Residence. Select collaborators will work closely with the team to develop and launch open-source tools, products and services designed to help journalists do their jobs better. Collaborators will have instant access to DocumentCloud’s user base to test and learn throughout the development process. If testers find them useful, the tools will become a core feature of DocumentCloud. Document Cloud will host will host one News Nerd in Residence per quarter through calendar 2018 (a total of three). Collaborators will be chosen through an open application process. DocumentCloud is a 2007 winner of the Knight News Challenge, and has received additional funding from Knight Foundation.

Code for Science & Society | Project Lead: Max Ogden |$200,000 | Twitter: @dat_project | Portland, Oregon: Support will help academic and government institutions more easily share data on the web using Dat, a suite of tools that allow users to track changes, collaborate, and redistribute data over a peer-to-peer network. Through outreach and pilot programs with universities, Dat has established a growing community of engaged users, and an exciting ecosystem of peer-to-peer web-based tools and products built on Dat. Funding will help Dat in growing the team’s business and client development expertise to transform the way academic institutions and government clients handle data. Max Ogden is a 2013 winner of the Knight News Challenge on Open Gov.

The program, called Storytellers Without Borders, received $150,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation as one of the winners of the latest round of the Knight News Challenge, which were announced this morning. Knight is awarding $1.6 million to 14 projects around the theme of the future of libraries. (Disclosure: Knight also funds Nieman Lab, though not through the Knight News Challenge.)

In Dallas, Morning News journalists will teach students how to conduct interviews, write stories, and produce video while the librarians will share best practices for conducting research through the library’s digital resources and databases.

“The identity of city public libraries is in question,” said Tom Huang, the Morning News’ Sunday and enterprise editor. “Are they simply repositories for physical books or is there something more? Having a city news organization partner with a library can help the library figure out what that identity is and really promote it and make it gain even higher visibility in different communities. I think that ultimately helps the news organization because potentially you get more people interested in reading.”

The program will launch in September with eight-week workshops at three library branches. The paper and library are still developing the application process, but they initially will limit the program to 60 total students — 20 at each library branch. Huang said he expected about a dozen Morning News journalists to participate in Storytellers Without Borders.

Using lessons learned from the first round of sessions, the plan is to run additional workshops in the spring and fall 2017.

The idea for the program came out of a talk Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto (Nieman Fellow, class of 2005) gave at the annual Dallas Ideas Festival in February. Inspired by Guillermoprieto’s suggestion for a program that brought together professional writers and journalists to mentor students, the Morning News and library decided to team up and apply for the Knight grant.

The project is using the Knight money to hire a program coordinator; fund trainers and guest speakers; purchase digital recorders, cameras, and other equipment; and also build a website that will host the students’ reporting.

“It’s a perfect combination of skills and opportunities for us to take teenagers, that are very much glued to the devices in their hands, and get them to look up and see what’s going on in the world around them, and then tell their story,” said Dallas Public Library director Jo Giudice.

“The challenge with this is engaging the teens and having them be aware of issues in their community, issues outside of their neighborhood,” she said. “The journalists, we hope, will really mentor them in looking someone in the eye, how to have a conversation with somebody, how to talk to them about their story…and then have them write the story.”

This isn’t the first time the Morning News and the public library have collaborated. In 2014, the paper worked with the library to form the Hispanic Families Network, another Knight-funded effort that provided parents with smartphones and training on how to report and share information within their community on childhood education. The Morning News also sponsors the library’s Dallas Book Festival.

Much of the training for the Hispanic Families Network took place in libraries, and Huang said that the experience helped him and the paper realize the important role public libraries play in many communities.

“As journalists, we’re not in these communities all the time,” Huang said. “Obviously, the libraries are there. They’re anchors of these communities. They know a lot of these communities pretty well. The nonprofits doing good work in these communities also know them well. The Dallas Morning News didn’t just want to come in and say, ‘This is what you need, and this is what you have to do with the Hispanic project.’

“We took things slowly, and worked with the libraries and the nonprofits to make sure that we weren’t stepping on any toes and making sure that we were providing something that the families wanted and needed,” he continued. “That’s going to be the challenge with this project, to really make sure we’re providing the students with what they want and need.”

Huang said the paper and library could use the network to recruit students to participate in Storytellers Without Borders. They’re also going to use library resources and possibly work with the local public schools to reach students as well.

The Morning News also hosts an annual high school journalism day that invites hundreds of journalism students to spend a day at the paper each March. Huang said they plan to use these networks to recruit students from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds.

While the focus of the Knight grant is on helping libraries adapt to an increasingly digital world, Huang said Storytellers Without Borders will enable the Morning News to try and reach new audiences in the Dallas area.

“I think city news organizations are challenged to keep readers, meet readers needs, find new readers and then stay connected with the different communities in the city,” he said. “As news organizations resources continue to shrink, it’s more and more challenging to stay connected.”

The other winning projects are also focused on better connecting libraries and communities. Five projects — including Storytellers Without Borders — have won six-figure grants from Knight. Those efforts include a project run by the Online Computer Library Center to make Wikipedia more accessible to librarians and another program that aims to help rural libraries better tell the history of their communities.

Another nine projects are each receiving $35,000 in funding to test early stage ideas.

Here’s the full list of News Challenge winners:

Improve access to knowledge and empower citizens: Amplify libraries and communities through Wikipedia | Seattle

Award: $250,000
Organization: Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)
Project leads: Sharon Streams and Merrilee Proffitt
Twitter: @oclc, @thinktower, @merrileeiam

Wikipedia is an important information resource, attracting up to 15 percent of all internet visitors per day. Volunteer Wikipedia editors (“Wikipedians”) work collaboratively to make knowledge accessible to all. However, many quality information sources are out of reach to people due to the digital and economic divide. Public libraries provide free, open access to trusted materials, and in many cases house important local information resources. This project will launch a national training program to help make library resources more accessible to Wikipedia editors and train library staff as editors. OCLC Research Program Officer Merrilee Proffitt and the WebJunction team will work with a Wikipedian-in-Residence to build library staff skills in creating and editing Wikipedia articles. With these skills, librarians will be equipped to lead local Wikipedia outreach programs to increase information literacy and encourage community member contributions of knowledge.

Our Story: Content, Collections and Impact in Rural America | San Francisco

Award: $222,245
Organization: Historypin
Project leads: Jon Voss and Emily Gore
Twitter: @Historypin, @dpla, @jonvoss, @ncschistory

While libraries and cultural heritage organizations are important to communities around the world, their overall impact on community well-being is difficult to track and measure. Our Story will launch a national pilot that partners with 12 rural American communities across three states in New Mexico, North Carolina and Louisiana to host public library-led history, storytelling and local cultural heritage programs, and measure the impact of these events on local communities. The project will also adapt and incorporate curriculum from Digital Public Library of America’s Public Library Partnership Project, which was created to help small public libraries build digital collections. Libraries will receive tools for running community initiatives such as sentiment-mapping, digital storytelling and exhibit creation, and librarians will receive training and lightweight methods of data collection.

Storytellers Without Borders: Activating the Next Generation of Community Journalists Through Library Engagement | Dallas

Award: $150,000
Organization: Dallas Public Library
Project leads: Jo Giudice (Dallas Public Library) and Tom Huang (The Dallas Morning News)
Twitter: @dallaslibjo, @dallaslibrary, @tomthuang, @dallasnews

Library and journalism professionals are increasingly having to adapt to an information landscape that is in constant flux. To reinforce the community’s stake in the strength of its information resources, the Dallas Public Library will host an intensive community journalism course that provides area high school students with opportunities to grow their information literacy while enhancing public discourse. Library resources and services will serve as the foundation for the course, with branch locations in diverse neighborhoods operating as research centers, technology hubs and venues for interviews with community members. Under the guidance of professional librarians and journalists from The Dallas Morning News, students will be taught journalism best practices, as well as the craft of nonfiction writing and storytelling, while gaining valuable experience using library technology and research tools.

TeleStory: Library-Based Video Visitation for Children of Incarcerated Parents | New York

Award: $393,249
Organization: Brooklyn Public Library
Project leads: Nicholas Higgins, Odette Larroche-Garcia, Nick Franklin and Story Bellows
Twitter: @BKLYNlibrary

To increase childhood literacy and provide a trusted environment in which children can connect with their incarcerated parents and other family members, Brooklyn Public Library will offer free, quality library-based video visitation services in 12 branches for families who wish to read books, sing songs, visit and stay connected. By providing multiple library access points across the area, the library will help separated families easily and frequently visit and read together, creating a bridge back to the community.

Visualizing Philanthropic Funding for Libraries | New York

Award: $300,000
Organization: Foundation Center
Project leads: Amanda Dillon and Kate Tkacik
Twitter: @fdncenter, @katetkacik, @gobbledyquack

While there is a long history of philanthropic funding for libraries in the United States, most public libraries rely on government funding for financial support. Local funding accounts for nearly 85 percent of public library funding, and state funding has decreased nearly 43 percent over the past decade. Foundation Center will develop a data visualization and mapping tool, along with training, for libraries to find and track funding opportunities and increase understanding of funding for both libraries and library supporters. The tool will allow users to search and see funding sources at the national, state and local levels and answer key questions about regional funding trends. Data visualizations such as maps, network connections and partnership pathways will highlight key networks of funders and recipients as well as individual grants. Foundation Center will also deliver grant-seeking training, in-person and online, to build libraries’ capacity to effectively tap new funding sources. Foundation Center will partner with the Digital Public Library of America to leverage its extensive combined national networks to disseminate this tool and training.

The following projects are each receiving $35,000 via the Knight Prototype Fund:

ATL Maps | Georgia State University| $35,000 | Project lead: Brennan Collins | Twitter: @ATLStudies | Atlanta
Enabling people to use multiple library collections to tell stories about their city through open source software that combines archival maps, geospatial data and multimedia pinpoints.

Can I Fair Use It? Crowdsourcing Fair Use Knowledge | Harvard University | $35,000 | Project leads: Kyle K. Courtney and Jack Cushman | Twitter: @HarvardLIL, @KyleKCourtney | Cambridge, Massachusetts
Enabling people to share information on questions of copyright and fair use by exploring existing gaps and opportunities, and testing a new approach for libraries to connect patrons with subject experts.

Digging DEEP: A Digital Extension Education Portal for Community Growth | Pennsylvania State University | $35,000 | Project leads: Rebecca Kate Miller, Lauren Reiter and Maria Kenney Burchill | Twitter: @psulibs, @rebeccakmiller, @mkburchill | State College, Pennsylvania.
Connecting academic libraries to local community needs by developing a portal for information, research, resources and sharing.

Free Library of Philadelphia Cultureshare | Free Library of Philadelphia | $35,000 | Project lead: Autumn McClintock | Twitter: @FreeLibrary | Philadelphia
Advancing local engagement and strengthening community connection to untapped library collections and new work from local artists by introducing subscribers to librarian-curated digital content on a monthly basis.

Future-proofing Civic Data | Temple University | $35,000 | Project lead: Joe Lucia | Twitter: @TempleLibaries, @jplucia | Philadelphia
Exploring ways libraries can support preservation and long-term access to open civic data through community information portals such as OpenDataPhilly.

Indigenous Digital Archive | The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture | $35,000 | Project lead: Anna Naruta-Moya and Daniel Moya | Twitter: @NativeDocs, @MNMF, @NMM_IndianArts, @AnnaNaruta | Santa Fe, New Mexico
Helping people more easily access and engage with mass digitized archival documents and photos through tools that enable people to annotate, tag and make searchable archival materials.

Literacy, Art, Technology and Community | Storyscape | $35,000 | Project lead: Micah Eckhardt | Twitter: @storyscape_tech, @micahrye | Cambridge, Massachusetts
Increasing literacy and engaging communities by piloting StoryScape, an interactive learning platform that allows users to create visual stories about their communities with artwork from local artists, in public libraries.

The People’s Media Collection | PhillyCAM | $35,000 | Project lead: Gretjen Clausing | Twitter: @PhillyCAM | Philadelphia
Offering media training in libraries through a program that engages community members to gather information about their communities and create broadcast content.

Unlocking Film Libraries Through Discovery and Search | Dartmouth College | $35,000 | Project leads: Mark Williams and Lorenzo Torresani | Twitter: @dartmouth | Hanover, New Hampshire
Making film and video housed in libraries more searchable and discoverable by testing software that will annotate speech, objects and actions in film.

PANDA (“PANDA A News Data Application,” not to be confused with the Python data analysis library) was a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner. At its core is a data warehouse appliance that gives local news outlets a centralized place to maintain, organize, and analyze data sets, including huge ones like voter registration rolls. (Disclosure: Nieman Lab is also supported by Knight, though not through a News Challenge grant.)

Reporters can upload their own data sets or search existing data and documents. Interested developers can help tweak the code and make use of PANDA’s API to customize the application to their newsrooms’ needs. The tool was designed with local newsrooms in mind, with features like fuzzy search and language translations, led by a group of people who were working in local newsrooms themselves.

Here’s the thing: None of the people from the PANDA project work in local newsrooms anymore. But team members estimate that at least dozens of newsrooms or more use it, and not just in the U.S. — some as superusers who’ve even built additional features, and others on a much smaller scale, with a few interested reporters uploading data every once in a while. Yet more newsrooms have it installed, but haven’t gotten farther than that.

PANDA formally debuted at the 2012 NICAR conference, in partnership with Investigative Reporters & Editors. Brian Boyer, then on the news apps team at the Chicago Tribune and now editor of the NPR Visuals team; Joe Germuska, another Tribune developer and now at Northwestern University’s Knight Lab; and Ryan Pitts, then senior editor managing web development at the Spokane Spokesman-Review and now at Knight-Mozilla’s OpenNews, put together the News Challenge proposal. (The Tribune’s intranet for databases inspired PANDA.)

“Plenty of folks use it a lot, and I’m far from ready to call it dead,” Boyer said. “Now we just need to figure out what the next step is. It’s just dumb luck that every single one of us went somewhere where PANDA doesn’t necessarily make sense!”

PANDA could find a new partner and hand off the torch, Boyer suggested. Someone at IRE could look after it and offer it as a benefit for members, so the tool would shift to having a central maintainer. A single organization could host it for many. Or PANDA’s original team could pursue another grant to hire a developer to help debug and build new features.

“It’s a little tricky to figure out what to do with it because the overall adoption was uneven, with some places using it a lot, some places installing it and then forgetting, and some never getting over the hurdle in the first place,” Christopher Groskopf, PANDA’s main original developer, said. (Groskopf was a news applications developer at the Chicago Tribune but is now a reporter at Quartz.) “There hasn’t been one single plan forward that has really emerged. Like a lot of open source projects, ours kind of runs by momentum and rough consensus, and without that single bolt-of-lightning idea about how things should be done, things are more in limbo.

Germuska and Pitts were both at this year’s NICAR conference in Denver, and Germuska convened a lunch for PANDA users to talk about how they’re using the tool and discuss its future. The call was aimed at serious users, but people who were just curious also showed up (including me).

Matt Kiefer first heard about PANDA when it won the News Challenge in 2011, but didn’t work in a newsroom where it made sense for him to install the tool until a couple of months ago, when he started as a data editor at the nonprofit investigative outlet the Chicago Reporter. The editorial team is small — a dozen or so — and juggles plenty of data sets.

“To keep the data sane, to keep the system manageable even in a small newsroom, you need some kind of system with some kind of standard,” Kiefer said. He found PANDA setup simple (“The documentation was very straightforward — I got out of a meeting with my boss late afternoon and had it deployed before I left for the day”). There are still kinks to work out, but he’s hoping his newsroom will be able to use PANDA’s API features to simplify workflow.

“PANDA is a good solution as a data warehouse,” Kiefer said. “Before data’s served its ultimate purpose, whether piped into graphics or mapping software or something else, it can be on file in an organized way for fact-checking. PANDA is where our data could live between research and getting reported.”

The Associated Press got PANDA up and running about a year ago and has been able to adjust it to the newsroom’s needs, including getting to the point of having single sign-ons for newsroom staff, AP data journalist Serdar Tumgoren told me. PANDA allowed developers to shut down some buggy old Ruby on Rails–based news apps, and it allows reporters who work with a lot of data to deal with a functional data warehouse directly. The AP is using it to store huge amounts of voter registration data. Automation editor Justin Myers feeds regularly released data, like labor and economics statistics, into PANDA on schedule.

“We were looking for a way for reporters to get and share data internally, and PANDA fits that bill in a lot of ways,” Tumgoren said. “I’m very happy with a lot of the features. Many of the reporters really seem to love it and use it to do a lot of their research.”

Tumgoren would love a more complex management system that would allow power users working on investigative stories to restrict access to data and documents. But he acknowledges that PANDA, by design, is a “bazaar of open materials” geared at “making information more discoverable.”

By all accounts, PANDA’s creators have made themselves as available as possible for feedback and requests, despite being no longer officially involved. (There’s also a semi-active Google group.)

“Open source software have ebbs and flows, and they get regular life because people decide it’s worth it,” Tumgoren said. “I appreciate what the team has been doing. They don’t talk about an end, but rather convene folks to see how we can keep this going, as long as people are using it.”

“One of the oldest rules of open source software is that it works when it scratches people’s itches, and then people are motivated to fix it where it falls short,” Germuska said. “This is not something that’s part of our everyday. But if there are people who don’t know how to start but are motivated to install it, we want to help them.”

By law, TV and radio stations are required to disclose who is buying political ads, but these disclosures weren’t enough for Wallstin: They don’t tell you details such as the content of the ads or how many times each spot has run.

So he turned to the Political TV Ad Archive, a project from the Internet Archive that is building a searchable archive of political ads throughout the 2016 primary season in partnership with a number of fact-checking, transparency, and journalism advocacy groups.

Wallstin used the archive to build a database of New Hampshire ads, and after the primary on February 9, he wrote a definitive wrap-up of advertising in the race.

“This seemed like a good way to follow up on and build on the knowledge I was trying to obtain from the public filings with the FCC,” Wallstin told me. “It was particularly helpful for me to track the evolution of the messaging, from more positive or biographical advertising to more direct attacks on other candidates.”

The archive, which is free to use and open-source, has been used by outlets of all sizes — from The Economist and FiveThirtyEight to New Hampshire Public Radio.

It launched in January and covers 20 media markets in eight states. It also includes ads that exclusively aired online, and covers not just the presidential race but other races as well.

The archive is also partnering with the American Press Institute, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Responsive Politics, Duke Reporters’ Lab, Facktcheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker to add more context to the database, fact-check the ads, and provide training.

The Political TV Ad Archive grew out of a project the Internet Archive ran in 2014 to document and catalog political coverage and ads in Philadelphia leading up to that year’s midterm elections.

“In Philadelphia, they were using people to identify the ads as they aired on TV,” said Nancy Watzman, managing editor of the Internet Archive’s Television Archive. “We’re still doing some of that, but we’re trying to use more sophisticated tech [too].”

The Political TV Ad Archive scrapes the broadcasts and uses an audio fingerprinting tool, called The Duplitron, to identify the ads and count how many times they’ve been played. Internet Archive senior engineer Dan Schultz — familiar to longtime Nieman Lab readers for previous projects like Truth Goggles and Opened Captions — built the tool off of another open-source effort developed at Columbia University.

The ads are then uploaded to the database, where they can be downloaded, shared, embedded, or edited. The archive lists information about the ad, including its sponsor, topics covered, candidates mentioned, and the shows it aired during.

“We can’t promise that we’re catching every single instance of every single ad, but we’re doing our best and we’re improving our process as we go along,” Watzman said.

Last month the archive also began saving copies of everything that is posted to candidates’ social media accounts.

The Internet Archive isn’t the only group collecting and analyzing political ads (the archive even shares some other projects on its site), but others focus solely on historic ads or mainly use government filings, which don’t provide a particularly detailed picture of an ad’s content. Other efforts that offer similar levels of detail are paid products that may be too expensive for newsrooms.

The archive is primarily supported through a $200,000 grant from the Knight Foundation via the Knight News Challenge. (Disclosure: Knight also funds Nieman Lab, though not through the News Challenge.)

In addition to its support from Knight, the archive has also received $50,000 in funding from the Democracy Fund to work with the American Press Institute to run training sessions for journalists on how to use the archive.

For example, API went to Miami and put on a training for Univision reporters. It also ran a session for students and journalists at Hampton University, a historically black university in Hampton, Virginia. Watzman also presented the archive at a gathering of all the local iterations of PolitiFact last month.

For now, the archive only has the resources to continue through the primaries, though Watzman said it’s looking for funding to continue running the archive through this fall’s general election.

Outlets of all types have used the archive’s content in their coverage. The Atlantic’s Andrew McGill used it to create an arcade-style video game that used the archive’s data from Iowa to show how unavoidable political ads were in the days leading up to the caucuses. Users move a remote-wielding TV watcher on a couch across TV listings, trying to avoid the oncoming ads.

