Not surprisingly, there were dozens of submissions that suggested a way to “wikify” something, but I was a bit curious to find that only three of the entire three hundred proposals actually contained the word “dashboard.”

The idea of a breaking news dashboard is not entirely unique in itself, but it is still lacking on the web in a truly rich collaborative fashion. We’ve seen individual news outlets themselves provide a one stop shop type experience for breaking stories (i.e. The Guardian during the Copenhagen climate talks, The Huffington Post during the Tucson Shootings) but it only contains their selective coverage rather than a cross network experience.

Breaking news populates pretty quick on Wikipedia, but the experience is limited to the capabilities of the MediaWiki platform, and only those who are willing and capable of using the MediaWiki syntax to create it. Not to mention the lack of streaming tweets, images, video, maps, and all other forms of real time interaction.

There are many flavors of individual news dashboards (iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, My Yahoo), but they are still missing true community features. These services do offer various levels of collaboration, but they all require a lot of moderation and are not anywhere near scalable for millions of people to contribute.

So how do we fix this?

Regnard Raquedan’s idea is to come up with a ranking system that determines a piece of media’s ability to make it to the front page of the dashboard, known as an REP (rich event page). That way editorial decisions are truly in the hands of the crowd and the dashboard is simply a window into what their seeing, or should be seeing, via REPRank. As you see by his mockup sketch, he’s thought of a useful layout to take in the information and keep tabs on what’s happening as it happens.

It’s tempting to debate the metrics and criteria for the REPRank system, but that will have to be a conversation for another day. Let’s just assume it works swimmingly, there is still one issue to overcome.

The much talked about filter bubble syndrome.

The problem with the old school media was that it acted as an authority and left out less popular, yet important voices. While intelligently crowdsourced media may offer more depth, how will it cover breadth?

Here’s an idea. What about two tabs at the top, one displaying a page with all the highest ranked materials nicely laid out, and another “waiting room” page that uses a list display, which anyone can add to. To avoid overload you could still sort it by date/time added, or with tags, and watch it work its way to the main page.

A commenter on Regnard’s submission page took the liberty to ask the platform question, just as he did for Chris Keller’s somewhat similar “living topic page” idea, and I think Regnard gave the correct answer, which is no platform. If the REP system were built, it would display natively in the web browser using HTML5, with a possible Android companion app to make it more mobile friendly. This lives a very wide open challenge to come up with a universal ranking system that can pick up media published from a diverse set of tools, but we enjoy challenges here, and I wish Regnard the best of luck in his pursuit.

It goes without saying that the best part of being involved with the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Challenge (voting ends June 19th, come out and play!) is the opportunity to interact with brilliant people.

Ted Han holds one of those fantastic hybrid minds that not only can chew on a batch of code and spit out something shiny, but also thinks outside of the box that the code has to live in. Ted sent in a number of proposals across the board covering all thee challenges. The two entries I’m particularly fond of demonstrate not only technical chops, but fresh ways of thinking about the news process as a whole. Here’s why they speak to me:

What can Journalism learn from Text-based Adventures?

I’m a sucker for the classics, and all of us who’ve been on computers long enough have a soft spot for text based adventure games (no graphics, just a written story that respond to commands that the player types in). Ever since a friend informed me of the underground resurgence of interactive fiction, I couldn’t help but wonder how we can harness the power and purity of text to become interactive non-fiction.

Regardless of the new storytelling methods and sensory experiences that the future brings, it will be a long time before we come up with something that is truly as accessible and adaptable as good old fashioned text.

People who are interested in making their own interactive stories have more options than ever, with new programming languages such as Inform7 that are designed to be used by people who only know plain English. With the steady ubiquity of personal reading devices on the market, there’s a great opportunity to communicate rich experiences using a simple medium that we all can understand. Ted has a lot of interesting observations on the similarities between TbA games and the journalistic process, as well the transformative potential that TbA games hold. As he notes,

“The key narrative feature that both news pieces and TbAs share is an anticipation of what users know and wish to know. However, where Journalism simply attempts to target a safe lowest common denominator which presumes only what all users know in an attempt to cover the broadest swath of readership, TbAs offer users the ability to discover and investigate narrative elements in further depth, should they so choose.”

