current draft

Knight News Challenge cfp

From the website:

We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.

If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it! You have the opportunity to win funding for your project and support within a vibrant community of media, tech, and community-oriented people who want to improve the world.

There are three rules to follow to apply to the 2008-09 Knight News Challenge:

Get support for your application before you submit: The brand-new News Challenge Garage is a coaching and mentoring site for prospective applicants to talk with mentors and peers, check out previous winners’ applications and improve your application before you submit.

Applications for the 2008-09 cycle will be taken starting September 2, 2008 and close on November 1, 2008.

Draft One

Project Title- Neighborhood/Noosphere

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:

Expected amount of time to complete project:

Total cost of project including all sources of funding:

Describe your project (1800 characters):

-tech talk: keep it brief, but in a nutshell, define web 2.0 as a description of the way technology is involved in a necessary cultural shift from consumption of technology to participation and production with technology, in a creative commons, towards social goals. The original promise and potential of the web may be renewed through open applications and services that emphasize the goals of the users over the goals of the latest business model in the technology sector. Knowledge gets made in communities, and as the business of technology moves away from PCs towards envisioning networks as platforms (web as OS), geographically-defined communities of users (Mt. Zion, Tomlinson, Monroe, etc) may find opportunities to leverage this technological shift for specific social goals.

The physical code layer: need funding for tech support....

Because proprietary computer culture and economics have become so prohibitive while remaining so prominent, we argue that a more diverse open source culture can emerge if greater segments of the population could access the social technologies born of the open source programming ethic. We argue further that there is a correlation between open source technology and values and the shift in quotidian and pedagogical values from consumption to production. In her study of the Peruvian open source movement, MIT's Anita Chan, it's the "recodability of political and civic bodies--rather than the recodability of technology and free software itself--that's most at stake in movements for free software legislation," and...... (Chan). Community networks running on open source technology and facilitating open source community-forming practices can help us move out of dependency and

-Pat: describe Mt. Zion and the communities served

-USFSP partnership: lots of potential. Mentoring, modeling, tutoring, teaching/learning

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities? (750 characters)

-"safe zone" or "neutral zone" where creativity and learning can flourish

-alternative approaches to solving problems and stoking creativity are welcomed and nurtured at Mt. Zion

-proximity to JHOP

-using FOSS (free and open source software) and Ubuntu Linux server software networks, groups of users can build and expand upon existing radio and print journalism projects and establish community databases

-writing components:

pen pal programs: within Mt. Zion, between schools and across neighborhoods, connections to Tomlinson Center, etc

these 1-to-1 communication practices can be expanded into community writing projects via mentoring + social media (wiki, twitter, youtube)

How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists) (750 characters)

-the "mesh" of cultures is the innovation. While proprietary software is a business model, open source software is connected to a culture of learning and networking that promises to amplify already existing cultures and practices in the Mt. Zion area, and create new possibilities, as well. In other words, far from resting on the premise that technology itself is panacea for social imbalance, this proposal is motivated by the belief that free software will open doors to already thriving knowledge practices in our communities and schools. In Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday L,ife Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu and Alicia Headlam Hines explain that "when we limit our discussions of technology simply to computer hardware and software, we see only a 'digital divide' that leave people of color behind" (5). Many people falling through the rift of the so-called "digital divide" already have valuable skills, technological and otherwise, but no resources for developing them into life-long learning practices in technological contexts. This project's understanding of culture is open, broad, and inclusive, and is informed by J.A. Freese's translation of Isocrates' discussion of common culture in his most famous work, the Panygericus, where Isocrates defines culture as a "badge of education."

What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?

-Pat's experience of 25 years

-Trey's qualifications, research into p2p pedagogy, music and rhetoric in the digital age; early grant efforts forging connections between open source culture and community literacy

-this project is designed to be sustainable beyond the grant period. Because the goal and ethic is open source (an ethic most famously compressed by Eric S. Raymond's share early and often mantra), our projects are designed to be exportable to other neighborhoods and contexts throughout St. Pete. Community centers can/should be hubs for an emergent participatory technology infrastructure in St. Pete.