Vox reporter Alvin Chang used the archive to watch more than 100 different ads that aired in Iowa. (“I watched them more than once. I am still alive.”) Fusion analyzed which national TV shows the candidates most liked to advertise on. (Donald Trump likes Jimmy Fallon. Hillary Clinton? The Ellen Show.) The Washington Post used artificial intelligence to study the content of the ads. (“The Vision API also estimated that about 0.4 percent of faces showed anger or sorrow.”)

“What’s wonderful about it is that there are so many things you can do with it,” Watzman said.

The archive’s partnerships with various factchecking groups allow it to add extra contextual information. Whenever one of the archive’s partner organizations runs a fact check on an ad, that information is entered in the ad’s page in the database.

The archive has also made factcheckers’ jobs easier, said Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact’s executive director. Instead of spending hours trying to find the ads, PolitiFact can use the archive as a starting point and can focus on actually researching the ads. The archive, Sharockman estimated, has saved two to three hours per fact check.

“That adds up to an extra fact check or two per week,” he said.

This iteration of the News Challenge focused on how data can be used to improve communities, and many of the projects — such as efforts to track policing, make FOIA easier, or follow legislation — have the potential to aid journalists. The winners were announced Tuesday afternoon at an event in New York. Eight projects will receive grants between $237,589 and $470,000. The other nine winners will be presented $35,000 through the Prototype Fund, which provides structured funding and support for early-stage projects. Since the News Challenge launched in 2007, Knight has funded 190 projects through it, totaling $47 million. (Disclosure: Nieman Lab also receives funding from Knight, though not through the News Challenge.)

“The winning projects reveal new ways to shape and deliver information through data — showing how it can be used to build stronger more informed communities, while inviting people to explore and innovate,” John Bracken, Knight’s vice president for media innovation, said in a statement.

Several grantees, for example, are focused on bettering transparency around policing. A group of researchers from Stanford University was awarded $310,000 to develop Law, Order, and Algorithms: Making Sense of 100 Million Highway Patrol Stops, an initiative that will “collect, release and analyze more than 100 million highway patrol stops conducted over the last several years across the United States.” One of the goals of the project is to help journalists investigate accusations of racial profiling in traffic stops.

In Chicago, the Citizens Police Data Project won $400,000 to build out a database of police misconduct reports that the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit group, published in 2014 after a lengthy legal fight with the city of Chicago. Journalists, including reporters with City Bureau, a community newsroom for youth on the city’s south and west sides, are already using information from the Invisible Institute database, but the Knight grant will allow the project to make it easier to access and sort the data while also improving the way individuals can file complaints.

Another winning project is Security Force Monitor, a project of Columbia University’s Human Rights Institute, which will gather “unstructured data from government sources, the media and civil society groups” to track police, military, and security forces from around the globe.

The Knight Prototype Fund is a six-month cycle that gives the winners the resources to develop their ideas. The process begins with a training seminar focused on human-centered design and then finishes with the grantees coming together to present their projects to one another.

Some of the Prototype Fund winners include FOIA Mapper, an attempt to make it simpler to file freedom of information requests and find public information. Another project, Legislation Tracker: Beyond the Bills, is aiming to create a tool that will allow users to bills as they progress through the New Jersey State Legislature.

Two North Carolina government bodies also won prototype grants. The city of Raleigh is building an open-source project to improve the search process on city websites. It explains that “a search for ‘budget’ on raleighnc.gov would yield intuitive, attractive graphs and charts.” The Charlotte Area Transit System will develop Charlotte ZipBus, a mobile platform that will improve how residents can track public transit in the city.

Here is a full list of the winners:

All the Places Personal Data Goes (Cambridge, Mass.)

Award: $440,000
Organization: Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University
Project lead: Latanya Sweeney
Twitter: @thedatamap, @latanyasweeney

People share details of their lives widely – whether they are buying an app or providing information to their doctor – often trusting companies and others with intimate facts. But where does that data end up? In many cases, once an organization acquires this information, it can legally share it with others without clear notice – whether the information be medical history, or a name and GPS location. This project aims to create a crowdsourced resource that documents how data is being shared by companies and organizations. Through a game-like portal, members of the public will become “data detectives,” earning points for locating and reporting evidence of data sharing arrangements. The result will be a detailed database of personal data sharing arrangements that can be visualized, and help the public spot potential risks, benefits and opportunities.

Citizens Police Data Project (Chicago)

Award: $400,000
Organization: The Experimental Station in partnership with The Invisible Institute
Project leads: Harry Backlund, Alison Flowers, Darryl Holliday, Chaclyn Hunt, Jamie Kalven, Rajiv Sinclair, and WuDi Wu
Twitter: @invinst

Two years ago, after a decade of litigation and advocacy, the Invisible Institute won a significant legal victory in Illinois requiring that all recorded allegations of police abuse be made public. The Citizens Police Data Project will create a toolkit to make it easier for the public to engage with this data through: an easier complaint filing process; quick lookups of complaint history per officer; and interactive analyses of allegations and investigations across geography and other meaningful dimensions of life in the city such as geography, race and gender demographics.

Data Equity for Main Street (California, Nevada, Washington)

Award: $470,000
Organization: California State Library, Nevada State Library, Archives and Public Records, and State of Washington Technology Solutions
Project leads: Anne Neville, Daphne DeLeon, and Will Saunders
Twitter: @anneneville, @wabroadband, @CAstatelibrary

Most libraries offer digital literacy training that helps community members find information online and better understand it. To further promote digital equity, this project seeks to ensure that libraries can help communities take advantage of the growing amount of open data. Data Equity for Main Street will use the skills and knowledge of library professionals and civic technologists in California, Nevada and Washington to create two types of open educational resources: a train-the-trainer approach that prepares librarians to help patrons find open data resources, and a second that provides class training materials and lesson plans so that libraries can teach patrons what open data is, and how to find, use it and give feedback on its quality and relevance.

Documents Empowerment Project (Chicago)

Award: $250,000
Organization: mRelief
Project leads: Rose Afriyie and Genevieve Nielsen
Twitter: @mrelief_form

For the millions of Americans living in poverty, accessing public benefits is inextricably linked to providing documentation that proves they qualify to receive this support. With help from a Knight Prototype Fund grant, mRelief built and piloted a platform in Chicago to make it easier for families to determine their eligibility for state programs in Illinois. It also allows program providers to create an eligibility template for their services. With new funding, mRelief will scale its tool to multiple cities. The tool will also expand its text messaging service, which allows people to check their benefit eligibility via text. It will expand to include a database of required documents for benefit programs, text messaging reminders for required resources for beneficiaries, and an SMS discovery platform to help people search for the documents they need.

Law, Order and Algorithms: Making Sense of 100 Million High Patrol Stops (Stanford, Calif.)

Award: $310,000
Organization: Stanford University
Project leads: Sam Corbett-Davies, Sharad Goel, Vignesh Ramachandran, Ravi Shroff, and Camelia Simoiu
Twitter: @Stanford, @5harad

Traffic stops are one of the primary ways in which the public interacts with law enforcement, yet there is little easily accessible information on this practice. The lack of data has made it difficult to rigorously investigate public concerns of racial profiling in such interactions. To help individuals, communities and journalists understand police practices, this project will collect, release and analyze more than 100 million highway patrol stops conducted over the last several years across the United States. It will produce one of the most comprehensive data sets of police interactions with the public. Project leaders will work with journalism organizations to analyze the data and publish stories based on their findings.

PublicBits: Breaking Down Open Data Silos (Oakland, Calif.)

Award: $420,000
Organization: U.S. Open Data
Project lead: Karissa McKelvey
Twitter: @opendata, @dat_project, @captainkmac

Finding open data on a topic can be time-consuming, requiring searches across many siloed websites. PublicBits seeks to solve that problem by building a search engine that will allow users to search for information across many data portals with a single query. In addition, a desktop application will connect to the search engine, keeping track of the data source automatically and notifying the user when the data is out of date.

Security Force Monitor (New York)

Award: $237,589
Organization: The Human Rights Institute at Columbia University
Project lead: Tony Wilson
Twitter: @SecForceMonitor

Around the world, publicly available data on the police, military and other security forces is unstructured and scattered across numerous sources. This makes it difficult for journalists, human rights researchers, advocates and others to hold security forces accountable and pinpoint the source of abuses. The lack of information also undermines anti-corruption efforts, budget transparency and other public interest work. The Security Force Monitor is addressing this problem by compiling unstructured data from government sources, the media and civil society groups. The monitor structures and assigns confidence scores to this data and uses it to create an online platform with: organizational charts of the police, military and other security forces; maps of their location and jurisdictions; profiles on commanders and units; and maps and records of documented human rights abuses committed by security forces as reported by civil society organizations, the United Nations and other sources. Currently in beta, the monitor includes several years of data for Egypt, Mexico and Nigeria, and will expand to include several additional countries in its first year. All countries covered by the monitor will be kept up to date.

Weighing the Wisdom of the Crowd (Washington, D.C.)

Award: $450,000
Organization: Orb Media
Project lead: Heather Krause and Neal Rothleder
Twitter: @OrbTweet, @njr7, @datassist

Information is a critical, powerful factor in public discourse and decision-making. Good, reliable information that collects public opinions (a.k.a. crowdsourced data) is expensive, and out of reach of many individuals and organizations. While social and online tools make it easier to create surveys to gauge public opinion, they don’t consider critical features needed to meaningfully analyze and draw valid conclusions (such as demographic and socioeconomic bias). Most people don’t have the knowledge or expertise to understand and correct for these factors when they generate a survey or questionnaire. This project will create software tools and online services to help survey-makers frame sampling questions, embed them into existing survey and Q&A platforms, statistically adjust the collected results and help visualize the answers – allowing everyone to poll the crowd and share reliable results.

Prototype Fund winners

SeaGlass: Bringing Transparency to Cellphone Surveillance by University of Washington (Project leads: Peter Ney, Ian Smith, Tadayoshi Kohno; @peter_ney1, @sesotek, @yoshi_kohno | Seattle): Helping communities maintain their privacy by building a community-driven, open data service to detect cellphone surveillance and produce high-quality cellular network data for research.

Charlotte ZipBus by Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) (Project lead: Robert Cerrato; @CATSRideTransit | Charlotte, N.C.): Using real-time data via a mobile platform to transform an existing call-based transit service into an enhanced service that allows customers to schedule transit to meet their personal needs.

FOIA Mapper (Project lead: Max Galka; @galka_max | New York): Making it easier for people to find public data and make Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by creating an open source “FOIA map,” including a catalog of government information systems, descriptions of the records they contain, and documentation of the language needed to request them.

Democratizing Data through Visual Search Results by city of Raleigh (Project lead: Adam Martin; @RaleighGov | Raleigh, N.C.): Making it easier to access and use public data through an open source project that will present data in a more visual and relevant manner through search results. For example, a search for “budget” on raleighnc.gov would yield intuitive, attractive graphs and charts.

Legislation Tracker: Beyond the Bills by NJ Spotlight (Project leads: Colleen O’Dea and Lee Keough; @njspotlight, @colleenodea, @leekeough | Trenton, N.J.): Bringing more accountability and transparency to state lawmaking by creating a tracking tool for all major bills passed in New Jersey that would provide information on whether the law was enforced and milestones were met.

Civic Infrastructure for Workers by Coworker.org (Project leads: Michelle Miller and Jess Kutch; @teamcoworker, @jesskutch, @michelleimiller | Washington, D.C.): Enabling workers to improve their jobs by creating tools that allow them to connect, as well as provide, share and acquire data about work issues and conditions.

Excellence In, Excellence Out – Data Quality Uplift for Government (Project lead: Stephanie Singer; @sfsinger | Portland, Ore.): Helping to improve the quality of government data by creating tools for quality assessment, a scorecard to motivate leaders to invest in data quality and a quality improvement protocol for governments.

Could Your Data Discriminate? by Data & Society Research Institute (Project leads: Sorelle Fridler; Wilneida Negron; @kdphd, @WilneidaNegron | New York): Helping people identify and fix hidden biases in their data and learn about data discrimination through a website that will allow people to test data for bias and experiment with public data to determine what may result in such bias.

Quantified Self Data Experience: Understanding Your Data and the World it Creates by University of Colorado, Boulder (Project lead: Michael Skirpan; @mwskirpan, @CUBoulder, @FastForwardLabs | Boulder, Colo.): Informing people about digital privacy, data sharing and the future of our data-driven society using performance, interactive art, digital education, data toolkits and public discussions.

Twenty-two different projects will receive a total of $3.2 million in funding from the Knight Foundation and partners like the Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Rita Allen Foundation. (Disclosure: Knight is also a funder of Nieman Lab, though not through the News Challenge.)

As Knight described it when they introduced the latest contest: “For this challenge, we want to discover ideas and projects that better inform and inspire voters, as well as make the election process more fun and accessible for individuals.”

Ten of the projects in this round of the News Challenge will receive between $200,000 and $525,000. The twelve remaining projects will receive $35,000 each as part of the Knight Prototype Fund, which provides seed investment to budding ideas in media, information, or technology.

“The winning projects offer the opportunity to advance journalism innovation, while helping to ensure voters have the information they need to make decisions at the polls and become more involved and engaged in the issues that affect their communities,” Jennifer Preston, Knight’s vice president for journalism, said in a news release.

There are plenty of media companies in the mix of projects, including The Des Moines Register, the Associated Press, WNYC, the Orlando Sentinel, and more. Several plan to use funding from Knight to help shape coverage of the 2016 elections or to move forward projects on improving voter turnout and participation.

While the AP wants to develop a better system for exit polling, the Register is focused on a project that would use “a series of public events and initiatives that use social media to draw millennial attention to issues and candidates.”

Sally Buzbee, Washington D.C. bureau chief for the AP, is overseeing the polling project. With more people voting early, exit polling has become less effective, she said over email. But people’s changing technology habits are also a factor:

Voters are getting harder to reach because more people choose to carry only a cell phone or decline to answer calls from pollsters. Innovation is required to ensure our work continues to be accurate and complete into the future. It’s worth noting that these rapid changes in Americans’ behavior are affecting all of polling: Pollsters have already turned to surveys conducted online as possible ways to bridge the gap, and we see online panels as a starting point for our experiments.

Others News Challenge winners are extensions of existing work being done by media companies.

Last year, journalists from the Los Angeles Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Stanford’s Computational Journalism Lab joined forces to create the California Civic Data Coalition. The early goal was to create apps that make it easier for journalists to make sense of data like campaign finance reports. The coalition is receiving $250,000 in the News Challenge to continuing building open source tools to make campaign data more accessible.

Last year, Ben Welsh, a database producer at the Times, told the Lab it made more sense for the organizations to combine resources to fight a shared problem rather than spend time competing:

“We want to compete on who can do the better deep dive, who can ask the smarter question, who can be more aggressive about getting the story. We don’t want to compete on who can unzip and link together 76 crappy database tables,” Welsh said then.

Today, Welsh said the Knight money will be used to “bring on a full-time developer who will team with participating newsrooms and Stanford students to lead the project through Election Day 2016,” as well as a series of code sprints.

Knight has already announced that the next round of the News Challenge will begin this fall and will focus on data.

Here’s the full list of winners for the Knight News Challenge on elections, including 12 projects receiving funding through the Prototype Fund.

2016 Political Ad Tracker

Award: $200,000
Organization: Internet Archive
Project leads: Roger Macdonald, Tracey Jaquith
Twitter: @internetarchive, @r_macdonald, @tracey_pooh,

Voters are exposed to large amounts of campaign advertising, especially in key swing states. Though these ads are designed to influence and sway votes, little information is provided about their background and accuracy. To hold candidates accountable and bring more transparency to the voting process, the Internet Archive, with the world’s largest open archive of TV news, will create a public library of TV news and political ads from key 2016 primary election regions. The library will be paired with nonpartisan fact-checking and other analysis from PolitiFact, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org, The Center for Public Integrity and others. Ads will be tracked along with facts about their accuracy, source, frequency and context. These widely distributed library resources will provide voters with trustworthy information and encourage greater participation in the political process.

Campaign Hound

Award: $150,000
Organization: Reese News Lab, University of North Carolina
Project leads: John Clark and Sara Peach
Twitter: @johnclark, @sarapeach

Few citizens have direct contact with their candidates and elected officials. As such, the media and other sources are what keep them informed about politicians both on the campaign trail and once they are in office. To give citizens more information and help journalists improve their political coverage, the Reese News Lab will create a searchable archive of campaign speech transcripts that provides users with customized keyword alerts. It will use crowdsourcing and computer natural language processing to gather recordings of speeches and generate transcripts, enabling subscribers to search for exact words spoken by politicians. Users can also monitor political speeches remotely, providing easy access. In addition, it will alert subscribers when custom keywords are spoken on the campaign trail. The archive will be piloted in North Carolina.

California Civic Data Coalition

Award: $250,000
Organization: California Civic Data Coalition, a partnership of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Stanford University, The Center for Investigative Reporting, and The Los Angeles Times
Project leads: Ben Welsh, Cheryl Phillips, Aaron Williams, Jennifer LaFleur
Twitter: @palewire, @cephillips, @aboutaaron, @j_la28

Campaign finance data in statehouses across America is hard to organize, access and understand. Making it easier to find and use this raw, machine-readable data can help to hold politicians accountable and enable deeper analysis of the influence of money in politics. The California Civic Data Coalition will engage data journalists from The Los Angeles Times, Stanford University, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Center for Investigative Reporting to lead an open-source effort to refine this raw data into an easy-to-use product. The work will serve as a model for other states and join an ongoing effort to consolidate money-in-politics data from statehouses across America.

Civic Engagement Toolkit for Local Election Officials

Award: $400,000
Organization: Center for Technology and Civic Life
Project leads: Whitney May, Tiana Epps-Johnson, Whitney Quesenbery
Twitter: @HelloCTCL, @tianaej, @whitneymaybe, @civicdesign, @whitneyq

Local governments produce information that is important to voters. However, there are few communications avenues for people to access this information and engage with their local governments to help shape policy and decision-making. To tackle this issue, the Center for Technology and Civic Life will develop a civic engagement toolkit, designed in concert with local election officials. The kit will include a set of tools for election offices such as an election website template, visual icons and illustrations, resource allocation calculators, and other tools. It will help local officials identify how to best use communication tools, and measure the reach and impact of the information they are sharing.

Informed Voting From Start to Finish

Award: $200,000
Organization: e.thePeople
Project leads: Seth Flaxman, Kathryn Peters, Whitney Quesenbery and Alex Quinn
Twitter: @etppl, @civicdesign, @whitneyq, @sethflaxman, @katyetc, @turbovote

Lack of information about the voting process, candidates and issues, especially in local elections, can limit voter participation and prevent people from making informed choices at the polls. Informed Voting From Start to Finish will combine the voter services and timely reminders of TurboVote with local guides from e.thePeople, to provide comprehensive voting support, including registration assistance, election reminders, poll locators, explanations of contests and ballot questions, and candidate information.

Inside the 990 Treasure Trove

Award: $525,000
Organization: The Center for Responsive Politics in partnership with GuideStar
Project leads: Robert Maguire
Twitter: @RobertMaguire_

The Center for Responsive Politics wants to help journalists and the public better understand who is funding campaigns and the sources of so-called “dark money,” the funds that certain nonprofits can spend to back candidates and issues without having to reveal where the donations are coming from. In fact, the amount of dark money in campaigns has grown exponentially — from $6 million in 2004 to $309 million in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The center has developed a system for tracking and processing information on these donations from difficult-to-access IRS 990 forms, and matching this information with Federal Elections Commission data. With new funding, the center will partner with GuideStar to retrieve greater volumes of this information more quickly and comprehensively, and create a database that any journalist can access.

Revive My Vote

Award: $230,000
Organization: Marshall-Wythe Law Foundation
Project leads: Mark Listes and Rebecca Green
Twitter: @ReviveMyVote

Virginians with felony convictions face real obstacles in restoring their right to vote. Those who have already applied to restore voting rights face a severe backlog of applications. In addition, reaching out to those who have not yet applied is very difficult since Virginia maintains no comprehensive contact list of eligible citizens. Revive My Vote seeks to address both obstacles. To reduce the backlog, the group will organize and train local law students to remotely process these applications, speeding the process. In addition, the project will create a digital platform where successful applicants will inspire prospective applicants with success stories and information about rights restoration will be disseminated.

Sharp Insight

Award: $250,000
Organization: Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program
Project lead: Duerward Beale
Twitter: @YOACAPphilly

While barbershops have long been trusted spaces in the African-American community, this project seeks to build on that stature by recruiting barbers as voting advocates. The Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program and its partners will recruit Philadelphia barbers, educate them on rights restoration and other voting issues, and ask them to help disseminate voting information. The program will provide barbers with incentives for getting their male customers to take surveys, read nonpartisan election information and continually discuss the importance of civic participation. The barbers who enroll will have their names listed on a radio partner’s website, with a special radio promotion going to the shop that disseminates the most information.

