MediaShift Idea Lab

LocalWiki Now Speaks Portuguese, German and Russian

philipn@gmail.com (Philip Neustrom) — Fri, 25 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

While LocalWiki's roots are in the United States, we've seen increasing interest in starting projects all over the globe. One barrier, however, has been that our interface is entirely in English -- at least it was until now.

Thanks to the hard work of Pedro Lima and Nuno Maltez in Portugal, LocalWiki is now completely internationalized and can be easily translated into any language!

Pedro and Nuno have started a beautiful LocalWiki project for the city of Porto, Portugal: por.to. So far, they've been using their LocalWiki to collect information about the remarkable architecture around the city.

Porto residents are using LocalWiki to document their unique architecture.
This is Casa do Cinema Manuel de Oliveira. (Photo c/o Sérgio Barbosa)

Right now we've got translations for Portuguese (thanks to por.to), German (thanks to some folks in Sissach, Switzerland), and Russian.

We need lots more translations! If you'd like to help with translations, just email contact@localwiki.org.

How the AP's Overview Turns Documents Into Pictures

jstray@ap.org (Jonathan Stray) — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Overview produces intricate visualizations of large document sets -- beautiful, but what do they mean? These visualizations are saying something about the documents, which you can interpret if you know a little about how they're plotted.

Same documents, different visualizations

There are two visualizations in the current prototype version of Overview, and both are based on document clustering.

The first is the items plot, which grew out of the proof-of-concept system we presented a year ago. Every document is a dot. Similar documents get pulled together to form visible groups, that is, clusters. All the dots start grey, but become colored as you apply tags while exploring the document set. You can click on individual documents to view them, or select a whole region of documents to see what they have in common.

Overview also has a "tree" view. Documents are still organized into clusters, but each "node" in the tree is an entire cluster, not just a single document. Also, the clusters are hierarchical, meaning that the larger clusters (higher up the tree) contain all the documents within their child clusters (lower down the tree.) The bottom of the window displays the top words and two-word phrases from the selected nodes. In this case, the selected node contains press releases discussing oil industry subsidies.

The tree view and the items plot show the same thing, just in different ways. When you select documents in one view, the same documents are selected in the other. They're two different ways of looking at the same set of clusters: hierarchically categorized, or laid out visually.

Extracting key words

All of Overview's clustering depends on grouping similar documents together, but what does that mean? Conceivably, two documents might be "similar" because they were written by the same person, talk about the same event, or came from the same place. There are as many potential categorization schemes as there are stories.

But Overview doesn't know any of this. Instead, it breaks down documents by words and short phrases. It starts by counting how many times each word appears in each document. Frequent words are "key" words. But the language processing also discounts words which appear in too many documents. This gets rid of common English words like "the" and "is," but also suppresses words which are very common in your specific set of documents. If most documents from a set of police reports contain the word "crime," Overview will mostly ignore that word.

Two documents are similar if they have overlapping sets of key words. A cluster is a set of documents that are all pretty similar to one another, and less similar to all other documents. This sounds insanely naive; after all, this word counting process throws away pretty much all of the syntactic information in the text, including word order. It can't differentiate between "police hit protesters" and "protesters hit police." But it can group together all the documents that talk about police and protesters, and that by itself is useful enough. In fact, variations of this basic algorithm, called the vector space model, are used by every search engine.

Where do those documents go?

This simple, word-based technique determines where each document is placed in the visualizations. In the Items plot, Overview tries to place similar documents close together. Collections of documents with similar words (and two-word phrases) naturally form groups, or clusters. Clusters with similar topics tend to be nearby. But that's the extent of the process; the exact angle or position of each document and cluster doesn't mean anything at all. In fact, it depends somewhat on the initial, random position of the documents, and every time you run Overview you will get a slightly different visualization -- the same clusters will show up, but possibly in different places.

The tree view finds not only clusters but sub-clusters. In the example above, the yellow branch of the tree contains the key words "fees, credit card, consumers, airlines." The left sub-branch has key words "fees, credit card, consumers" and the right branch has key words "fees, airlines, surcharges." One sub-cluster is about credit card fees, while the other is about airline fees. They've been grouped into one larger cluster because they both contain many occurrences of the word "fees".