But like I said, Ted doesn’t just lay down obscure gonzo theory, he likes to deal with the nuts and bolts as well. Through another submission he asks:

Why isn’t there a visual web scraper builder?

Good question. Let’s bring scraping to the masses! As he notes in the comments:

“Turns out there are a few visual web scrapers, none of which are free unfortunately. http://www.needlebase.com/ does some cool things, but unfortunately limits it’s utility unless you pay for an account. And i’m still exploring http://www.outwit.com/“

I’m sure there’s a lot that can be done with those tools, but there will always be a lot more that can be done when we’re building them together and keeping them free.
Now that we all make data like bees make honey, Journalists need to be ready and willing to harvest it without fear of getting stung by technology.

This entry is also a great testament to the support of the Drumbeat community, as another commenter suggested

“It’d be interesting to see if you could partner up with http://scraperwiki.com/, who are already doing some pretty good work in trying to make scraping more non-programmer-friendly.”

This reminds me of two things:

1. It’s important that we have a grasp of who’s doing what already, and I actually had a chance to introduce myself to Ted while we were jamming on this EtherPad, which has some great examples of groundbreaking projects entering the news innovation arena. Feel free to add some stuff there that we missed so we can get them over to the MoJo Wiki
2. Leaving comments are really helpful! The review team will be looking at them while selecting the “MoJo 60″ who will be moving on to the Learning Lab (which we’ll get to a bit later…), and more importantly, the idea creators will be reading them and will warmly appreciate you stopping by.

You have only until June 19th to vote for your favorite submissions, so check ‘em out and support the brave pioneers who made their brains sweat in hopes of building something to benefit us all.

Also check out my previous knight-mozilla highlight on Dan Schultz’s C-SPAN makeover, titled “ATTN-SPAN“

Now that the 2011 submissions for the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation challenge are officially closed until next season, the team is going to be highlighting some of the more intriguing ideas that made our eyebrows dance.

Note that this is just an exercise to generate discussion, and all opinions are my own and have no effect on the results of the challenge. It’ll be up to our stellar review panel to decide who advances to the Learning Lab and gets a shot at the full salary fellowship.

Please allow me to raise my first glass to Dan Schultz, who’s proposing to give C-SPAN a civic facelift and harvest the juice out of what appears to be boring (yet influential) humans talking too close into a microphone. C-SPAN is a non-profit organization funded by affiliate fees that the cable and satellite networks have to pony up, and it’s a shame that the content isn’t being delivered in a more relevant and engaging way. Not yet at least.

Dan would like to see personalized syndication channels that only show you the stuff that matters to you, as well as the ability to highlight, flag, and discuss certain clips that are important, and see how they compare with the selections of others.

This idea has a lot of great elements folded into it that all work together to make his entry shine. Dan wants to take an existing public service and make it better, so rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, he’s grabbing a few and building a hot rod on top of them. He’s looking to incorporate other baseline technologies into the works, particularly MetaVid, which uses open video technology to match government transcriptions to C-SPAN footage of the people speaking them. Lastly, his submission lays a foundation for amazing possibilities down the road, such as adding in government data (like stuff from the Sunlight APIs) and citizen shot footage (The Uptake anyone!?) that could potentially make this project breathe sweet knowledge for generations to come.

Also, quick random note, I remember seeing some interesting C-SPAN clips getting passed around the net a while back from the eccentric fellow at cspanjunkie.org, so I decided to pay him a visit and discovered that the 6,400 C-SPAN clips he had uploaded to YouTube were taken down by Google, presumably due to copyright complaints (?). So as we currently stand, if you want to share public footage of our own government’s deliberations, your best option is to buy a cable subscription and babysit a DVR all day, transcode, tag, and upload the footage to a youtube account that ends up being terminated into thin air for history to forget.

This is why Mozilla’s commitment to a free and open web will remain critical for a long time to come.

What do you think? Leave your comments here, or go to Dan’s submission page to vote and give him some feedback!

Depressed that you missed the deadline for this year’s innovation challenge? Do not fret, you have a chance to redeem yourself, we’re doing it all again in 2012!