The Next Generation Beyond Exit Polls

Award: $250,000
Organization: The Associated Press
Project lead: Sally Buzbee, David Pace, Emily Swanson
Twitter: @AP, @AP_Politics, @SallyBuzbee, @EL_Swan, @dhpace

For years, the media, academics and the public have relied almost exclusively on exit polls to explain voter behavior and declare winners on national election nights. But with the growing number of early voters — and well-publicized recent errors in candidate estimates — many have questioned their accuracy. The Associated Press, in partnership with two national polling firms, is looking to develop less expensive methods to more accurately measure voter views. Two recent experiments have used online, probability-based panels to gauge voter sentiments in real time. The AP is looking to publicize the results, refine its methods and ultimately share new tools with other newsrooms.

Vote-by-Smartphone

Award: $325,000
Organization: Long Distance Voter
Project lead: Debra Cleaver
Twitter: @debracleaver, @absenteeballots

Long Distance Voter wants to increase voter turnout by making it possible to sign up for an absentee ballot using smartphones. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, more than 25 percent of all ballots were cast by mail in 2014. Three states, Oregon, Washington and Colorado, have transitioned to a standard vote-by-mail system, with all three experiencing higher turnout and lower election administration costs. Voters in other states currently need to print and mail their forms in order to submit absentee ballots, which is difficult for many in an increasingly digital age. Long Distance Voter will use DocuSign’s electronic signature technology to enable citizens to complete, sign and mail their absentee ballots directly from their smartphones.

Prototype Fund winners

Judge Your Judges by WNYC (Project leads: Kat Aaron, @kataaron, and John Keefe, @WNYC, @jkeefe; New York): Enabling people to make more knowledgeable decisions about judicial elections through a tool that will provide key information, insights and context about candidates, their views and the court system.

Lenses by NYC Media Lab (Project leads: Amy Chen, Justin Hendrix, Kareem Amin, R. Luke DuBois, and Mark Hansen, @nycmedialab; New York): Enabling journalists and other storytellers to transform and visualize data to build interactive election stories through an open-source, mobile-friendly tool.

OpenJudiciary.org by Free Law Project (Project leads: Michael Lissner, @mlissner, and Brian Carver, @brianwc; Berkeley, Calif.): Helping to make judicial elections more transparent by creating online profiles of judges that show campaign contributions, judicial opinions and biographies.

Prompt Data Query by Center for Responsive Politics (Project lead: Sarah Bryner, @aksarahb; Washington, D.C.): Bringing more transparency and accountability to elections, through an automated, interactive tool that will give users access to real-time campaign finance data.

Silent Targeting, Loud Democracy by University of Wisconsin (Project lead: Young Mie Kim, @DiMAP_UW; Madison, Wis.): Promoting transparency in elections by prototyping an investigative service that tracks political ads that use online microtargeting to reveal how political action committees, parties and candidates target individual voters based on their personal information.

Tabs on Tallahassee by the Orlando Sentinel (Project leads: Charles Minshew, @CharlesMinshew, and Andrew Gibson, @AndrewGibson27; Orlando, Fla.): Fostering government transparency by creating a searchable database of the voting records of Florida lawmakers for newsrooms across the state.

Up for Debate Ohio! by the Jefferson Center (Project lead: Kyle Bozentko, @JeffersonCtr; Akron, Ohio): Increasing political knowledge in Ohio through community deliberation, online engagement and the media to provide citizens the opportunity to discuss issues and campaigns thoughtfully and civilly.

Voter’s Edge by MapLight (Project lead: Michael Canning, @votersedge; Berkeley, Calif.): Providing in-depth voter information that is easily accessible, neutral and factual on one platform; the mobile-optimized guide provides voter information on federal, state and local elections, including endorsements, candidate biographies, ballot measure summaries, top funder lists, videos, news, and more.

Accessible Voting for Everyone by University of Florida (Project lead: Juan Gilbert, @DrJuanGilbert, @FloridaEngineer; Gainesville, Fla.): Making voting easy and accessible to all through an open source electronic voting system that allows citizens, including those with disabilities, to cast ballots by actions such as tapping a touchscreen or speaking into a microphone.

Erase the Line by D.C. Board of Elections (Project lead: Margarita Mikhaylova, @dcboee; Washington, D.C): Helping election officials improve the voting process by creating a digital platform that will document wait-time information at polling places across the nation.

Rhode Island Civic Fellowship by Rhode Island Secretary of State (Project lead: Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, @RISecState; Providence, R.I.): Encouraging more millennials to vote through a statewide civic fellowship program designed to inspire, recruit and train them to get involved in shaping voting and elections in their communities.

The Iowa Electorate by The Des Moines Register (Project lead: Amalie Nash, @AmalieNash; Des Moines, Iowa): Engaging young voters in the Iowa caucuses by sponsoring a series of public events and initiatives that use social media to draw millennial attention to issues and candidates.

It’s a fitting analogy for the Internet Archive, Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships for the archive tells me. They’ve spent almost 20 years building an expansive repository of web pages, books, TV, and software. And now, they want to turn the doors open and make it easier for everyone to get involved.

“In some ways, we’re opening up that vast warehouse and saying here are the tools to bring together really meaningful collections and expose them to the world,” said Hanamura.

The Internet Archive is one of 22 projects receiving funding from Knight Foundation through the Knight News Challenge, which is awarding $3 million towards projects the provide new tools and ideas for making libraries more accessible. The Internet Archive will get $600,000 to develop new technology to give users more control over how materials are uploaded, categorized, and curated in the archive. [Disclosure: Knight is a funder of Nieman Lab, though not through the News Challenge.]

For example, a collection of music from the Grateful Dead has rules for how content is added, with specific metadata on the date, venue, and file quality of sound recordings. Rossi said it needs to be easier for individual groups to manage those collections and rules on their own without help from archive staff.

By far the most difficult part of the archive to update is websites, Rossi told me. The archive relies on web crawlers to collect pages, but it becomes more difficult as sites incorporate more multimedia or applications that are difficult to capture automatically. That creates broken or incomplete pages, which take time to fix by hand, she said. Another growing obstacle: pages that are blocked by web crawlers, either by files that don’t want to be recorded or by sites like Facebook that have password protection or other privacy controls.

But the point of having users involved in growing the archives collections isn’t just to help the staff, but to rely on the legions of expertise that exists across the world. It ultimately makes for a richer, smarter collection, she said. “I don’t think we or anyone are in any position to tell anyone what is important now, or what will be important 100 years from now,” Rossi said.

Here are the rest of the winners in the Knight News Challenge on libraries, which includes 14 projects receiving awards through the Prototype Fund, which invests $35,000 to early stage media and information projects.

Activating the Public Library

Award: $152,000
Organization: Peer 2 Peer University
Project leads: Philipp Schmidt and Carl Ruppin
Twitter: @chipublib, @p2pu

Online courses can offer people free access to useful content and knowledge, as well as education opportunities. However, the lack of peer-support and face-to-face learning options are often a barrier to successful participation, especially for newcomers. To address this issue and increase access to information and education, Peer 2 Peer University, with Chicago Public Library, will organize in-person study groups for patrons to support their free online learning experience. The project will assist participants through the library’s familiar resources and leverage Peer 2 Peer University’s experience in building online communities; it will also include reinforcement and feedback from fellow learners. Study groups will be held in local branch libraries.

Culture in Transit

Award: $330,000
Organization: Metropolitan New York Library Council
Project lead: Anne Karle-Zenith
Twitter: @DigitizeNYC

Many communities are excluded from the nation’s digital cultural memory because they lack the equipment and technical support to contribute their history to local and national archives. To bridge that gap, two New York public library systems and a citywide libraries and archives membership organization will create a mobile kit, with scanners and cameras, that libraries will take to city branches, so that residents are able to record their historical items. Each item will not only be housed in local digital archives but in the Digital Public Library of America and other large-scale initiatives such as Internet Archive, providing worldwide access to local treasures. While these events provide educational and community-building opportunities, they also democratize the process of history-making — allowing people to contribute to and help define their local history. The partners include the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Queens Library, which designed the project together after meeting online via the newschallenge.org

The Internet Archive

Award: $600,000
Organization: Internet Archive
Project lead: Alexis Rossi and Brewster Kahle
Twitter: @internetarchive, @alexisrossi, @brewster_kahle

The Internet Archive is one of the world’s largest public digital libraries, with an extensive collection of human culture: 2 million books, 430 billion Web pages, 3 million hours of television and more. However, the archive’s users upload only a small percentage of these materials and to preserve the world’s knowledge the public should be encouraged to contribute. The archive is embarking on a project to make the archive.org site more community-driven by improving the tools that allow people to upload, describe and organize items. With these new tools, the Internet Archive hopes to democratize knowledge by giving global communities the ability to save, manage and share their cultural treasures for free. What Wikimedia did for encyclopedia articles, the Internet Archive hopes to do for collections of media: give people the tools to build library collections together and make them accessible to everyone.

The Library Freedom Project

Award: $244,700
Organization: Independent
Project lead: Alison Macrina
Twitter: @flexlibris

Private companies and the government increasingly control a large part of online communications, and as a result, society is facing a new set of challenges around privacy, surveillance, censorship and free speech. As stewards of information and providers of Internet access, librarians are in a prime position to educate patrons about their digital rights. The Library Freedom Project aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries by bringing together a coalition of librarians, technology experts and lawyers to scale a series of privacy workshops for librarians. The workshops will provide librarians and their patrons with tools and information to better understand technology, privacy and law related to use of the Internet.

Digital Library for the Developing World

Award: $265,000
Organization: Library for All: Digital Library for the Developing World
Project leads: Rebecca MacDonald, Tanyella Evans and Isabel Sheinman
Twitter: @libraryforall

Many developing countries continue to struggle with limited access to information and educational resources, leading to challenges with literacy, civic participation, knowledge building and progress. To address this issue, Library for All will expand its Digital Library, uniquely designed to work in low-bandwidth environments, making educational content available for libraries and schools across the developing world. The platform will leverage mobile technology and be accessible on all devices, including low-cost tablets and $30 feature phones. Content will be culturally relevant and available in local languages.

Measure the Future

Award: $130,000
Organization: Evenly Distributed
Project lead: Jason Griffey
Twitter: @measure_future, @griffey

While libraries in recent years have created makerspaces to provide access to open technology, this project will help libraries use open hardware devices to improve their own services. Librarian Jason Griffey, a former Knight Foundation Prototype Fund grantee, will train librarians to use open source hardware to better understand the library building itself, one of a branch’s most important assets. The hardware will measure a variety of factors in each room, so that libraries can make better, data-driven decisions on how to use their public spaces.

Open Data to Open Knowledge

Award: $475,000
Organization: City of Boston
Project lead: Jascha Franklin-Hodge
Twitter: @DoITBoston

Boston, like many cities, has published a collection of “open data” that includes everything from building permits to a list of urban farms. The data tells a story about government and city life. Public interest in the data is clear — with more than 14,000 views so far of neighborhood pothole data alone. But as with many forms of knowledge, making something available isn’t the same as making it useful. Through this project the city of Boston will work with local libraries to create a digital data catalog that will make it easier for residents, researchers and public employees to navigate. Once developed, the city and libraries will work together to introduce people to the resource, through, for example, introductory classes or data challenges where people are encouraged to analyze and visualize the data.

Space/Time Directory

Award: $380,000
Organization: New York Public Library
Project lead: Matthew Knutzen, David Riordan, Ben Vershbow
Twitter: @NYPLMaps @nypl_labs

What if we could search a city’s past as easily as we search its present? What if we could explore forgotten neighborhoods, look up long-ago vanished buildings and streets, and discover the history around us? Libraries hold the records of evolving urban landscapes, but historic data that charts these changes is not easily accessible. To increase access and public exploration of this data, the New York Public Library will create a free, historical mapping service: the NYC Space/Time Directory. Using data from the library’s map collections and other sources, the directory will be a searchable, digital atlas and database of historical places, allowing scholars, students, journalists and enthusiasts to explore the city across time periods. It will be open source and community-built, engaging local museums, historical societies, universities, citizen cartographers and the New York tech community to help gather data, and to contribute code and expertise.

Prototype Fund winners

Anti-censorship Alert System by Center for Rights (Boston; project lead: Tiffiny Cheng, @fightfortheftr) allowing the public to see a blocked website by launching a series of tools, including an index and shareable website widgets, that enable the distribution and decentralization needed to provide local access to proxies and mirrored versions of the sites.

BklynShare by Brooklyn Public Library (New York; project lead: Michael Fieni; Twitter: @bklynlibrary): Enabling people to learn new skills through a service that connects knowledge seekers with experts in their own neighborhood

Book a Nook by Harvard University metaLAB (Boston; project lead: Jeffrey Schnapp; Twitter: @metalabharvard, @berkmancenter, @jaytiesse): Activating library public spaces for diverse community uses by testing a software toolkit that streamlines the exploration and reservation of physical library spaces.

The Community Resource Lab by District of Columbia Public Library (Washington, D.C.; project lead: Meaghan O’Connor; Twitter: @dcpl): Advancing the library as the primary anchor of an open information system that connects residents to essential health, human and social services.

Co-working at the Library by Miami Dade Public Library (Miami; project lead: Liz Pearson; Twitter: @MDPLS): Providing freelancers, entrepreneurs and innovators a collaborative space for co-working in Miami-Dade libraries.

Indie Games Licensing by Concordia University’s TAG Research Center (Montreal, project lead: Olivier Charbonneau; Twitter: @culturelibre): Prototyping models for the licensing and circulation of independent video games at libraries.

GITenberg by Project GITenberg (Montclair, N.J., and Somerville, Mass.; project leads: Eric Hellman and Seth Woodworth; Twitter: @GITenberg): Exploring collaborative cataloging for Project Gutenberg public-domain ebooks using the Web-based repository hosting service GitHub.

Journalism Digital News Archive by University of Missouri Libraries and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (Columbia, Mo.; project lead: Edward McCain; Twitter: @e_mccain): Ensuring access to digital news content through development of a model for archiving and preserving digital content that can be used across the country.

Maker Tool Circulating Kits by Make it @ Your Library (Chicago; project leads: Katy Hite, Amy Killebrew, Elizabeth Ludemann, Allison Parker, Vicki Rakowski; Twitter: @MakeItLib): Sharing the tools and technology of the maker movement by prototyping an equipment lending system – a process for sharing maker kits between libraries – that builds on existing interlibrary loan frameworks.

Making the Invisible Visible by Bibliocommons (Boston; project lead: Iain Lowe Twitter: @bibliocommons, @ilowelife): Prototyping an app to give patrons a deeper library experience based on the user’s location, interests and actions in the library.

Privacy Literacy by San Jose Public Library (San Jose, Calif.; project leads: Erin Berman and Jon Worona; Twitter: @SanJoseLibrary): Developing online tools which will help individuals understand privacy in the digital age and make more informed decisions about their online activity.

Regional Business Information Bureau by Kent State University Library (Kent, Ohio; project lead: Karen MacDonald; Twitter: @KentState_LIB): Experimenting with models for a Business Information Bootcamp, connecting local entrepreneurs and small businesses to information and services that will support their growth and contributions to the local economy.

This Place Matters by Marshall University (Huntington, W.Va.; project lead: Monica Brooks; Twitter: @MUPlaceMatters): Exploring the potential of a location-aware mobile application to share African American history and link to library resources.

White Space 101 (San Francisco; project lead: Don Means; Twitter: @donmeans):
Creating learning materials for libraries to explore and implement TV White Space networks to support remote library Internet hotspots that will give people wider broadband access, especially in crisis situations.

Your Next Skill by Seattle Public Library (Seattle; project lead: Jennifer Yeung; Twitter: @splbuzz): Helping people acquire new skills or expand their knowledge by creating a librarian-led, referral service that connects users with materials, classes and instructors that will help them meet their goals.

Preston was a political reporter, editor, and manager at The New York Times, but she might be best known as the paper’s first social media editor, a role she began in 2009 to help get the Times up to speed in how it used Twitter and Facebook in all facets of its reporting. It was unfamiliar territory, but the goals for using emerging social platforms were relatively straightforward: “The reason why it worked was I focused on why and how social media was relevant to the journalism — how it was relevant to reporting,” she said.

Now after almost 20 years at the Times, Preston is moving on to a different challenge as the new vice president for journalism at the Knight Foundation. Preston will lead a team tasked with finding ways to encourage newsrooms to experiment with new tools and new forms for storytelling. (Full disclosure: Knight Foundation is a funder of Nieman Lab.)

I spoke to Preston about what she learned during her years at the Times, what reporters can do to help foster a sense of experimentation, and her thoughts on the impact of the Times innovation report. Here’s a condensed version of our interview.

The report of course didn’t focus on all of the challenges we face, but it spelled them out clearly, and it has created a real path for success at The New York Times. I’m really excited about the direction that we’re going in now at the Times.

There wasn’t anything new in there to anyone who had been in the sandbox trying to get things done. But what was fantastic about it is that it was said out loud. And that the response to that innovation report was to do something about it. So that to me was the power of the innovation report.

Now, I gotta tell you, I think Arthur Gregg Sulzberger is fantastic. And I think the whole generation of young, digital leaders in The New York Times newsroom — I just think they’re fantastic.

And one of the reasons why I was excited about this new role is, in many ways, I think that I can do more to help young digital journalists and young digital media leaders in this new role than if I had stayed at the Times.

That makes this post by Knight’s Andrew Sherry useful — it outlines the various routes to funding currently available. The three most important to journalism types (emphasis mine):

If you have a news or information idea you want to develop and test, the Knight Prototype Fund may be for you. This Media Innovation initiative provides $35,000 to turn ideas into prototypes. There are several cohorts of winners each year; the most recent winners can be seen here. The next application deadline is Nov. 1…

The Knight News Challenge, which will next open for applications in early 2015, is Knight’s best known way of funding media innovation. Challenges usually have a theme — libraries, strengthening the Internet, Open Gov, networks — and the number in a year may vary. Increasingly, though, we’re emphasizing the Prototype Fund as the gateway for news and information projects…

Separate from Knight’s grantmaking, the Knight Enterprise Fund provides early-stage venture funding for media innovation. The fund invests in for-profit companies that can strengthen the news and information ecosystem. Along with investment, the fund brings Knight’s media industry network and knowledge to the table. The fund is drawn from Knight’s endowment, not its grantmaking budget.

In other words, if you’re a typical Nieman Lab reader, unless you’re a for-profit of the sort that looks for substantial venture capital, the Prototype Fund process is probably the best way to seek funding from Knight. The positive side of that is that the turnaround time is much shorter than the News Challenge used to offer, and the number of projects funded is higher; the downside is that the dollar figures are smaller than the News Challenge used to offer. But a successful Prototype Fund grantee could certainly move up to bigger funding down the road.

That’s the question the Knight Foundation has been asking about perhaps the most prominent program supporting media innovation, the Knight News Challenge. Since 2007, the competition has attracted thousands of people with ideas for an innovation project, and Knight has funded more than a hundred of them. Some have grown into successful, widely used tools; others have disappeared with barely a trace.

Knight is out with a new report today that looks at the successes and failures of two cycles of the News Challenge, and what lessons might be passed on from them to other inventors and entrepreneurs. (Along with a visual summary, the full report is available as a PDF.)

On its face, the document reads like a lesson plan for journalism innovation, especially if you’re interested in developing a project you have to have Knight fund some day in the future. (Now would be a good time for a disclosure: Knight is a financial supporter of Nieman Lab, though not through the News Challenge.) Knight, working with Arabella Advisors, surveyed News Challenge winners from 2010 and 2011, looking at their original applications, metrics around their projects, and other materials to see what behaviors and characteristics correlated with success.

This is the second time Knight has put together a report card on the News Challenge; the first focused on the 2009 round of winners. The findings will likely be used in helping to shape the program’s future: Knight CEO Alberto Ibargüen has said the foundation is looking for new ways to support innovation in media and on the web.

Over the time period being studied, the News Challenge featured 28 projects like FrontlineSMS, iWitness, and Zeega, among others. The document’s worth a read to get an update on how those projects are faring today — some continue on, others have spun into something new, and others have closed their doors. Knight offers eight lessons for future innovation in the report; here are a few of the highlights.

Understand your staffing needs early

Many News Challenge projects are developed by people who already have a full-time job elsewhere, which means figuring out the best ways to devote time and energy to an idea can be tricky. Having a core staff from the outset is important for putting a project on the right footing, but so is identifying what things can be done by part-timers or volunteers, the report says. You can’t just assume that your idea will find the right community of users and take off on its own:

Many projects plan at the outset to rely upon a dedicated user community to refine and promote an innovation, and upon vocal evangelists to drive wider adoption of their tools. In many cases, user communities and evangelists can become indispensable (and inexpensive) cornerstones of a project, especially when a project is dependent upon open source development. But without a core group of paid staff with the skills, the time, and the incentive to devote themselves full time to a project, development of a tool can suffer.

The pros and cons of going open source

One of the original requirements of the News Challenge was that all projects open up any code or other resources they develop. The idea being that the money invested in Knight would help not just the grantees, but potentially a wider community of developers. As the report notes, in the case of DocumentCloud, that success came through the creation of the hugely successful JavaScript library Backbone.js, now used on countless non-journalism projects across the web.

But News Challenge winners reported that the open source requirement could also slow down their efforts, especially for groups working on existing software or tools that receive funding. The report suggests that more flexibility be offered in the what projects are made open source in the future.

In some cases, the News Challenge winners themselves benefit from using and sharing open source code. In other cases, it is the wider community of developers that benefits most. It is entirely conceivable that the winner might bear the cost of developing open source code, without receiving an equivalent or offsetting benefit, which might accrue to someone else entirely.

Getting into newsrooms will be a challenge

A common desire among News Challenge projects is to build tools to help journalists in newsrooms. Some, like Zeega, wanted to build a platform that simplifies multimedia projects for local news outlets. Others, like ScraperWiki, wanted to make it easier for journalists to pull and store data from websites. But both projects were met with some resistance, as newsrooms were unwilling to pay for the service they created.

Fundamentally, unless an innovation addresses a pressing need, journalists and news organizations will not adopt it. In fact, innovators need to anticipate resistance, and create development and marketing plans that address it. Innovators may need to diversify their user bases beyond journalists and news organizations to promote wider adoption and project sustainability.

Aim for a broader audience than you might anticipate

So convincing journalists to try something new is hard — that’s why it’s important look at what other users might have a need for what you are building. CityTracking had anticipated an audience of journalists for its public data display tools, but later focused on specifically serving developers. Game-o-matic, which lets reporters build games based off the news, shifted gears to reach users outside of newsrooms.

Pushback can come from multiple directions

Newsrooms with tight budgets and established ways of working aren’t the only source of resistance. In many cases, News Challenge projects found themselves bumping up against established institutions, and some institutions don’t like to be disrupted.

For the OpenCourt project, which wanted to provide live streaming of court cases in Massachusetts, that resistance came in the form of lawsuits from the judiciary.

Get the user interface right early

A lesson from the world of apps and game builders, applied to journalism entrepreneurs:

User interface can play a major role in determining whether a media innovation is actually adopted by its audience — an interface that’s fun to use or saves the user’s time can make the difference between a tool that’s used and one that gathers dust. Among the innovations developed by News Challenge winners, the most effective interfaces frequently have been those that appear simple or straightforward.

Everyone needs a little support sometimes

One thing Knight has heard from News Challenge winners in the past was repeated in this report: They need more support, beyond funding. Because Knight has such a large network that touches into media, technology, government, and more, grantees said they want to be able to tap the expertise of others when it comes to developing their business plans and other strategies. In particular, the 2011 and 2010 winners said further connecting with other winners of the News Challenge would also prove helpful to learn from their experience.

Success goes beyond the impact of a single project

The best barometer of success isn’t the outcome of individual projects but the effects projects may have on their sectors or industries. Funders should focus on building the capacity of innovators as leaders in their fields or strengthening their network of supporters and collaborators for long-term impact — regardless of the sustainability of particular projects.

The OpenIDEO platform Knight switched to a few cycles back enables a lot of public input into and evaluation of News Challenge applicants. You can see both the semifinalists and other entries that didn’t make the cut online.

After looking through all the entries, here are a few that stuck out to us. These aren’t our predictions for who’ll win, and they aren’t even necessarily the ones we like best — consider this less an exercise in Vegas oddsmaking than an attempt to highlight some of the interesting ideas in the pool with ties to journalism. (No offense — and good luck! — to those we didn’t pick.)

Checkdesk

Checkdesk is a Middle East-focused application that provides news organizations a one-stop platform to verify user-generated content using a variety of methods. “What we propose is not a silver bullet for verifying digital media, but a more structured, easy-to-use and expandable toolkit that makes it easier for you, the journalist, to use the best techniques already out there,” wrote Tom Trewinnard, the research and communications manager of Meedan, the nonprofit behind Checkdesk. Six news organizations across five Middle East countries are already using Checkdesk, and Meedan hopes to use Knight funding to expand access to the platform and make it available on mobile.

MapWhatever

Fed up with the limits of Google Maps, the excessive costs of commercial GIS software, and the difficulty of learning open source mapping applications, James Baughn decided to build his own program that takes advantage of public information and allows users to easily create high quality maps. Baughn, who oversees the websites of The Southeast Missourian and other affiliated sites, wrote in his application that his goals are to create an effective script for downloading and processing data from maps, create a consumer-facing website, and open source the system so others can customize it.

Though he imagines MapWhatever could be used for a variety of purposes, there is no doubt that it could be used in newsrooms as well, Baughn wrote in his application. “Newspapers wanting to produce map-based infographics (for print or online) could generate a vector base map, import it into Adobe Illustrator or similar applications, and then fine-tune as necessary,” he wrote.

NewsA11y

Many news websites are not accessible to users with disabilities, argues Emily Stewart, who created NewsA11y as a means to connect members of the disabled community and news organizations to overcome these barriers. In her Knight application, Stewart wrote that NewsA11y has three goals: to allow users to point out barriers on news sites, to provide a space where individuals can collaborate on ways to overcome those barriers, and to act as a network where news organizations can look to hire coders or testers to help develop sites on case-by-case basis that better serve users with disabilities.

Stewart built a prototype of NewsA11y as part of her graduate school work at the University of Missouri, and she said she would use the funding from Knight to “transition NewsA11y from a working prototype to a real product. I would have the resources to build a robust application with a passionate user base that connects two groups of people. NewsA11y would motivate news sites to become more accessible and provide a place for rapid testing.”

Overview

Sorting through a large set of documents can often be a nightmare for journalists, but Overview believes it can make that process easier. The platform has been under development since it won a 2011 Knight News Challenge grant — project lead Jonathan Stray is a Nieman Lab contributor — and Overview is already being used in newsrooms as a way to organize and navigate reams of documents being used for investigations. Now, Overview wants to continue to develop the product and build it out into free and paid tiers. (Overview also offers consulting services.)

Still, Overview has recognized that the journalism field won’t be big enough to support the program, so it’s hoping to expand its user base beyond traditional reporters. “It will take sustained effort to reach a critical mass of paying users,” Stray wrote in its application. “Although we have increasing visibility within journalism, journalism alone is unlikely to provide enough revenue to support our organization. We need to broaden our user base into the non-profit sector generally, which means we need to learn what these new users need, build it for them, support their use, and market our product.”

SecureDrop

First developed by the late Aaron Swartz, SecureDrop is an open-sourced application that allows whistleblowers to securely submit content to news organizations. The product is already in use in several newsrooms, including ProPublica and The New Yorker, and the team behind SecureDrop hopes to use Knight funding to improve the tool’s encryption to make it safer for sources to share information.

SecureDrop hopes to redesign the platform to simplify the API to allow newsrooms to simplify how information is submitted and allow for different utilities depending on the level of confidentiality needed for a particular source or type of information. It also plans to implement end-to-end encryption and other security measures.

“While the current version of SecureDrop leverages US legal protections to provide unprecedented protection for sources and journalists, the current version still potentially leaves international journalists at risk if governments are willing to raid newsrooms and seize servers, or hack into the servers themselves in an attempt to find sources,” wrote Trevor Timm, executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, the group that manages SecureDrop.

Today Knight is launching the latest installment of its Knight News Challenge, and this round will focus on a subject on many minds these days: how best to support a free and open Internet. Specifically, Knight is asking people how they would answer this question: “How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?” Those who come up with a good answer — or at least an idea that can pass muster with Knight’s experts and advisers — will get a share of $2.75 million.

Knight has funded the contest for media innovation since 2007 and awarded more than $37 million over that span. This time around, Knight is partnering with Ford Foundation and Mozilla to administer the News Challenge. The contest is open to anyone, with a simple application form on newschallenge.org, with a deadline of March 18. Winners of the News Challenge will be announced at the annual MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference this June.

With the FCC attempting to rewrite its open Internet rules after having them struck down by a federal appeals judge, and the pending merger of cable companies Comcast and Time Warner (not to mention Netflix brokering a deal for better service on Comcast broadband network), there has been growing concern about the future of the Internet from consumer advocates and other technology watchers. (Not to mention those three letters N, S, and A and attendant concerns about surveillance and privacy.)

“We see the Internet as a really important resource for expression, for learning, for journalism, for connecting to one another as neighbors in the community — we want to make that stronger,” said John Bracken, Knight’s director of journalism and media innovation.

With the events of the past few weeks, the News Challenge might seem particularly timely, but Bracken said protecting the free flow of information has been among Knight’s main concerns for years. He pointed to the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, a collaboration with the Aspen Institute that aimed to “maximize the availability and flow of credible local information” and “enhance access and capacity to use the new tools of knowledge and exchange.”

Bracken said recent events will only add more urgency to the News Challenge. “Clearly it’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds,” he said. “It’ll be exciting to see what it yields in terms of ideas and broadening our idea of the topic.”

In the most recent round of the News Challenge, which focused on health, applicants were asked to answer the question “How can we harness data and information for the health of communities?” The latest round offers a similarly open-ended question on the subject of the Internet. Bracken said that was done be design to try to spur as many new ideas as possible. (Knight is again using IDEO’s OI Engine to channel ideas through the contest.)

Making the ask appealing is one part of the equation; another is taking an active approach to finding people to apply. One of the reasons Knight partnered with Mozilla and Ford is to tie into their networks. In the Venn diagram the three organizations share, Internet openness and democratic access to information slots nicely into the middle. Knight and Mozilla already collaborate on the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.

“We want to expand the network of people we’re reaching. You look at the Internet and open web and building useful tools, and Mozilla and their community come to mind,” Bracken said.

Bringing partners into the News Challenge is only the latest tweak Knight has made to the competition in the last several years as it re-evaluates the way it funds innovation in journalism. Since 2012, the News Challenge has been broken up from one annual call into smaller, shorter, themed contests. But the long-term future of the News Challenge remains under examination. (As Knight president and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said at the MIT-Knight Civic Media conference last year: “It may be finished. It may be that, as a device for doing something, it may be that we’ve gone as far as we can take it.”)

Bracken said they’re still re-tooling the competition, as well as expanding the funding opportunities for new projects through other programs like the Knight Prototype Fund. “We want to constantly extend the network of people we work with, and one way to do that is collaborating on a new News Challenge,” Bracken said.

Full disclosure: The Knight Foundation is a funder of Nieman Lab, though not through the News Challenge.

Image by Roo Reynolds used under a Creative Commons license.

Knight just announced it’s launching a new $1 million fund to support innovation in nonprofit and public media organizations. The new INNovation Fund is a collaboration between Knight and the Investigative News Network, designed to grant small amounts of money to help media organizations try out new ideas in business, technology, or operations.

The $1 million will go towards around 30 projects over the next two years, with most organizations winning grants of $25,000 to $35,000. The grants are open to any online news nonprofit or public media organization in the United States. (The application period begins February 1.) INN will oversee the program, and the INN board will choose the winners.

Investing in journalism innovation is not new for Knight, which has helped countless media organizations and websites (disclosure! including this one). But with this newest investment, Knight wants to help nonprofits secure a measure of long-term security. Specifically, the grants are to help established organizations diversify their revenue streams, develop new technology, and find new ways to reach out to audiences. Marie Gilot, a media innovation associate with Knight, said applications will need to have a proper understanding of the site’s audience, a plan of action, and methods for measuring success.

What is Knight not looking to fund? “This is not about funding content. This is about funding sustainability,” said Gilot.

That’s about as clear a message as Knight can send about its current outlook on funding journalism. Knight has been steadily refining its mechanisms for funding journalism — consider the recent iterations of the Knight News Challenge and the rise of the Knight Prototype Fund. The INNovation Fund is part of a broader Knight Local Media Initiative, which has $5 million earmarked for cementing sustainability in the local news sector.

The $1 million in grants comes out of that $5 million pot. As part of the initiative, Knight will be investing another $3.5 million to 25 local news outlets who have “demonstrated potential for growth, operating for at least three years.” Officials at Knight said the names of those organizations have not yet been released.

Last fall, Knight released a report card on nonprofit news and found a number local, state, and topic-based nonprofit news outlets who continue to grow and thrive. But the report found it was an uncertain growth — while more news sites are decreasing their reliance on foundation funding, many outlets lack the business-side talent or technical know-how to continue their ascent.

Michael Maness, Knight’s vice president for journalism and media innovation, said the INNovation fund is a response to the needs outlined by many nonprofits in last November’s report. “This is still such a nascent space, but we’re starting to see areas that are really important,” Maness said.

For most nonprofit news organizations, the problem isn’t the journalism — it’s the business, a fact which stems from the fact that many of them were created by journalists unexperienced on the dollars side of the business. Journalists built sites like Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, and the New Haven Independent because of a perceived lack in coverage from other news sources, Maness said. What the nonprofit report showed is that one of the keys to survival in the nonprofit news universe is expanding the types of revenue you pull in, from memberships to events and sponsorships, he said.

The small-scale grants may not seem like a lot of money, especially when Knight has awarded six- and seven-figure sums to innovation projects in the past. But the point of the grants is for nonprofit news companies to take a shot at an idea they might not otherwise have the money or resources to pull off at the moment. “One of the ideas is to say, ‘Hey, I want to try this, we don’t have the financial bandwidth to experiment, but we know everyone needs to be experimenting all the time,'” Maness said.

But Knight is realizing that not all nonprofit news outlets are created equal. The report last fall was the second from Knight to analyze the state-of-play in nonprofit news. As Knight has tried to become more effective in how it funds innovation, that could mean some nonprofits will fall by the wayside. “It’s like anything else: You’ll see some now that might not keep going. It’s part of the era that we’re in,” Maness said. “But we’ve got to make sure it’s not from a lack of adequate resources.”

The question of resources is one reason Knight is working with INN. As part of the Knight Local Media Initiative, INN will receive $500,000. The organization currently helps nonprofits through providing technical assistance, legal consultations, and business training. Maness said nonprofit news executives who went through business training have reported revenue increases.

There’s no single right answer for nonprofit news outlets looking to find success, Maness said. The hope is that through trial and error and other experiments each newsroom will find what works and share those findings with others. “What we really want is to facilitate their ability to do this work and celebrate what they’re doing through innovation work,” Maness said.

There were a ton of angles to explore and opinions to hear out on the ruling, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram collected many of them in a very thorough roundup. Several good posts explained the basics of the issue: The New York Times has a good primer on net neutrality and the FCC’s role, and The Wall Street Journal explained some of the key passages of the decision. A team of web freedom experts also answered other questions on what just happened and what happens next at Reddit.

The ruling struck down the conflicted legal framework under which the FCC attempted to regulate Internet providers — essentially, the Bush-era FCC classified ISPs as more loosely regulated “information services,” rather than the more strictly regulated phone companies, while the Obama-era FCC tried to apply the same regulation powers to those information services as the telecom companies get. The court said the FCC can’t do that, so this ruling put the ball back in the FCC’s court: They can appeal to the Supreme Court, try to reclassify ISPs as telecom services, or give up on net neutrality and try some other workarounds to enforce open access.

Nilay Patel of The Verge detailed how the FCC ended up in this spot. The Washington Post’s Brian Fung explained how reclassification might work, and The Wrap’s Ira Teinowitz noted that Congressional Republicans have already warned against that path, while consumer groups have endorsed it. Former Wired reporter Ryan Singel also offered a useful account of how the FCC got here, and said the FCC won’t pick a reclassification fight with Republicans and the ISP industry. Instead, he said, the best hope for an open web is building open-access municipal fiber networks.

With or without a protracted reclassification fight, we’re going to see preferential-access deals between ISPs and online companies soon, though the providers insisted the ruling won’t ultimately hurt customers. That’s doubtful, of course, but the bigger damage may be on the producers’ side, where the ruling allows Internet giants to pay more for better user access, crowding out startups and innovation. John Herrman of BuzzFeed has the best explanation of how the threat of a non-neutral web has evolved, noting that, on the surface, the changes might appear positive for customers, as Internet companies pay ISPs to subsidize your data use.

Others, including Tim Wu at The New Yorker, Dan Gillmor at The Guardian, John Judis at The New Republic, and Cale Guthrie Weissman at PandoDaily, made a similar argument about how the ruling will privilege tech monopolies. “The promise, and for several decades the reality, of the internet was decentralization: a network of networks where innovation would take place largely at the edges, not in the center,” wrote Gillmor. “We are on the verge of losing the internet that held such promise, at least for the near and medium term.” Venture capitalist Fred Wilson illustrated how frustrating the scenario would be for entrepreneurs, and Forbes’ Tom Watson expressed concern for the future of nonprofits and social entrepreneurship. Free Press’ Josh Stearns made the case that the end of net neutrality would be a blow to online journalism as well.

Google’s big buy, and Facebook’s small one: Two web giants made noteworthy purchases this week: The much larger purchase was Google’s acquisition of Nest, a company that makes smart thermostats and smoke alarms, for $3.2 billion. Though the price appeared to be something of an overpay, Gizmodo’s Brian Barrett and The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy have the best explanations of what Nest brings to Google: Nest gives Google a real entrée into people’s homes, something that, as Barrett noted, Google has struggled with in the past. It also ties into Google’s move into smart devices, something it’s invested a lot in with its work on self-driving cars. “In whatever form, understanding the connected device, and how people work with it, is a big part of understanding overall behavior, and that is Google’s driving ambition,” Hardy wrote.

On Nest’s end, Hardy pointed out that the company is run by Apple veterans who were already considerably wealthy, so the acquisition isn’t necessarily just about cashing out. Nest’s CEO, Tony Fadell, told Recode and The Verge that his company needed infrastructure more than anything to grow, and Google provides plenty of that.

Of course, Google’s move into smart devices built around daily behavior within the home has people understandably nervous about privacy. Gigaom’s Stacey Higginbotham and Salon’s Andrew Leonard both articulated those worries, and while Nest said its customer data will only be used for Nest products, John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed out that its policy can change, wondering, “Does anyone seriously think Google doesn’t want the information Nest’s devices provide?”

The second purchase was smaller, but had more potential implications for social news: Facebook bought Branch and its sister service Potluck, both of which center on structured conversations around news links, for $15 million. Mathew Ingram of Gigaom said Branch could help Facebook figure out how to create spaces for smart discussions, an issue with which Facebook continues to have difficulty, though The Daily Dot’s Kate Knibbs was more skeptical about the usefulness of Branch and the wisdom of the purchase.

The Lab’s Joshua Benton suggested that this purchase has the distinct smell of an “acquihire,” an acquisition done more for a startup’s employees than for its product. SiliconBeat’s Brandon Bailey also reported that the acquisition was indeed an acquihire, and that Facebook is not actually getting the rights to Branch’s technology. (What this means for the product itself is unclear.) Bailey and others noted that Branch’s Josh Miller has been a critic of Facebook in the past, and PandoDaily’s Michael Carney questioned the fit, given Branch’s roots in Obvious, an incubator co-founded by Twitter’s founders.

Social media and the power to tell personal stories: Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and his wife, Emma, triggered a debate about publicness, publishing authority, and social media (along with a whole lot of criticism) when they both wrote columns about Lisa Bonchek Adams, who has been blogging and tweeting about her increasingly painful experience with breast cancer for several years. Emma Keller’s column in The Guardian, published last week, wondered if Adams was sharing too much, asking her tweets were “a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies.” Bill Keller’s column in the Times this week was a bit less severe but questioned whether Adams’ documentation was glorifying a method of dealing with cancer that isn’t for every patient.

Shortly after Bill’s column ran, The Guardian deleted Emma’s column, explaining its rationale a couple of days later. The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, issued a mild rebuke of Bill’s column, saying it struck a wrong note on tone and sensitivity and appeared to some as a double-barreled attack with his wife on Adams.

The rebuke from others was much stronger. BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, who herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011, catalogued Bill Keller’s faults in both tone and fact on Twitter. Likewise, Gawker’s Adam Weinstein, Wired’s Maryn McKenna, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram all issued scathing critiques of the Keller’s condescension.

There were several smart pieces that attempt to pinpoint exactly what the Kellers weren’t understanding about social media and self-disclosure, including one by sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, who wrote that the Kellers got Adams’ case so wrong because they merely perused her postings: “Social media is not a snapshot that can be understood in one moment, or through back-scrolling. It’s a lively conversation, a community, an interaction with implicit and explicit conversations and channels of signaling, communication and impression.” The Atlantic’s Megan Garber said the Kellers misidentified one Twitter user’s style of writing as some sort of “this is the way we treat death now” trend, when Twitter is anything but a monolith.

The Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins said the Kellers ultimately objected to someone else without their professional or cultural cachet being able to tell their story, and NPR’s Linda Holmes made a similar point, arguing that traditional media assumes some sort of presumption of importance is necessary to public writing on personal subjects, while that presumption isn’t present in the social media environment in which Adams writes. Adams’ writing on Twitter is “not meant to announce its own heft as appearing on an op-ed page does,” Holmes wrote. “She didn’t ask for endorsement, she didn’t ask for sign-off, she didn’t ask for agreement. She’s just telling a story.”

Reading roundup: A few other stories to take note of this week:

— After years of hemorrhaging money and months of trying to find a buyer, AOL unloaded its hyperlocal news network Patch on Hale Global, “an investment company that specializes in turning around troubled companies through technological innovation,” as The New York Times put it. As Recode noted, AOL will maintain a small stake in Patch, but Hale will take over its operation and AOL is done funding Patch’s losses. Hale and AOL are both saying Patch’s 900 sites will remain open. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram noted the clear lesson here: Hyperlocal doesn’t scale.

— The Knight News Challenge announced the winners of its most recent round of grants, which focused on health and data. A total of $2.2 million went to seven projects, and the Lab and American Press Institute highlighted one of them, the Solutions Journalism Network.

— NBC News announced it’s partnering with and investing in NowThis News, a social video news startup funded by BuzzFeed chairman Ken Lerer. New York magazine, meanwhile, published a feature on Lerer and his son, Ben, and their growing role as tech company funders.

— New York Times reporter James Risen appealed his long legal case to protect a confidential source to the Supreme Court this week, setting up a potentially definitive fight over whether journalists have the right not to name their confidential sources in response to court orders. Vocativ also talked to Risen about the case.

— Finally, two other interesting pieces, one an interview with the AP’s Eric Carvin on the state of social media and journalism, and the other a Columbia Journalism Review piece on research into the quality of the New Orleans Times-Picayune after its digital overhaul.

Image of Ethernet cable by Bert Boerland used under a Creative Commons license.

With $180,000 in new funding from the Knight Foundation — as part of the latest round of the Knight News Challenge, announced moments ago — the Solutions Journalism Network will work to apply its framework to health care reporting. With the money, the Solutions Journalism Network will collaborate with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to provide reporters with data on promising solutions to health problems. In total, Knight awarded $2.2 million to seven health-related projects in this round of the News Challenge, which focused on health data and information.

The new grantees cover a wide range of areas, including crisis counseling for youth, tracking prescription drug abuse, and a health information aggregator. The winners were announced today at the Clinton Health Matters conference. More information on all this cycle’s winners below; you can see the winners list here and all 39 finalists here.

The funding from Knight will go toward scanning the available research on health to find instances of positive deviance within the data. They’re calling the project Positive Deviance Journalism, and the goal is to uncover places where people are finding results fighting community health issues and have reporters apply that knowledge in covering similar problems in their area, said Tina Rosenberg, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network.

For example, a reporter in a city that has had mixed results increasing the physical activity in school-aged kids could use the network to identify places that have had better results with similar programs. With better information, a reporter could write a story that focuses on providing more concrete answers to those health problems, Rosenberg said.

In addition to the funding from Knight, the Solutions Journalism Network also received $122,000 from the California HealthCare Foundation. That funding will be used with a specific focus on reporting on health initiatives in California. The money from the News Challenge will go towards hiring an additional researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to help analyze data for the project, Rosenberg told me. The funding will also support newsroom training, she said — they’re currently reaching out to news organizations to form partnerships.

Rosenberg said newsrooms will benefit by letting reporters have access to information they were unaware existed. “Any problem you have is shared by other cities and someone is responding to it better than other people,” Rosenberg said.

The Solutions Journalism Network was launched last year by Rosenberg and several other journalists to provide a framework for reporting and writing stories that put forward answers to community problems instead of more questions. Rosenberg writes the Fixes column in The New York Times with Solutions Journalism Network cofounder David Bornstein.

The overall mission of the network is to give “credible responses to social problems.” It’s a concept many journalists would say is integral to their work, Rosenberg said. The difficulty often comes in how stories are pitched and reported out. Some reporters might be resistant to the idea of offering solutions because it feels too close to making personal judgments, she said. No journalist wants to look foolish or gullible in their reporting by offering solutions that might not work, said Rosenberg.

One way to get past those fears is through the use of data to bolster reporting. More broadly, Rosenberg said journalists will have to find ways to make offering solutions a regular part of their work.

“Part of our mission should be reporting on how people are responding to problems with the same degree we report on the problems themselves,” Rosenberg said.

This latest News Challenge comes as Knight is re-evaluating how it funds journalism innovation. (Full disclosure: Nieman Lab is also a Knight grantee, though not through the News Challenge.) Knight commits $5 million to the challenge each year, and in 2012 the foundation re-tooled the contest into smaller, focused events. Last summer, Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibargüen told attendees at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: “It may be finished. It may be that, as a device for doing something, it may be that we’ve gone as far as we can take it.”

According to Knight spokeswoman Anusha Alikhan, another round of the News Challenge will take place this year, but the format of the contest is still undetermined.

Here are all this round’s other winners, which stray farther from traditional definitions of “news” than past cycles of the contest have — we spoke with Knight’s Michael Maness last year about that broadened territory.

Positive Deviance Journalism

Award: $180,000
Organization: Solutions Journalism Network
Project leads: Tina Rosenberg
Twitter: @soljourno

The Solutions Journalism Network seeks to broaden the role of journalism: it should not just uncover society’s ills, but also report on responses to those problems. Founded by authors of the New York Times “Fixes” column, the Network works with newsrooms looking to include regular coverage of how communities, individuals and institutions address challenges and what society can learn from such efforts. Using this framework, the Solutions Journalism Network will collaborate with partner newsrooms and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to scan data sets for “positive deviance” in the health sector— examples of promising health results that could lead to important stories. For instance, a journalist working in a city that has been unable to help people increase their levels of physical activity could identify cities that have succeeded in doing this and report on how the gains were achieved. Solutions Journalism Network will coach newsrooms to identify, vet, develop and write these stories.

Camden Health Explorer

Award: $450,000
Organization: Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers
Project leads: Jeffrey Brenner, Erek Dyskant and Aaron Truchil
Twitter: @CamdenHealth

In Camden, New Jersey, as in many U.S. cities, 1 percent of patients generate 30 percent of health care costs. Many of these patients arrive in emergency rooms seeking care for easily treatable or preventable conditions; they often face a fragmented, uncoordinated and expensive health care system. The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers addresses this problem by sharing data between the city’s hospitals and providers to better target resources and proactively tackle patient health issues. The Camden Health Explorer is the next step in this effort. The open source tool, built in partnership with data firm BlueLabs, will aggregate anonymous individual health and medical claims data, then display and map the results by demography and geography. Camden Coalition staff will work with local stakeholders, including hospital administrators, providers and policymakers, to ensure the data make Camden’s health care system more efficient and ultimately make patients healthier. The dashboard will make the tool available to other communities.

Crisis Text Line

Award: $350,000
Organization: DoSomething.org
Project leads: Jennifer Chiou and Nancy Lublin
Twitter: @DoSomething

Crisis Text Line provides youth with free counseling via text messaging. Over its 5 month beta phase, it has helped teens in crisis with more than 14,000 text conversations. Created by DoSomething.org, one of the largest organizations in the country for teens and social change, Crisis Text Line provides intervention and live referral services from trained counselors, reaching teens through a preferred means of communication: SMS. With challenge funding, Crisis Text Line will launch the service nationally and create a national, anonymous database about teens in crisis to inform further initiatives in this area.

Homebrew Sensing Project

Award: $350,000
Organization: Public Laboratory
Project leads: Shannon Dosemagen, Jeffrey Warren, Mathew Lippincott
Twitter: @PublicLab

People are increasingly concerned about exposure to of hazardous chemicals—from formaldehyde in building materials to fumes from industrial sites—and their long- and short-term health impacts. To address this problem, the Public Laboratory wants to provide more low-cost chemical analysis tools, including simple devices that can be plugged into smartphones and laptops, so residents can measure the effects themselves instead of relying on costly labs. With its community of more than 3,500 active members, Public Lab raised $110,000 from more than 1,500 backers in 2012 with a Kickstarter campaign to use DIY spectrometry tools to identify petroleum in sediments in coastal Louisiana and monitor emissions from oil refineries, among other projects. Knight funding will allow the lab’s Homebrew Sensing Project to expand, improve its hardware and software, and connect with citizens to collect data that empowers communities.

Ohana API

Award: $210,000
Organization: Code for America
Project leads: Sophia Parafina, Moncef Belyamani, Anselm Bradford
Twitter: @codeforamerica

Launched in beta in San Mateo County, Calif., by a team of Code for America fellows, this open source tool connects citizens with community resources through one centralized database. Ohana helps people locate social services, displays them on a map and makes the results easily printable. This database unites information on health, human and social services that are often kept in separate silos, such as paying for food, finding affordable health care or connecting with a social worker. Exposing the data through a Web API, the tool allows users to quickly access targeted community information through applications such as search engines, smartphones, or SMS.

Open Humans Network

Award: $500,000
Organization: PersonalGenomes.org
Project leads: Jason Bobe and Madeleine Price Ball
Twitter: @PGorg

Patients today have greater access to their own medical records, but they are limited in their ability to share that information, which hinders the potential for advancing medical research. To address these problems, the Open Humans Network will create an online portal to connect people willing to publicly share data about themselves with researchers. The portal will include three components: a personal page that will allow participants to set up their data profile; a public data explorer enabling people to use data compiled from participant profiles; and a set of design guidelines for researchers looking to use a collaborative data sharing model.

SafeUseNow

Award: $208,000
Organization: Principled Strategies
Project leads: Patrick Burns and Paul Dubose
Twitter: @SafeUseNow

Since the 1990s, prescription drug abuse has significantly increased in the United States. However, a lack of actionable information about prescription drug abuse risk, despite the increase of state monitoring programs, makes it difficult to combat the problem. SafeUseNow aims to reduce abuse by making prescribing safer and more effective. The tool uses data to identify combinations of prescribers, patients and pharmacies who may be contributing to the problem. This information helps pharmacies, insurance companies and other health care stakeholders educate prescribers to more effectively and safely treat patients. It also allows them to monitor prescribing patterns for changes in trends and behavior. A successful pilot with one health plan provider achieved a significant reduction in key risk factors. With Knight Foundation funding, the team will scale the project for use by Medicaid plans in California and aims to spread around the country.

But the big news is what Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen just said here in Cambridge at the opening morning of the 2013 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. He asked openly for ideas on what the future of the News Challenge should be, because, as he put it, “It may be finished. It may be that, as a device for doing something, it may be that we’ve gone as far as we can take it.”

Today, Knight released a report on their funding strategy that highlights the importance of framing grants around competition and contests. It’s the first in a series that suggests Knight is heading further down the path of introspection, trying to hone in on what makes for the most impactful giving. Here’s the gist:

There were just a few of the questions asked at the annual Civic Media Conference hosted by MIT and the Knight Foundation in Cambridge this week. It covered a diverse mix of topics, ranging from government transparency and media innovation to disaster relief and technology’s influence on immigration issues. (For a helpful summary of the event’s broader themes check out VP of journalism and innovation Michael Maness‘s wrap-up talk.)

There was a decided bent towards pragmatism in the presentations, underscored by Knight president Alberto Ibargüen‘s measured, even questioning introduction to the News Challenge winners. “I ask myself what we have actually achieved,” he said of the previous cycles of the News Challenge. “And I ask myself how we can take this forward.”

While the big news was the announcement of this year’s winners and the fate of the program going forward, there were plenty of discussions and presentations that caught our attention.

Panelists and speakers — from Republican Congressman Darrell Issa and WNYC’s John Keefe to Columbia’s Emily Bell and recent MIT grads — offered insights on engagement (both online and off), data structure and visualization, communicating with government, the role of editors, and more. In the words of The Boston Globe’s Adrienne Debigare, “We may not be able to predict the future, but at least we can show up for the present.”

One more News Challenge

Though Ibargüen spoke about the future of the News Challenge in uncertain terms, Knight hasn’t put the competition on the shelf quite yet. Maness announced that there would indeed one more round of the challenge this fall with a focus on health. That’s about all the we know about the next challenge; Maness said Knight is still in the planning stages of the cycle and whatever will follow it. Maness said they want the challenge to address questions about tools, data, and technology around health care.

Opening up the newsroom

One of the more lively discussions at the conference focused on how news outlets can identify and harness the experience of outsiders. Jennifer Brandel, senior producer for WBEZ’s Curious City, said one way to “hack” newsrooms was to open them up to stories from freelance writers, but also to more input from the community itself. Brandel said journalists could also look beyond traditional news for inspiration for storytelling, mentioning projects like Zeega and the work of the National Film Board of Canada.

Laura Ramos, vice president of innovation and design for Gannett, said news companies can learn lessons on user design and meeting user needs from companies like Airbnb and Square. Ramos said another lesson to take from tech companies is discovering, and addressing, specific needs of users.

Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, said one solution for innovation at many companies has been creating research and development departments. But with R&D labs, the challenge is integrating the experiments of the labs, which are often removed from day-to-day activity, to the needs of the newsroom or other departments. Bell said many media companies need leadership that is open to experimentation and can juggle the immediate needs of the business with big-picture planning. Too often in newsrooms, or around the industry, people follow old processes or old ideas and are unable to change, something Bell compared to “watching six-year-olds playing soccer,” with everyone running to the ball rather than performing their role.

Former Knight-Mozilla fellow Dan Schultz said the issue of innovation comes down to how newsrooms allocate their attention and resources. Schultz, who was embedded at The Boston Globe during his fellowship, said newsrooms need to better allocate their developer and coding talent between day-to-day operations like dealing with the CMS and experimenting on tools that could be used in the future. Schultz said he supports the idea of R&D labs because “good technology needs planning,” but the needs of the newsroom don’t always meet with long-range needs on the tech side.

Ramos and Schultz both said one of the biggest threats to change in newsrooms can be those inflexible content management systems. Ramos said the sometimes rigid nature of a CMS can force people to make editorial decisions based on where stories should go, rather than what’s most important to the reader.

Vine, Drunk C-SPAN, and gender bias

!nstant: There was Nieman Foundation/Center for Civic Media crossover at this year’s conference: 2013 Nieman Fellows Borja Echevarría de la Gándara, Alexandra Garcia, Paula Molina, and Ludovic Blecher presented a proposal for a breaking news app called !nstant. The fellows created a wireframe of the app after taking Ethan Zuckerman’s News and Participatory Media class.

The app, which would combine elements of liveblogging and aggregation around breaking news events, was inspired by the coverage of the Boston marathon bombing and manhunt. The app would pull news and other information from a variety of sources, “the best from participatory media and traditional journalism,” Molina said. Rather than being a simple aggregator, !nstant would use a team of editors to curate information and add context to current stories when needed. “The legacy media we come from is not yet good at organizing the news in a social environment,” said Echevarría de la Gándara.

Drunk C-SPAN and Opened Captions: Schultz also presented a project — or really, an idea — that seems especially timely when more Americans than usual are glued to news coming out of the capitol. When Schultz was at the Globe, he realized it would be both valuable and simple to create an API that pulls closed captioning text from C-SPAN’s video files, a project he called Opened Captions, which we wrote about in December. “I wanted to create a service people could subscribe to whenever certain words were spoken on C-SPAN,” said Schultz. “But the whole point is [the browser] doesn’t know when to ask the questions. Luckily, there’s a good technology out there called WebSocket that most browsers support that allows the server and the browser to talk to each other.”

To draw attention to the possibilities of this technology, Schultz began experimenting with a project called Drunk C-SPAN, in which he aimed to track key terms used by candidates in a televised debate. The more the pols repeat themselves, the more bored the audience gets and the “drunker” the program makes the candidates sound.

But while Drunk C-SPAN was topical and funny, Schultz says the tool should be less about what people are watching and more about what they could be watching. (Especially since almost nobody in the gen pop is watching C-SPAN regularly.) Specifically, he envisions a system in which Opened Captions could send you data about what you’re missing on C-SPAN, translate transcripts live, or alert you when issues you’ve indicated an interest in are being discussed. For the nerds in the house, there could even be a badge system based on how much you’ve watched.

Schultz says Opened Captions is fully operational and available on GitHub, and he’s eager to hear any suggestions around scaling it and putting it to work.

Follow Bias is a Twitter plugin that calculates and visualizes the gender diversity of your Twitter followers. When you sign in to the app, it graphs how many of your followers are male, female, brands, or bots. Created by Nathan Mathias and Sarah Szalavitz of the MIT Media Lab, Follow Bias is built to counteract the pernicious function of social media that allows us to indulge our unconscious biases and pass them along to others, contributing to gender disparity in the media rather than counteracting it.

The app is still in private beta, but a demo, which gives a good summary of gender bias in the media, is online here. “The heroes we share are the heroes we have,” it reads. “Among lives celebrated by mainstream media and sites like Wikipedia, women are a small minority, limiting everyone’s belief in what’s possible.” The Follow Bias server updates every six hours, so the hope is that users will try to correct their biases by broadening the diversity of their Twitter feed. Eventually, Follow Bias will offer metrics, follower recommendations, and will allow users to compare themselves to their friends.

LazyTruth: Last fall, we wrote about Media Lab grad student Matt Stempeck’s LazyTruth, the Gmail extension that helps factcheck emails, particularly chain letters and phishing scams. After launching LazyTruth last fall, Stempeck told the audience at the Civic Media conference that the tool has around 7,000 users. He said the format of LazyTruth may have capped its growth: “We’ve realized the limits of Chrome extensions, and browser extensions in general, in that a lot of people who need this tool are never going to install browser extensions.”

Stempeck and his collaborators have created an email reply service to LazyTruth, that lets users send suspicious messages to ask@lazytruth.com to get an answer. Stempeck said they’ve also expanded their misinformation database with information from Snopes, Hoax-Slayer and Sophos, an antivirus and computer security company.

LazyTruth is now also open source, with the code available on GitHub. Stempeck said he hopes to find funding to expand the fact-checking into social media platforms.

Vine Toolkit: Recent MIT graduate Joanna Kao is working on a set of tools that would allow journalists or anyone else to use Vine in storytelling. The Vine Toolkit would provide several options to add context around the six-second video clips.

Kao said Vines offer several strengths and weaknesses for journalists: the short length, ease of use, and the built-in social distribution network around the videos. But the length is also problematic, she said, because it doesn’t provide context for readers. (Instagram’s moving in on this turf.) One part of the Vine Toolkit, Vineyard, would let users string together several vines that could be captioned and annotated, Kao said. Another tool, VineChatter, would allow a user to see conversations and other information being shared about specific Vine videos.

Open Space & Place: Of algorithms and sensor journalism

WNYC: We also heard from WNYC’s John Keefe during the Open Space & Place discussion. Keefe shared the work WNYC did around tracking Hurricane Sandy, and, of course, the Lab’s beloved Cicada Project. (Here’s our most recent check-in on that invasion topic.)

As Keefe has told the Lab in the past, the next big step in data journalism will be figuring out what kind of stories can come out of asking questions of data. To demonstrate that idea, Keefe said WNYC is working on a new project measuring air quality in New York City by strapping sensors to bikers. This summer, they’ll be collaborating with the Mailman School of Public Health to do measurement runs across New York. Keefe said the goal would be to fill in gaps in government data supplied by particulate measurement stations in Brooklyn and the Bronx. WNYC is also interested in filling in data gaps around NYC’s housing authority, says Keefe. After Hurricane Sandy, some families living in public housing went weeks without power and longer without heat or hot water. Asked Keefe: “How can we use sensors or texting platforms to help these people inform us about what government is or isn’t doing in these buildings?”

With the next round of the Knight News Challenge focusing on health, keep on eye on these data-centric, sensor-driven, public health projects, because they’re likely to be going places.

Mapping the Globe: Another way to visualize the news, Mapping the Globe lets you see geographic patterns in coverage by mapping The Boston Globe’s stories. The project’s creator, Lab researcher Catherine D’Ignazio, used the geo-tagged locations already attached to more than 20,000 articles published since November 2011 to show how many of them relate to specific Boston neighborhoods — and by zooming out, how many stories relate to places across the state and worldwide. Since the map also displays population and income data, it’s one way to see what areas might be undercovered relative to who lives there — a geographical accountability system of sorts.

This post includes good screenshots of the prototype interactive map. The patterns raise lots of questions about why certain areas receive more attention than others: Is the disparity tied to race, poverty, unemployment, the location of Globe readers? But D’Ignazio also points out that there are few conclusive correlations or clear answers to her central question — “When does repeated newsworthiness in a particular place become a systemic bias?”

Moments ago, the Knight Foundation announced its latest round of winners in the Knight News Challenge, its currently semiannual competition to identify fundable ideas that advance the interests of journalism and the information needs of communities. This round focused on the open government movement, and its eight winners all fit squarely into that box. More about them below.

But the big news is what Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen just said here in Cambridge at the opening morning of the 2013 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. He asked openly for ideas on what the future of the News Challenge should be, because, as he put it, “It may be finished. It may be that, as a device for doing something, it may be that we’ve gone as far as we can take it.”

#civicmedia @ibarguen @knightfdn asks for ideas on how to take #newschallenge to the next level. He asks is #newschallenge dead? Send ideas

— Damian Thorman (@dthorman) June 24, 2013

The six-year-old News Challenge is probably the highest-profile effort to fund innovation in journalism and media. It has funded many dozens of projects over the years, and beyond that, its application process has forced thousands of people to turn fuzzy ideas into concrete proposals. Knight devotes $5 million a year to the News Challenge, which has evolved from a single annual open call to a series of smaller, faster, more focused contests, with a significant reboot leading into 2012.

With more than a half decade in the rearview, Ibargüen asked what had been accomplished: “What have we actually achieved? How have we changed the way people receive their information? How have we affected the existing news community?…They take, I think, comparatively little notice of the things people in this room do.”

To be clear, he gave no sign of stepping away from funding journalism innovation, which remains a core Knight mission. But he noted that the foundation had maximum flexibility in how to accomplish that goal: “We have a huge luxury: We can do whatever we want to do. We can use whatever process we want to use.”

Which was behind his question to the assembled crowd: “What would you do if you had decided to invest $5 million a year in figuring out how to best get news and information to communities? What would you do?”

There will be at least one more round of the News Challenge later this year (topic TBA), but beyond that, Knight’s thinking about where to take the broader idea. Ibargüen said he expected the foundation would make these decisions over the next four to five months. If you’ve got an idea, get in touch with Knight.

But that’s the future. How about the brand new round of winners? Civic Insight promises to create better databases of vacant properties so activists can better connect land to opportunities. OpenCounter wants to make it easier for small businesses to navigate local regulation. Outline.com aims to build public policy simulators, estimating the impact of legislative decisions on people’s circumstances. The Oyez Project will offer clear case summaries of the suits before American appellate courts. GitMachines wants to make it easier for governments to add servers quickly. (More from their applications here.)

As I wrote in January for the last round of announcements, the “News” in Knight News Challenge seems to be moving out of the spotlight in favor of a broader concept of connecting civic information to people who can use it. In the classical American 20th century news model, that was a role that typically involved journalists as intermediaries. Today, though, those communities of self-interest can organize in ways more efficient than a newspaper’s subscriber list. While a few of the projects funded could be of use to journalists — making data available to the general public also makes it available to reporters, who can then approach it with a different set of interests — they’re not the primary target. (That growing disconnect, I imagine, is something that will be addressed in whatever new form the News Challenge takes.)

Civic Insight

Award: $220,000
Organization: Civic Industries
Project leads: Alex Pandel, Eddie Tejeda and Amir Reavis-Bey
Twitter: @CivicInsight, @alexpandel, @maromba, @eddietejeda

Neighbors, cities, nonprofits and businesses all have an interest in seeing vacant properties become productive again. However, a lack of public access to information about these properties makes it difficult for groups to work together on solutions. By plugging directly into government databases, Civic Insight provides real-time information on vacant and underutilized properties, enabling more collaborative, data-driven community development. With Civic Insight, journalists and residents can search for a property on a map and learn about its ownership, inspection and permitting history, and subscribe to receive real-time notifications about changes. Civic Insight grew out of a successful pilot in New Orleans called BlightStatus, which was created during the team’s 2012 Code for America fellowship. It is now available for licensed use by cities nationwide. Knight Foundation’s support will help the team expand the software and test new use cases in more communities.

Team: Eddie Tejeda is a web developer and former Code for America fellow who brings 10 years of experience working on open-source civic projects such as Digress.it and Littlesis.org. Tejeda is engaged in the Open Gov movement in his home city of Oakland, where he co-founded OpenOakland and serves as a mayoral appointee to the city’s Public Ethics Commission, which oversees government transparency.

Alex Pandel is a designer, communicator and community organizer. Before her 2012 Code for America fellowship with the City of New Orleans, Pandel was engaged in public-interest advocacy work with CalPIRG, as well as designing print and web solutions for organizations like New York Magazine and The Future Project.

Amir Reavis-Bey is a software engineer with experience building client-server applications for investment bank equities trading. He also has web development experience helping non-profits to collaborate and share resources online to promote human rights activism. He spent 2012 partnering with the City of New Orleans as a Code for America fellow.

GitMachines

Award: $500,000
Organization: GitMachines
Project leads: Greg Elin, Rodney Cobb, Ikjae Park, Terence Rose, Blaine Whited and John Lancaster
Twitter: @gregelin

Governments are often reluctant to adopt new software and technology because of security and compliance concerns. GitMachines allows developers doing civic innovation to easily build new technology governments can use faster, by offering a grab-and-go depot of accreditation-ready servers that support their projects. Unlike traditional servers that can take hours or days to set-up, GitMachines can be up and running in minutes and are pre-configured to meet government guidelines. This makes it easier for governments to adopt open source software, and will help government agencies adopt new technology more quickly in the future.

Team: Rodney Cobb is a mobile developer and data analyst working in Washington D.C. Through his previous work with Campus Compact, Cobb has worked on several projects combing civic engagement/service learning and virtual interaction. Cobb received a bachelor’s in political science from Clark-Atlanta University and his master’s in politics from New York University.

Greg Elin has spent 20 years developing easy-to-use information tools and helping organizations embrace disruptive technologies. In 2006, Elin created the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs. Previously, he was chief technology officer at United Cerebral Palsy before entering the civil service in 2010 as one of the first chief data officers in federal government. Elin has been leading the Federal Communications Commissions’ efforts to lower data collection burden and improve data sharing with modern web service APIs. He was a member of the White House Task Force on Smart Disclosure exploring machine-readable data as a policy tool and citizen aid. Elin has a master’s in interactive telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School of Art.

John Lancaster has bachelor’s degree in computer science, a minor in studio art and is studying for his master’s of information systems technology. He has worked as a technology consultant the past four years at the Department of State where he builds mission critical websites that reach a global audience in over 60 languages, and manages the server infrastructure that supports the entire operation.

Ikjae Park is an expert in software development and system administration working for a government contractor and has developed enterprise JAVA applications at Salesforce.com, among others. He is passionate about development and making a simple workflow process for the community.

Terence Rose is a senor business Analyst with MIL Corp., currently leading the content development and user experience for high profile Department of Commerce projects. He previously worked as a technologist on contract for the Office of Head Start.

Blaine Whited is a programmer and systems administrator with a bachelor’s in computer science.

OpenCounter

Award: $450,000
Organization: OpenCounter
Project leads: Peter Koht, Joel Mahoney
Twitter: @opencounter, @yurialeks, @joelmahoney

While entrepreneurs may have market-moving ideas, very few can expertly navigate the local government permitting process that allows them to open and operate. Whether it’s a startup, boutique or restaurant, OpenCounter helps to simplify this interaction with city government. It collects and sorts data on existing regulations while providing running totals of the costs and time involved in setting up shop. A team of Code for America fellows developed and piloted OpenCounter in Santa Cruz, Calif. during 2012. Knight Foundation funds will support OpenCounter’s expansion to new communities, including several 2013 Code for America cities.

Team: Peter Koht, a self-described civics nerd, is an experienced economic development professional who most recently worked for the City of Santa Cruz. Koht worked on a number of issues at the city, including leading a regional broadband policy group, opening up city data and spearheading policy initiatives that lowered administrative barriers to job creation. Previous to his public sector role, he worked in technology and media.

Joel Mahoney is a civic technologist and serial entrepreneur. He was an inaugural fellow at Code for America, and served as a technical advisor to the organization. Before Code for America, Mahoney founded several startups, including an online travel site, a genetics visualization tool and an m-health platform for diabetics. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

Open Gov for the Rest of Us

Award: $350,000
Organization: LISC Chicago
Project leads: Susana Vasquez, Dionne Baux, Demond Drummer, Elizabeth Rosas-Landa
Twitter: @liscchicago

Open Gov for the Rest of Us is seeking to engage neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side in the Open Government movement. The three-stage campaign will connect more residents to the Internet, promote the use of open government tools and develop neighborhood-driven requests for new data that address residents’ needs. Building on the success of LISC Chicago’s Smart Communities program and Data Friday series, the project aims to spread a culture of data and improved use of digital tools in low-income neighborhoods by directly involving their residents.

Team: Susana Vasquez is LISC Chicago’s executive director. Vasquez joined LISC in 2003 as a program officer and soon became director of the office’s most ambitious effort – the New Communities Program, a 10-year initiative to support comprehensive community development in 16 neighborhoods. She has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Illinois and a master’s from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dionne Baux, a LISC Chicago program officer who works on economic development and technology programs, has worked in city government and for nonprofits for more than seven years. Baux leads LISC’s Smart Communities program, which is designed to increase digital access and use by youth, families, businesses and other institutions. She has a master’s degree in public administration, with a focus in government, from Roosevelt University.

Demond Drummer is tech organizer for Teamwork Englewood, an organization formed in 2003 as part of LISC Chicago’s New Communities Program. Its goal is to strengthen the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Drummer joined Webitects, a web design firm, in summer 2009. Previously, he coordinated a youth leadership and civic engagement initiative in Chicago. A graduate of Morehouse College, he is completing a master’s degree at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Elizabeth Rosas-Landa is the Smart Communities program manager at The Resurrection Project in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. A Mexico City native, she received a bachelor’s degree in information technology from Insurgentes University and later joined the Marketing and Promotion Company in Mexico. In 2008, she moved to the United States to work with community organizations on technology issues. At The Resurrection Project, Rosas-Landa has implemented computer literacy programs for residents and businesses.

Outline.com

Award: unspecified, through Knight Enterprise Fund
Organization: Outline.com
Project leads: Nikita Bier, Jeremy Blalock, Erik Hazzard, Ray Kluender
Twitter: @OutlineUSA

Outline.com is developing an online public policy simulator that allows citizens and journalists to visualize the impact that particular policies might have on people and their communities. For instance, with Outline.com, a household can measure how a tax cut or an increase in education spending will affect their income. The project builds on the team’s award-winning app Politify, which simulated the impacts of the Obama and Romney economic plans during the 2012 campaign. The Outline.com simulator uses models developed by a team of economists, backed by open data on American households from the IRS, the Census Bureau and other sources. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has hired Outline.com to develop an official pilot. The team is a part of the accelerator TechStars Boston.

Team: Nikita Bier, CEO, recently graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with honors and degrees in business administration and political economy. During his college years, he researched higher education finance, receiving recognition for his insights from the president of the university. While a student, he founded Politify.us, an award-winning election application that received national coverage. Before that, he worked in business development at 1000memories, a Greylock and YCombinator-backed startup.

Jeremy Blalock, CPO, led design and development for Politify.us. He is currently on leave from UC Berkeley, where he studied electrical engineering and computer science.

Erik Hazzard, CTO, is an active member of the data visualization and mapping communities. He was formerly lead developer at Visual.ly. He is the author of OpenLayers 2.10 Beginner’s Guide. He graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in information science.

Ray Kluender graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin with majors in economics, mathematics and political science. His extensive research experience includes involvement in developing value-added models of teacher effectiveness for Atlanta, New York City and Los Angeles public schools, election forecasting for Pollster.com and studying optimal health insurance design and government intervention in health care at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He will be starting his Ph.D. in economics at MIT this August.

Note: Outline.com is receiving funds through the Knight Enterprise Fund, an early stage venture fund that invests in for-profit ventures aligned with Knight’s mission of fostering informed and engaged communities. In line with standard venture-capital practices, the funding amounts are not being disclosed.

Oyez Project

Award: $600,000
Organization: ITT Chicago – Kent School of Law
Project lead: Jerry Goldman
Twitter: @oyez

The activities of courts across the country are often hard to access and understand. For the past 20 years, the Oyez Project has worked to open the U.S. Supreme Court by offering clear case summaries, opinions and free access to audio recordings and transcripts. With Knight Foundation funding, Oyez will expand to state supreme and federal appellate courts, offering information to the public about the work of these vital but largely anonymous institutions. Beginning in the five largest states that serve over one-third of the American public, Oyez will work with courts to catalog materials and reformat them following open standards practices. In conjunction with local partners, Oyez will annotate the materials, adding data and concise summaries that make the content more accessible for a non-legal audience. Oyez will release this information under a Creative Commons license and make it available online and through a mobile application.

Team: Professor Jerry Goldman of the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law has brought the U.S. Supreme Court closer to everyone through the Oyez Project. He has collaborated with experts in linguistics, psychology, computer science and political science with major financial support from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Google and a select group of national law firms to create an archive of 58 years of Supreme Court audio. In recent years, Oyez has put the Supreme Court in your pocket with mobile apps, iSCOTUSnow and PocketJustice.

Plan in a Box

Award: $620,000
Organization: OpenPlans
Project lead: Frank Hebbert, Ellen McDermott, Aaron Ogle, Andy Cochran, Mjumbe Poe
Twitter: @OpenPlans

Local planning decisions can shape everything about a community — from how residents get around, to how they interact with their neighbors and experience daily life. Yet information on projects — from new plans for downtown centers to bridge replacements — is often difficult to obtain. This project will be an open-source web-publishing tool that makes it easy to engage people in the planning process. With minimal effort, city employees will be able to create and maintain a useful website that provides information that citizens and journalists need while integrating with social media and allowing for public input.

Team: Aaron Ogle is an OpenPlans software developer. Prior to OpenPlans, he was a fellow at Code for America where he partnered with the City of Philadelphia to build solutions to help foster civic engagement. He specializes in JavaScript and GIS development and has contributed to such applications as reroute.it, septa.mobi, changeby.us, walkshed.org and phillystormwater.org.

Andy Cochran, creative director, provides design vision for OpenPlans’ projects, building user interfaces for tools that enable people to be better informed and stay engaged in local issues. Cochran has a bachelor’s degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and he has over a decade of experience in print and web design.

Ellen McDermott leads OpenPlans’ outreach to community organizations and cities, to help them be effective in using digital and in-person engagement tools. She also manages operations for OpenPlans. Previously, McDermott was the director of finance and administration for Honeybee Robotics, a technology supplier to the NASA Mars programs. She is a graduate of Amherst College and King’s College London.

Frank Hebbert leads the software team at OpenPlans. Outside of work, he volunteers with Planning Corps, a network of planners providing assistance to non-profit and community groups. Hebbert holds a master’s degree in city planning from MIT.

Mjumbe Poe is a software developer for OpenPlans. Previously, Poe was a fellow at Code for America, and before that a research programmer at the University of Pennsylvania working on modeling and simulation tools for the social sciences.

Procure.io

Award: $460,000
Organization: Department of Better Technology
Project leads: Clay Johnson and Adam Becker
Twitter: @cjoh @AdamJacobBecker

The government procurement process can be both highly complicated and time-consuming — making it difficult for small businesses to discover and bid on contracts and for journalists and transparency advocates to see where public money is going. As White House Presidential Innovation Fellows, Clay Johnson and Adam Becker built a simple tool for governments to easily post requests for proposals, or RFPs. Based on its early success at the federal level, the team is planning to expand the software to help states and cities. In addition, they will build a library of statements of work that any agency can adapt to their needs. The goal is to bring more competition into government bidding, as a way to both reduce costs and ensure that the most qualified team gets the job.

Team: Clay Johnson may be best known as the author of The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. Johnson was also one of the founders of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008. Since 2008, Johnson has worked on opening government, as the director of Sunlight Labs until 2010, and as a director of Expert Labs until 2012. He was named the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Organizer of the Year in 2009, was one of Federal Computing Week’s Fed 100 in 2010, and won the CampaignTech Innovator award in 2011. In 2012, he was appointed as an inaugural Presidential Innovation Fellow and led the RFP-EZ project, a federal experiment in procurement innovation.

Adam Becker is a software developer and entrepreneur. He co-founded and served as chief technology officer of GovHub, a civic-oriented startup that was the first to provide users a comprehensive, geographically calculated list of their government officials. In 2012, he was appointed alongside Johnson as an inaugural Presidential Innovation Fellow and led the development of RFP-EZ.

“Hay un dicho aquí que se relaciona con nuestro trabajo y que no implica que sea ilegal: es mejor pedir disculpas que pedir permiso“, dice Miguel Paz desde Chile.

Paz es un veterano en el negocio de las noticias digitales. Y el dicho tiene que ver con su postura ante la búsqueda de datos públicos gubernamentales que podría tomar mucho tiempo obtener de otra forma. Paz también es becario de la Fundación Knight para el Periodismo, fundador de Hacks/Hackers Chile, y reciente ganador del Knight News Challenge. Hace pocos años fundó Poderopedia, una base de datos de políticos chilenos y sus conexiones a organizaciones políticas, gobierno y empresas.

Pero liberar, organizar y publicar datos en Chile no es suficiente para Paz y por eso su próximo proyecto — en colaboración con Mariano Blejman de la red argentina Argentina’s Hacks/Hackers — está dirigido a liberar datos en toda América Latina a través del proyecto OpenData Latinoamérica. Paz y Blejman esperan armar una red centralizada donde almacenar y compartir los datos públicos de toda la región.

La conexión a través de Hacks/Hackers es clave para el desarrollo de OpenData Latinoamérica. La red estará disponible para resolución de problemas y entrenamiento mientras el proyecto despega y hackers y medios aprenden tanto a subir datos como a usarlos.

Otro socio clave para convertir OpenData Latinoamérica en una realidad es su conexión con el programa de Desarrollo Global del Banco Mundial World Bank Institute’s Global Media Development dirigido por Craig Hammer. Hammer cree que la era de los datos está revolucionando a los gobiernos, a las organizaciones no gubernamentales y los procesos de toma de decisiones.

“La pregunta para nosotros es ¿Qué vamos a hacer con los datos? ¿Datos para qué? Construir un puente entre los datos disponibles y su traducción en mejoras para la calidad de la vida de las personas es un proceso que necesita tiempo y dedicación. En eso se focaliza nuestro trabajo programático”, dice Hammer.

Un modelo a través del Atlántico

Bajo la dirección de Hammer, el Banco Mundial colaboró en la organización y financiamiento de Africa Open Data, un proyecto similar a OpenData Latinoamérica lanzado por otro becario de la fundación Knight, Justin Arenstein. “Las mismas políticas de acceso a la información del Banco Mundial permiten hacer públicos sus datos y en ese proceso, la institución provee un soporte para que los países de la región también publiquen sus datos” dice Hammer.

Africa Open Data se encuentra todavía en etapa beta, pero está reuniendo información, hackers y periodistas en proyectos de entrenamiento que ya han generado cambios en el periodismo. En un posteo acerca de la importancia de equipar al público para navegar en una nueva era de acceso a los datos. Hammer cuenta la historia de Irene Choge, periodista de Kenia que asistió a una sesión de entrenamiento del Banco Mundial en conjunto con Africa Open Data.

Choge…examinó los niveles de gasto público en infraestructura educacional, específicamente, en baños para escuelas primarias…El financiamiento para los baños había desaparecido, generando un aumento en la defecación al aire libre (en los mismos espacios donde los niños jugaban y comían), lo que a su vez había aumentando los riesgos de contraer cólera, giardiasis, hepatitis y rotavirus, y se traducía en menores niveles de asistencia escolar, especialmente para las niñas, que no contaban con instalaciones durante sus ciclos menstruales. Como resultado, el rendimiento en los exámenes escolares era bajo…A través del análisis que hizo Choge y la historia que escribió, los datos se convirtieron en inteligencia par a la acción. Como resultado, el gobierno está actuando: se dispusieron recursos ministeriales tanto para corregir la deficiencia de baños en las escuelas primarias más afectadas, como para identificar la fuente de la restricción en la asignación de fondos que constituía la raíz del problema.

Hammer describe Africa Open Data como una prueba de stress útil para OpenData Latinoamérica, pero Miguel Paz dice que la base de datos para la región fue también un paso natural frente a la serie de frustraciones que él y Blejman encontraron en su trabajo.

“Usualmente, el problema es que todo marcha bien antes y durante la hackathon” dice Paz. “Pero luego, ¿quiénes van a trabajar en los proyectos? ¿cuál es el status del proyecto? ¿cómo podemos seguirlo? ¿cómo pueden incorporarse otras personas?” La solución terminó siendo Hackdash, una creación de Blejman, y que constituye una interface que ayuda a los hackers a mantenerse al tanto de las respuestas para esas preguntas y por lo tanto, a reforzar el legado de varios proyectos.

Pensar en formas de organización y comunicación para los hackers a través de América Latina no es algo nuevo para Paz y Blejman. “En una hackathon nosotros hacíamos algo y otra persona, sin saber nada del proyecto, hacía otro aporte. Así que cuando vimos la plataforma de Open Data Africa pensamos que OpenData Latinoamérica era una gran idea”, dice.

Blejman dice que los aportes del Banco Mundial han sido claves para la fundación de OpenData Latinoamérica, especialmente para la organización de los “training bootcamps”. Hammer dice que él ve al Banco en el rol de construir un puente entre los hackers y los medios. “Más que una plataforma”, dice Miguel Paz, “es una institución que por sí misma ayuda a conectar fuentes de información gubernamentales y ayuda en la transformación de esos datos en conocimiento y conocimiento dirigido a la acción”.

Dar a las personas las herramientas para comprender el poder de los datos es un principio importante de la filosofía de datos abiertos de Hammer, quien cree que la alfabetización en el manejo de datos es el próximo paso en el escenario creado por las grandes cantidades de datos públicos (Big Data). Hammer considera que este proceso de alfabetización es más inmediatamente importante para sectores específicos y estratégicos como el periodismo, los medios, los hackers cívicos y la sociedad civil”. Uno de los objetivos de Hammer es conseguir que instituciones como los periódicos, en vez de confiar en intereses individuales, adopten la importancia de comprender el manejo de datos.

“No me refiero a que todo el planeta aprenda a visualizar datos”, afirma, “lo que digo es que debería ser posible que estas habilidades las adquiriera cualquier persona interesada en ellas. Si pensamos en el acceso y manejo de datos públicos como el elemento democratizador real — como democratización sustantiva de la información — entonces los datos tienen que ser digeribles, accesibles y consumibles por cualquiera que quiera acceder a ellos”.

Aumentar el interés del público por acceder a mayor cantidad de datos es lo que Hammer describe como estimular la demanda de datos. Para Hammer, es magnífico que los gobiernos estén dispuestos a transparentar los datos públicos, pero para que esos datos sean útiles, las personas tienen que comprender y utilizar el poder de los datos.

“Lo que es interesante en OpenData Latinoamérica es que es una iniciativa que afecta el lado de la demanda, donde el público está liberando datos, recolectándolos, limpiándolos. OpenData no opera sólo en la esfera gubernamental. Es algo que también pueden hacer otras entidades que operan en el ámbito de lo público”.

Como un ejemplo, en Argentina, donde el gobierno llegó tarde a la lógica de los datos abiertos, Blejman dice que vio cómo se desarrollaba una poderosa demanda por información pública entre los hackers y periodistas que lo rodeaban. “Cuando vieron lo que estaba pasando en otros países vecinos y las posibilidades que abría el acceso a los datos públicos, los argentinos pidieron lo mismo y el gobierno comenzó a entregar parte de sus datos”.

“Tenemos que pensar en los datos abiertos como un servicio, porque no importan cuánto trabajen las ONG: las personas no se van a preocupar de los datos per se” dice Paz. “Las personas se preocupan de los datos porque afectan su vida, para bien o para mal”.

Otra ventaja con la que contaron Blejman y Paz cuando decidieron inciar OpenData Latinoamérica fue la existencia de Junar, software chileno creado por Javier Pajaro, quien era un analista frustrado cuando decidió dedicarse a las plataformas de datos abiertos y ayudar a otros a hacer lo mismo. Según Blejman, mientras Africa Open Data optó por CKAN, el uso en OpenData Latinoamérica de una compañía local en español que ya era familiar para los integrantes de la red Hacks/Hackers ha fortalecido el proyecto, haciendo más fácil resolver los problemas cuando estos se presentan. También afirma que la habilidad de Junar para dar a las organizaciones involucradas mayor control sobre la plataforma se adapta muy bien con la visión de trabajo abierto y colaborativo que ellos visualizan para una futura operación diaria de la base de datos.

Organizando esfuerzos

Paz y Blejman tienen altas expectativas para el crecimiento de OpenData Latinoamérica y las historias que surgirán del proyecto. “Lo que esperamos es que la gente empiece a usar los datos, a entusiasmar a los periódicos para que se organicen en torno a los temas de datos y tener un puerto central a partir del cual puedan consumir los datos que deseen”, dice Blejman.

Ambos esperan algún día reunir datos de cada país en Latinoamérica, pero reconocen que algunos serán más difíciles de alcanzar que otros. “En general, en los gobiernos federales es difícil estandarizar los datos. Así que en países como Argentina, que es un estado federado con distintas autoridades en distintos niveles, es más difícil estandarizar que en una república donde hay un estado”, dice Paz. “Sin embargo, en Chile, tenemos gran cantidad de datos, un gobierno abierto y transparencia, pero no tenemos gran periodismo de datos”. (Chile es una república.)

En el futuro, también les gustaría ofrecer una manera segura de permitir que fuentes anónimas contribuyan con datos para el sitio. Paz dice que en su experiencia como editor, 20–25 por ciento de los golpes noticiosos provienen de fuentes anónimas. Pero a pesar de desarrollos como el reciente Strongbox de la revista The New Yorker’s, OpenData Latinoamérica todavía está trabajando en un método seguro que no requiera descargar Tor, y que sea más seguro que el email. Blejman agrega que, por ahora, tienen un control mínimo sobre la calidad y la precisión de la datos original con la que están trabajando: “En última instancia, no podemos controlar las fuentes originales, y estamos confiando en las organizaciones”.

Pero sobre todas las cosas, lo que motiva a Paz es anticipar las historias que podrán contar. Paz planea usar documentos sobre compras públicas del Gobierno de Chile para construir una aplicación que permita a los ciudadanos hacer un seguimiento del gasto público, y de las compañías que beneficia.

Otra historia en desarrollo ejemplifica en qué medida Paz tomó al pie de la letra los consejos de Craig Hammer en la construcción de una demanda de datos. En Chile, hay una significativa indignación estudiantil ante los crecientes costos de la educación y continuas protestas en favor de una educación gratuita. En respuesta, Paz decidió aprovechar esa energía y frustración en una #scrapaton que se realizará el 29 de junio en Santiago. Se focalizarán en conseguir datos de los dueños de las universidades, las compañías que tienen contratos con las universidades y los dueños de colegios privados y subsidiados.

“Hay una broma que dice que si dejas a cinco gringos — y no digo gringo en una manera despectiva-, si dejas a cinco estadounidenses en una sala, probablemente van a inventar un cohete”, dice Paz. “Si dejas a cinco chilenos en una sala, lo más probable es que se peleen entre ellos. Así que no sólo estamos construyendo herramientas, también estamos construyendo formas de trabajar juntos y de mejorar la confianza entre las personas”. Blejman agrega que espera que la reciente publicación de una versión en español del Open Data Handbook (El manual de Open Data) facilitará aún más la colaboración entre los hackers Latinoamericanos.

Con un proyecto de este tamaño y alcance, también hay un diseño ambicioso en torno a las métricas. Paz espera seguir cuántos proyectos se originan a partir de los datos de OpenData Latinoamérica. Craig Hammer quiere cuantificar el bien común que genera el acceso a los datos, un proyecto que ya está en camino a través de la Fundación World Wide Web (World Wide Web Foundation’s) en colaboración con Open Data for Development Camp.

“Si existe un lazo evidente, reconocible entre los datos abiertos y un aumento en el bienestar común, entonces creo que podría existir un momento catalizador para el manejo de datos abiertos, que permitiría un reconocimiento más amplio de por qué es importante y por qué vale la pena invertir en ellos, y se podría generar un aumento explosivo en la difusión de la alfabetización en el manejo de datos”.

Hammer quiere que la gente haga propios los datos y se dé cuenta de que pueden ayudar en la toma de decisiones en distintos niveles, incluso individual o familiar. Una vez que esas ventajas sean claras para la mayoría, la demanda aumentará y todo tipo de organizaciones se sentirá presionada a compartir su información”.

“Hay una sensación visceral de que los datos son importantes y eso es bueno. Hay un reconocimiento de que abrir la información y hacer accesible los datos es un bien público en sí mismo. Pero eso no es todo, ¿no?”, dice Hammer: “eso no es el fin de un proceso, sino su inicio”.

Foto de estudiantes marchando en la ciudad de Santiago entre gases lacrimógenos mientras la policía dispara cañones de agua, 8 de agosto, 2012. AP/Luis Hidalgo

“There’s a saying here, and I’ll translate, because it’s very much how we work,” Miguel Paz said to me over a Skype call from Chile. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s illegal. Here, it’s ‘It’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.””

Paz is a veteran of the digital news business. The saying has to do with his approach to scraping public data from governments that may be slow to share it. He’s also a Knight International Journalism Fellow, the founder of Hacks/Hackers Chile, and a recent Knight News Challenge winner. A few years ago, he founded Poderopedia, a database of Chilean politicians and their many connections to political organizations, government offices, and businesses.

But freeing, organizing, and publishing data in Chile alone is not enough for Paz, which is why his next project, in partnership with Mariano Blejman of Argentina’s Hacks/Hackers network, is aimed at freeing data from across Latin America. Their project is called OpenData Latinoamérica. Paz and Blejman hope to build a centralized home where all regional public data can be stored and shared.

Their mutual connection through Hacks/Hackers is key to the development of OpenData Latinoamérica. The network will make itself, to whatever extent possible, available for trouble shooting and training as the project gets off the ground and civic hackers and media types learn both how to upload data sets as well as make use of the information they find there.

Another key partnership helping make OpenData Latinoamérica possible is with the World Bank Institute’s Global Media Development program, which is run by Craig Hammer. Hammer believes the data age is revolutionizing government, non-government social projects, and how we make decisions about everyday life.

“The question for us, is, What are we gonna do with the data? Data for what? Bridging that space between opening the data and how it translates into improving the quality of people’s lives around the world requires a lot of time and attention,” he says. “That’s really where the World Bank Institute and our programmatic work is focused.”

A model across the Atlantic

Under Hammer, the World Bank helped organize and fund Africa Open Data, a similar project launched by another Knight fellow, Justin Arenstein. “The bank’s own access-to-information policy provides for a really robust opportunity to open its own data,” Hammer says, “and in so doing, provide support to countries across regions to open their own data.”

Africa Open Data is still in beta, but bringing together hackers, journalists, and information in training bootcamps has already led to reform-producing journalism. In a post about the importance of equipping the public for the data age, Hammer tells the story of Irene Choge, a journalist from Kenya who attended a training session hosted by the World Bank in conjunction with Africa Open Data.

She…examined county-level expenditures on education infrastructure — specifically, on the number of toilets per primary school…Funding allocated for children’s toilet facilities had disappeared, resulting in high levels of open defecation (in the same spaces where they played and ate). This increased their risk of contracting cholera, giardiasis, hepatitis, and rotavirus, and accounted for low attendance, in particular among girls, who also had no facilities during their menstruation cycles. The end result: poor student performance on exams…Through Choge’s analysis and story, open data became actionable intelligence. As a result, government is acting: ministry resources are being allocated to correct the toilet deficiency across the most underserved primary schools and to identify the source of the misallocation at the root of the problem.

Hammer calls Africa Open Data a useful “stress test” for OpenData Latinoamérica, but Paz says the database was also a natural next step in a series of frustrations he and Blejman had encountered in their other work.

“Usually, the problem you have is: Everything is cool before the hackathon, and during the hackathon,” says Paz. “But after, it’s like, who are the people who are working on the project? What’s the status of the project? Can I follow the project? Can I be a part of the project?” The solution to this problem ended up being Hackdash, which was actually Blejman’s brainchild — an interface that helps hackers keep abreast of the answers to those questions and thereby shore up the legacy of various projects.

So thinking about ways that international hackers can organize and communicate across the region is nothing new to Paz and Blejman. “One hackathon, we would do something, and another person who didn’t know about that would do something else. So when we saw the Open Data Africa platform, we thought it was a really great idea to do in Latin America,” he says.

Blejman says the contributions of the World Bank have been essential to the founding of OpenData Latinoamérica, especially in organizing the data bootcamps. Hammer says he sees the role of the bank as building a bridge between civic hackers and media. “More than a platform,” he says it’s, “an institution in and of itself to help connect sources of information to government and help transform that data into knowledge and that knowledge into action.”

Giving people the tools to understand the power of data is an important tenet of Hammer’s open data philosophy. He believes the next step for Big Data is global data literacy, which he says is most immediately important for “very specific and arguably strategic public constituencies — journalists, media, civic hackers, and civil society.” Getting institutions, like newspapers, to embrace the importance of data literacy rather than relying on individual interest is just one goal Hammer has in mind.

“I’m not talking about data visualization skills for planet Earth,” he says. “I’m saying, it’s possible — or it should be possible — for anybody that wants to have these skills to have them. If we’re talking about data as the real democratizer — open data as meaningful democratization of information — then it has to be digestible and accessible and consumable by everyone and everybody who wants to access and digest and consume it.”

Increasing the desire of the public for more, freer data is what Hammer calls stoking the demand side. He says it’s great if governments are willingly making information accessible, but for it to be useful, people have to understand its power and seek to unleash it.

“What’s great about OpenData Latinoamérica is it’s in every way a demand-side initiative, where the public is liberating its own data — it’s scraping data, it’s cleaning it,” he says. “Open data is not solely the purview of the government. It’s something that can be inaugurated by public constituencies.”

For example, in Argentina, where the government came late to the open data game, Blejman says he saw a powerful demand for information spring up in hackers and journalists around him. When they saw what other neighboring countries had and what they could do with that information, they demanded the same, and Argentina’s government began to release some of that data.

“We need to think about open data as a service, because no matter how much advocacy from NGOs, people don’t care about ‘open data'” per se, Paz says. “They care about data because it affects their life, in a good or bad way.”

Another advantage Bleman and Paz had when heading into OpenData Latinoamérica was the existence of Junar, a Chilean software platform founded by Javier Pajaro, who was a frustrated analyst when he decided to embrace open data platforms and help others do the same. Blejman said that, while Africa Open Data opted for CKAN, using a local, Spanish-language company that was already familiar to members of the Hacks/Hackers network has strengthened the project, making it easier to troubleshoot problems as they arise. He also said Junar’s ability to give participating organizations more control fit nicely into their hands-off, crowd-managed vision for future day-to-day operation of the database.

Organizing efforts

Paz and Blejman have high hopes for the stories and growth that will come from OpenData Latinoamérica. “What we expect from these events is for people to start using data, encourage newspapers to organize around data themes, and have the central hub for what they want to consume,” Blejman said.

They hope to one day bring in data from every country in Latin America, but they acknowledge that some will be harder to reach than others. “Usually, the federated governments, it’s harder to get standardized data. So, in a country like Argentina, which is a federated state with different authorities on different levels, it’s harder to get standardized data than in a republic where there’s one state and no federated government,” says Paz. “But then again, in Chile, we have a really great open data and open government and transparency allows, but we don’t have great data journalism.” (Chile is a republic.)

Down the road, they’d also like to provide a secure way for anonymous sources to dump data to the site. Paz says in his experience as a news editor, 20–25 percent of scoops come from anonymous tips. But despite developments like The New Yorker’s recent release of Strongbox, OpenData Latinoamérica is still working out a secure method that doesn’t require downloading Tor, but is more secure than email. Blejman also added that, for now, whatever oversight they have over the quality and accuracy of the original data they’re working with is minimal: “At the end, we cannot control the original sources, and we are just trusting the organizations.”

But more than anything, Paz is excited about seeing the beginnings of the stories they’ll be able to tell. He plans to use documents about public purchases made by Chile’s government to build an app that allows citizens to track what their government is spending money on, and what companies are being contracted those dollars.

Another budding story exemplifies the extent to which Paz has taken to heart Craig Hammer’s emphasis on building demand. In Chile, there is currently a significant outcry from students over the rising cost of education. Protests in favor of free education are ongoing. In response, Paz decided to harness this focus, energy, and frustration into a scrape-a-thon (or #scrapaton) to be held June 29 in Santiago. They will focus on scraping data on the owners of universities, companies that contract with universities, and who owns private and subsidized schools.

“There’s a joke that says if you put five gringos — and I don’t mean gringos in a disrespectful way — if you put five U.S. people in a room, they’re probably going to invent a rocket,” says Paz. “If you put five Chileans in a room, they’re probably going to fight each other. So one of the things — we’re not just building tools, we’re also building ways of working together, and making people trust each other.” Blejman added that he hopes the recent release of a Spanish-language version of the Open Data Handbook (El manual de Open Data) will further facilitate collaboration between hackers in various Latin American countries.

With a project of this size and scope, there are also some ambitious designs around measurement. Paz hopes to track how many stories and projects originate with datasets from OpenData Latinoamérica. Craig Hammer wants to quantify the social good of open data, a project he says is already underway via the World Wide Web Foundation’s collaboration with the Open Data for Development Camp.

“If there is a cognizable and evidentiary link between open data and boosting shared prosperity,” Hammer says, “then I think that would be, in many cases, the catalytic moment for open data, and would enable broad recognition of why it’s important and why it’s a worthwhile investment, and broad diffusion of data literacy would really explode.”

Hammer wants people to take ownership of data and realize it can help inform decisions at all levels, even for individuals and families. Once that advantage is made clear to the majority of the population, he says, the demand will kick in, and all kinds of organizations will feel pressured to share their information.

“There’s this visceral sense that data is important, and that it’s good. There’s recognition that opening information and making it broadly accessible is in and of itself a global public good. But it doesn’t stop there, right? That’s not the end,” he says. “That’s the beginning.”

Photo of Santiago student protesters walking as police fire water canons and tear gas fills the air, Aug. 8, 2012 by AP/Luis Hidalgo.

If you pay much attention to the journalism innovation world — or if you’ve been reading this site for long — you know that Knight is the biggest of big dogs in the space. They give more than $30 million a year to a mixture of startups, news organizations, coding projects, and other ventures they believe will help support the information needs of communities. Name a prominent nonprofit news outlet or journalism school — or, increasingly, a news-related open source project — and there’s a pretty good shot Knight has either funded it or been asked to fund it. (That includes — disclosure! — this website, which has received Knight funding.) You could get a pretty good idea of the journalism-innovation zeitgeist just by looking at who Knight is funding at any given moment.

Michael and I talked about how Knight decides on its journalism priorities, how those have shifted in recent years, and how they’re trying to ensure the projects they fund have impact beyond the length of a grant. If you’re interested in how journalism’s biggest foundation funder is thinking about the challenges in 2013, you should definitely give it a listen.

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Textizen, one of the winners of the mobile round of the Knight News Challenge, wants to give a boost to civic engagement through a suite of technology tools that allow residents to give feedback on community issues. Using its $350,000 award from Knight Foundation, Textizen will expand and begin working with cities around the country.

Textizen is a hybrid of the physical and the digital that gives people in a community real-world prompts to answer questions about important issues in their city. But instead of asking people to mail in a survey, responses are handled through mobile devices.

So let’s say your local planning department is trying to figure out what to do with a problem intersection. Using Textizen, the planning department could craft a series of short survey questions using a web interface. Flyers throughout town would direct residents to a number to text responses to the survey. Using Textizen’s web dashboard, the city would also be able to track and graph responses.

Web surveys aren’t new technology, but Textizen takes an interesting mobile-centric twist by turning the survey into a kind of chat. After texting their initial response, users are sent a new question, and the survey begins to resemble the kind of texting back-and-forth you might have with a friend who is really into public policy.

“Textizen allows you to build a survey that sounds like a conversation and less like red tape,” said Michelle Lee, CEO of Textizen. Lee said the software is designed to help cities and towns gain new kinds of engagement from residents. In order for a Textizen campaign to work, she said, you have to capture people’s attention and ask focused, rather than general, questions. Places like bus stops, parks, or community centers are the ideal location because they provide a ready audience. From there, municipalities have to be creative in the ways they appeal to people, Lee said.

Textizen got its start as a Code for America project based in Philadelphia, working with city planners on surveys for various neighborhoods. Lee said one the reasons officials in Philadelphia were eager to work with Textizen is because of the uneven Internet access throughout the city. In parts of the city, many don’t have Internet access at home, but mobile access is fairly high, she said. In that way, Textizen was the perfect tool to get feedback from areas officials have had difficulty reaching.

Lee said the pervasive nature of mobile technology is at the heart of Textizen. The number of cellphones in the U.S. is unlikely to shrink any time soon, so giving the mobile device a bigger role in civic engagement is a bet on the future. One key component of that, Lee said, is the use of SMS. Building the system around texting rather than a smartphone app — even as some news organizations step back from texting — gives Textizen access to the widest audience possible.

“Even though the SMS platform is rooted in reaching across the digital divide, SMS is still a first-class technology in the digital world,” she said.

Using its $150,000 award from Knight Foundation, Abayima will develop an open-source tool kit that will create a standard for writing and reading off SIM cards. Jon Gosier, founder of Appfrica, the company behind Abayima, said the project creates a secondary method of communication for areas of crisis. Abayima is currently finishing an alpha of its tool kit and preparing for a pilot project in Kenya, Gosier told me.

He began creating the software while working in Uganda. Specifically, he saw a need for activists to communicate during the country’s presidential and parliamentary elections; the government was reportedly monitoring text messages from citizens before to the election.

Tampering with the flow of information is not an unusual tactic in some corners of the world, whether in the form of widespread Internet censorship or slowing (or crashing) data networks. The reason these methods keep popping up, Gosier said, is because there is a familar choke point: service providers. “The problem is that all these forms of communications have a single point of failure,” he told me. And beyond the whims of governments, natural disasters and other emergencies can also help bring down data networks.

For the technically savvy, there are ways around network tampering: trying to use mesh networks when the Internet goes down, or encrypting messages when communications are being watched. But those methods may be too advanced or technically out of reach for some, he said. “If all these citizens and activists are relying on SMS as their main means of communications, and they don’t know those messages are being intercepted, or not hitting their intended target, that’s a problem,” he said.

Instead, Abayima offers a low-tech alternative communication that puts the emphasis on physical delivery systems. Think Sneakernet.

It’s a problem that disproportionately affects developing countries, particularly those where mobile phones can be the main access point for communication and local information. If you lose cell service after a hurricane in the U.S., you likely have other ways to get in touch with people. If you lose cell service or SMS in Uganda, it’s a different scenario, he said. “When those two means of communications go down, those two channels, you’re essentially voiceless, at least when it comes to digital communication,” he said.

At the heart of Abayima’s project is what Gosier calls the Open SIM Kit, open-source software that makes it possible to write information directly on a SIM card and make those files readable across various types of feature phones. If you can remember back to your old feature phone, Nieman Lab reader, its address book often had a field to enter additional information. While you could use that to leave notes like “does not like asparagus” or “works early mornings,” you could also use that to share other information.

What the Open SIM Kit does is make it possible for any type of feature phone to write or read these files. Or, to put it another way: “Essentially the SIM becomes like sticking a thumb drive into your laptop,” Gosier said.

Whether it’s photos of flooding during Hurricane Sandy, or videos of eagles stealing babies, it’s not always easy to detect fakery. And when you think of the number of videos and photos produced by our phones each day, it can be problematic for news organizations trying to deal with submissions from readers.

The human rights organization Witness is developing a new app that aims to make it easier to verify the authenticity of video, photos, or audio created and shared from mobile devices. Witness is partnering with The Guardian Project to build the app with $320,000 in funding from Knight Foundation. The InformaCam app, one of several winners in the mobile round of the Knight News Challenge, would bring metadata to the forefront, allowing journalists, human rights organizations, and others to better identify the origins of a photo or video.

“InformaCam is our way to respond to this question of media authentication and model some solutions we hope people will adopt,” said Sam Gregory, program director for Witness.

Video is at the heart of what Witness does, encouraging people around the world to document human rights abuses in their community. (Witness also collaborated with The Guardian Project on a project that might be thought of as the flip side of InformaCam: ObscuraCam, a camera app that allows users to quickly conceal the identity of people in a photo by pixelating faces and removing metadata.)

The spread of smartphones and other devices with capable of shooting photos and videos has been a boon to human rights campaigns, but it’s also brought along new sets of problems. Whether someone is shooting video on the streets of Syria, Burma, or Libya, the question remains: Is it real? It’s a concern groups like Witness share with many media organizations that now rely on submitted video to amplify their journalism.

An alpha of the app is currently available for Android. InformaCam works like the camera software now available on most phones, allowing users to shoot photos or video within the app. But as you shoot, the app collects metadata that it will bundle and encrypt with your photo or video — including generating an encryption key based on the camera’s pattern of sensor noise, which is unique to each camera. At the moment they’re still three to six months away from a pilot, Gregory told me.

Gregory told me the InformaCam app creates a kind of watermark for video or photo content coming from a device and pair that with time, location, and other types of metadata. Most smartphones already contain plenty of identifying information that people collect throughout their day. InformaCam taps into the passive sensors in your phone to provide backing data for photos.

“The first part of the Knight grant will help us work out how InformaCam addresses the challenges of how do you gather as much contextualizing data about a photo or video,” he said.

Unlocking those sensors is one half of the problem — the other is creating methods to confirm metadata and establish a kind of chain-of-custody for a video. In other words, how can you create a system to show whether someone — whether a government censor or another interested party — tampered with a video after it was shot?

With upheaval in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia in recent years, raw video produced on mobile phones has become a way for citizens to share what is happening on the streets of their community. But Gregory said InformaCam has a wide range of potential uses outside of covering protests or potential war crimes — everything from shooting a natural disasters to documenting household damage for insurance claims.

The important thing to keep in mind, Gregory said, is that the software will not be a perfect solution. InformaCam, he said, should be used in the context of other information to make a judgment. “It won’t prove everything is true,” he said. “But, given the volume of media, you can make it easier for people to distinguish what is verifiable and help step up that ladder.”

But according to new Knight News Challenge winner WeFarm, a project of the Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation, only about 25 percent of the world’s population has access to the Internet (it may be a little higher now). For them, trying to get answers to simple questions about their livelihood is, as program manager Kenny Ewan put it, “kind of like 10 years ago if your PC broke and you had to spend two hours on the phone with the manufacturer, who tells you to switch it off and switch it on again.”

Now, thanks to the WeFarm team, those farmers are able to help each other answer those questions, regardless of barriers of language and distance.

Founders Ewan and Claire Rhodes originally envisioned WeFarm as a purely web-based project. But as they connected with more smallholder farmers, they discovered that while only about 5-6 percent of their target population had reliable internet access, over 90 percent were familiar users of texting and mobile phones. They decided that what farmers in the developing world need is a database of useful information that’s accessible whether you use a desktop PC at an Internet cafe, a brand new 4G-enabled Samsung Galaxy, or a basic flip phone.

On its face, WeFarm is not a news project; its parent organization is an NGO that specifically works with tea, coffee and cocoa farmers across 14 countries. (It’s also the charity arm of the U.K. hot-beverage vendor, Cafédirect.) But what makes WeFarm relevant to the Knight News Challenge is the speed with which it’s making international communication possible.

“For people that never talk to anyone outside of their own community,” Ewan said, “to receive a text from someone on the other side of the world is kind of magic.”

Behind that WeFarm “magic” is web-to-text technology that facilitates the gathering and disseminating of information via mass SMS. Someone sends a text, which is then entered into a computer database, translated, and shot back out to users across the world. Ewan says, once WeFarm is running at full speed, that could mean receiving thousands of texts a day. So the site is developing a voting mechanism that will allow users to rank the usefulness of answers. In addition, volunteer translators will be able to tag questions with key words in multiple languages. “So if a farmer in Mexico is consistently answering questions about a certain type of tree and getting high ranks for those answers, it will recognize those questions as ones that should be targeted to him,” Ewan said.

WeFarm uses a commercial Android app called Telerivet, which allows them to operate their system countrywide using a single Android phone. But Ewan also spoke admiringly of FrontlineSMS, an open source software project (and fellow News Challenge winner) that allows users with a laptop and a modem to send out mass texts from a computer. It’s been used to facilitate mass communications among refugees and by hospitals to remind HIV/AIDS patients to take their medication. It’s also a major component of the much-lauded Kenyan violence mapping project Ushahidi.

“We take that text-to-web thing lightly, for granted, in the Western context because we all have smartphones, and so the interaction between the phone and the computer seems a pretty straightforward thing,” said CFP general manager Claire Rhodes. “But actually, on an old-school, non-smart mobile phone handset, that’s actually a system that isn’t used.”

But as WeFarm discovered via a 2011 survey, even the existing technologies can’t entirely eradicate the barriers between the developing world and the web: “Mobile phone tariffs and internet charges are too expensive for many small-scale farmers and high illiteracy levels limit written communications, including SMS and email. Frequent power cuts make re-charging mobile phones a challenge.”

Ewan says it’s important to remember how much innovation there is going on around mobile, especially in the developing world. Phone companies, for example, who have a stake in making sure their customers use their devices frequently, supply them with free solar chargers. And down the road, Ewan says WeFarm hopes to make wider use of voice recognition technologies so that community members unable to write out a text can still get their questions answered.

But the immediate goal for WeFarm is to build a permanent user platform and execute a business plan that will actually generate revenue. “Something we’ve talked about a lot is whether or not people should pay for messages,” Ewan said, “I think it is important that people spend at least a minimum to send a message, because…people need to value the service and value the information that they’re getting from it.”

Ideally, especially helpful responders could one day see dividends from WeFarm — another important step in the journey toward monetizing accurate and accessible information. “If a farmer in Kenya shares a tip, and people around the world take advantage of that tip, then there’s a reward, value on that knowledge,” said Ewan, “and it’s generated through the WeFarm business model.”

Wikipedia Zero was designed specifically to give access to the site to people in developing countries with low quality networks or high data costs. Using funding from the News Challenge, Wikipedia will aim to improve the user experience on feature phones, increase the number of languages available on the mobile site, and provide new ways to access the site via SMS.

In most Western countries, Wikipedia is usually a few clicks or taps away, whether on a computer or a smartphone. That’s not the case elsewhere. “There’s still a lot of people with old Nokia phones,” said Kul Wadhwa, head of mobile and business development for the Wikimedia Foundation. “A large part of the world still uses that. We want to make sure we support everybody.”

Wikipedia Zero is like normal Wikipedia, just stripped down to its essential parts. It comes in two flavors: a mobile-friendly site and a text-only site. But beyond making these barebones versions of Wikipedia, Wikimedia partners with telecommunications companies that agree to provide access to their customers free of charge. So far Wikipedia Zero is available through mobile providers in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Tunisia, Thailand, and Malaysia. (It comes after Facebook found significant success in poorer countries with the similar Facebook Zero, which launched in 2010.) Wadhwa told me mobile access to Wikipedia grew 40 percent year-over year in 2012, while non-English mobile usage jumped 66 percent.

Making Wikipedia Zero work comes down to two big issues — cost and access, Wadhwa said. Cutting deals with mobile providers is one way of addressing those problems. Creating more efficient software for feature phones is another, he said.

In order for the program to expand, they’ll need to continue usability testing on different types of feature phones, as well as adding new functionality, such as accessing the site through SMS. They also need to pursue more research on how people use Wikipedia in different counties and what their needs are, he said. One problem is that no two communities or mobile users are alike. Because phone usage and network strength varies so much, Wadhwa said it’s been difficult to develop a standard software for feature phones.

The next step after making Wikipedia readable across multiple phones and languages, is allowing users to edit the site. Given the limitations on feature phones, that could present problems. “Editing an encyclopedia on a phone is not entirely practical, but there are ways to contribute,” he said.

Like many News Challenge winners, Wikipedia will be releasing their work as open source once it’s complete. Given that Wikipedia is primarily built on open source software, Wadhwa said it’s fitting they’ll be able to give back to the developer community with their project. With a sizable global market for feature phones, Wadhwa expects their software could find plenty of uses. “Hopefully it’s not just Wikipedia people access on their phone. If they can use the same codebase, that can work for others.”

Past News Challenge winners have been interested in these issues before, of course; FrontlineSMS, NextDrop, and Ushahidi come to mind. But even though most of today’s winning projects are still based in the United States, their targets are in places like Uganda, Peru, Kenya, and Tanzania.

Since smartphones don’t (yet) have the same market share in Angola and Bolivia as in Austin and Boston, many of the projects focus on bringing some of the information-navigation powers we associate with iPhones and the like to feature phones, like the old Nokias that blanket much of the world. Money for Wikipedia will support its Wikipedia Zero project, which through deals with mobile companies lets people have free access to the free encyclopedia. Abayima wants to use SIM cards as a storage mechanism. WeFarm wants to use SMS to allow farmers to seek answers to their questions about crops. RootIO wants to turn cheap phones into ad hoc radio stations.

This crop of winners (who will receive a combined $2.4 million) also continues the News Challenge’s gradual drift away from what might be defined as innovation within traditional journalism and toward finding other ways to meet the information needs of communities. It’s unlikely that any of these projects, for instance, will be of great use to, say, a night cops reporter in Des Moines.

It’s not that such uses are unimaginable; a little creative thinking could twist some of these projects to be of interest to the enterprising journalist interested in building engagement with local citizens. But they’re not the target in the same way that they might have been in the earlier rounds of the News Challenge. One wonders whether “News” Challenge will always remain the appropriate name. (Knight already has a Community Information Challenge, aimed at connecting local foundations with local news and information efforts.)

Knight’s press release also confirmed the (rough) start date of the next News Challenge round: A competition themed around open government will open in February. Another round, subject TBA, will follow later in the fall. You can watch the winners present their projects on Knight’s webstream Friday at 12:30 p.m. Eastern from the campus of Arizona State University. (Also, full disclosure: Knight Foundation is a funder of Nieman Lab, although not through the News Challenge.)

Here’s a breakdown of the winners.

Abayima — $150,000
Jon Gosier, Philadelphia
@jongos, @abayima

The majority of mobile phone users around the world use simple feature phones which, unlike smartphones, do not have advanced storage or secondary communication options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Abayima wants to build an open source application that people can use to store information to SIM cards — effectively turning the cards into storage devices and their mobile phones into e-readers. This app is particularly useful for sharing news and information in countries where communication networks are unsafe to use due to surveillance or where authorities or other circumstances have shut off access to the Internet altogether. The team has successfully piloted a program with Ugandan activists during the country’s 2011 elections, while all SMS traffic in the country was monitored for voices of dissent. With challenge funding, Abayima plans to build the kit as an open source, full service, easy-to-use platform which enables publishing to SIM cards.

RootIO — $200,000
Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Jude Mukundane, Los Angeles
@csik

Radio continues to be a powerful tool for community information, and the RootIO project amplifies it by mixing its power with new mobile and Internet technologies. RootIO is an open-source tool kit that allows communities to create their own micro radio stations with an inexpensive smartphone and transmitter, and to share, promote, and collaborate on dynamic content. The project will be piloted in Uganda in partnership with the Uganda Radio Network, UNICEF Uganda and UNICEF Innovation Unit.

Digital Democracy — $200,000
Emily Jacobi and Gregor MacLennan, New York
@emjacobi, @digidem

In remote parts of the Peruvian Amazon, where mining and oil drilling are impacting the environment, health and economies of indigenous communities, residents lack the tools to collect and report these events to the outside world. Digital Democracy, a nonprofit that builds community technology capacity in marginalized communities, will create and combine existing open software to produce a tool kit communities can use to share their stories and make informed choices. The team will work with local partners in the Peruvian Amazon to deploy and test the tool kit and train residents in its use.

Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation (CPF) — $260,000
Kady Murphy, Claire Rhodes and Kenny Ewan, London
@we_farm, @TheCPFoundation

Smallholder farmers in developing countries have limited access to support and best practices. The Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation, which designs projects to support small-scale farmers, will use mobile to address this need by building a platform allowing farmers to ask questions and share knowledge about any farming topic, have it translated by volunteers, answered by farmers in other communities and returned to them via basic SMS messages. Knight funds will enable the project, called WeFarm, to expand on successful pilots in Kenya, Peru and Tanzania, where farmers exchanged more than 4,600 SMS messages, an average of more than 70 per user, on topics such as frost control and animal husbandry.

Textizen — $350,000
Michelle Lee, Serena Wales, Alex Yule, San Francisco and Philadelphia
@textizen, @mishmosh, @gangleton, @yuletide

Textizen is building software to transform the citizen feedback loop. Across the country, a growing number of civic leaders are looking for new ways to connect with constituents. Neighborhood meetings are costly to run, and attendance isn’t always representative. By placing questions in physical places and inviting residents to respond from their mobile phones, Textizen creates new ways for meaningful civic participation. Started as a Code for America pilot project in Philadelphia, Textizen identified early best practices by experimenting with several types of campaigns. One, for example, asked for feedback on public transit changes by posing a text-to-vote question at a bus stop. Building on these pilots, the team will license the software to cities seeking to create new open, engaging channels for civic participation.

TKOH — $330,000
Kacie Kinzer, Tom Gerhardt, Caroline Oh, New York
@kaciekinzer, @tomgerhardt, @carolineyoh

Current tools for recording oral history, such as video cameras and professional audio equipment, can be difficult to use and hamper the social nature of a conversation. This project will ease the process by building a simple application that enables users of all experience levels to create rich audio/visual stories that can be archived and shared easily with groups of people, ranging from immediate family members to the extended user community, depending on the user’s preference. By making it easy to record and share stories amongst generations and communities, TKOH’s tool will make it possible to preserve the stories of target groups, including rural ranchers in New Mexico whose lives reflect a disappearing culture of endurance and gifted storytelling, before the app launches more broadly.

Wikimedia Foundation — $600,000
Kul Takanao Wadhwa, San Francisco
@wikimedia, @wikipedia

As mobile technology is increasingly the primary opportunity for billions of people around the world to access the Internet, the Wikimedia Foundation is working to remove the two biggest hurdles to access free knowledge: cost and accessibility. News Challenge funding will help create software to bring Wikipedia to lower-end, more basic phones — the kinds the majority of people use to access data outside of the West. Specifically, efforts will be focused in three areas: developing features to improve the mobile experience regardless of how feature-rich the device is – including new ways to access Wikipedia via text; increasing the number of languages that can access Wikipedia on mobile; and improving the way feature phones access the platform.

WITNESS — $320,000
Sam Gregory and Bryan Nunez (at WITNESS) and Nathan Freitas and Harlo Holmes (at Guardian Project)
@SamGregory, @Tech_wit, @N8FR8, @Harlo

In situations of conflict or civil unrest, where ordinary people are using their mobile phones to create and share media, news organizations and others have trouble authenticating the origins of photos, videos or audio. In collaboration with The Guardian Project, the international human rights organization WITNESS seeks to solve this problem by launching the InformaCam app. The mobile app allows users to incorporate key metadata in their video (who, what, where, corroborating identifiers), watermark it as coming from a particular camera, and share it in an encrypted format with someone the user trusts. News outlets, human rights organizations and everyday people could use the app in a variety of ways — for a breaking news story using first-hand video from a citizen journalist, sharing evidence of war crimes from a conflict zone, or to verify the images of a fender bender that someone could take to small claims court. Alongside this, WITNESS is advocating for incorporation of a “citizen witness” functionality based on InformaCam into other platforms and apps.

LocalData, winner in the data round of the Knight News Challenge, is working to simplify the data collection process through a specialized toolkit that will make it easy for civil servants or civilians to gather information about where they live and work.

LocalData is a combination of several things. It provides for the collection, organization, and visualization of information in one continuous system. It’s designed to be used beginning at the street level: City workers or community members can either use an app to register information directly or scan paper documentation into the system. From there the information can be exported into different formats for display or analysis.

With the $300,000 awarded from Knight, LocalData founders Alicia Rouault, Prashant Singh, and Matt Hampel will refine the interface and launch the service in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston. “We feel the impact this tool can have in other cities will be really robust,” Rouault told me.

What types of things will LocalData enable? Nonprofit organizations, community groups, or others can create custom surveys, which could be used for gathering demographic information about a residents in a particular neighborhood. Or it could be used to assess property within specific regions of city.

That’s what happened in Detroit, where LocalData operated as a pilot project. Rouault, Singh, and Hampel are Code for America fellows, and were sent to Detroit earlier this year to figure out what type of tools or project would best benefit the city. Working with the city, they beta tested what would become LocalData in a survey designed to assess urban blight. Rouault said they worked with community development groups and neighborhood associations to understand the information needs, but also the tools that would be most useful.

For the most part data collection is clipboard-based work, with pen and paper being the system of choice, she said. The digital tools available now are more oriented to the professionals, which creates a barrier for wider use, Rouault said.

“All the existing tools in this space are expert tools, so we wanted to make something that was geared towards democratizing and leveling the playing field when it comes to data collection,” she said.

That idea of democratizing tech, using it as a bridge between the community and the government, is likely one of the reasons LocalData appealed to Knight. Rouault said the project has uses for city hall, but also for citizen groups. It can be used to collect data that can help attract federal aid, or for advocacy dollars. The common goal, she said, is improving the broader community.

The reason the project is expanding across the county is because the organizers see similarities to Detroit in places like Boston, New York, and Chicago. They’re cities that have a mix of civic engagement and technology adoption. But Rouault said going all digital would be a mistake for LocalData because some people, either because of preference or lack of access, take the pen and paper route for information gathering. “The bread and butter of how these groups actually collect data is their volunteer capacity,” she said.

Rouault said they’re less changing the feature set in LocalData than refining it. One thing they want to improve is the ability to tie information to a location. Instead of just inputing data by a parcel of land, Rouault said users need to be able to pinpoint information in relation to other objects within an area. As they expand their effort, Rouault said they’ll continue to improve the app based on how people use it. “The kinds of things we’re gonna build out in the future will really meet the needs of the user, so as we build out to new cities we’re going to get more feedback from users,” she said.