For more information, see the discussion of our WikiLeaks visualization. Or if you're really into all the gory details -- including how Overview creates these visualizations efficiently, even for large document sets -- we've recently published a technical paper in collaboration with the University of British Columbia.

With a little practice and experimentation, you can learn how to read Overview's visualizations effectively. If you want to use Overview for your own work, it's important to get a feel for what these visualization can tell you -- and what they can't.

Top 12 Social Technologies from MIT Media Lab and Beyond

natematias@gmail.com (J. Nathan Matias) — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

During my work on Social Mirror, tablet tech for social checkups, I have been inspired by other amazing Media Lab social technologies. Here are 12 of the projects which I have found most inspiring, including one or two from other universities.

Did I miss a project you love? Post your favorites in the comments.

Social Empowerment through Networks

Can social checkups empower marginalized teenagers? In 2001, Leo Burd, now a researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media, conducted several paper-based studies at Computer Clubhouse, with positive results. Leo is now an adviser on the Social Mirror software.

Leo Bonnani's SourceMap uses networks to optimize industries and encourage ethical sourcing. Using beautiful touchscreen displays, industry representatives pool information about their supply chains to plan economic development and highlight supply chain ethics (blog post here).

Big Data Network Research

We're bad at identifying the relationships that matter most to us. Nadav Aharony's Ph.D. on Social fMRI with Alex (Sandy) Pentland quantifies the difference between our perceptions and the reality of what our relationships really are. The people we think we trust are often different from the people we actually spend time with or call on the phone. In a future with better data privacy, automated behavior-mining technology such as Funf will outperform Social Mirror, which relies on the perceptions rather than behavior.

What is the economic value of a water-cooler? Ben Waber's Media Lab spinout company Sociometric Solutions tracks face-to-face interactions and extracts social signals from speech and body movements. Using "sociometric badges," Ben's company can quantify the value of social interactions towards factors like social performance. (See Alex Pentland's HBR article "The New Science of Building Great Teams.")

What do our emails reveal about our relationships? In 1995, Judith Donath created the Visual Who, one of the first network analyses of social interactions online. At the lab, Judith's Sociable Media Group created dozens of groundbreaking technologies in the social media space. Judith has moved on to Harvard's Berkman Center, where she continues fascinating research on online communities and virtual identities.

When to invest in plastics. Cesar Hidalgo applies network science to high-impact economic questions. Built together with Alexander Simoes, the Atlas of Economic Complexity breaks an economy into its component parts to tell governments what new industries provide the highest yield within the current capabilities of their infrastructure.

The Power of Online Networks

Were the revolutions tweeted? In this amazing paper and data visualization, researchers from SocialFlow, the Web Ecology Project, and Microsoft Research examine the role of Twitter in the Arab Spring. One of the project's authors, Erhardt Graeff, joins the Center for Civic Media this fall.

Can trust online turn into trust in person? Network scientist Lada Adamic (UMich) has carried out a fascinating study of trust among CouchSurfers. Want to learn social network analysis? This September, she's teaching a massive online course on Social Network Analysis.

How can networks boost the power of sharing? Andres Monroy-Hernandez intentionally designed for remix when creating the online learning community for MIT's Scratch. The network of sharing within the Scratch community is amazing.

Recommending Relationships

Can algorithms suggest good mentor relationships? Catherine Havasi and her company Luminoso use the power of networks and natural language processing to automatically pair hundreds of entrepreneurs with experienced mentors.

A new paradigm for social computing. Sep Kamvar, a luminary of Social Search and Social Datamining, is creating a new programming language, Dog, for social applications. Watch his amazing talk on Community Computing.

A version of this post also appeared on the MIT Center for Civic Media's blog.

How FrontlineSMS Users Could Monitor Kenya's 2013 Elections

florence@frontlinesms.com (Florence Scialom) — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

The FrontlineSMS user community has seen a growing number of user meet-ups across the world in recent months. It's exciting to see community members come together and share opinions and experiences on our software. This is a guest column by FrontlineSMS user Joseph Owuondo, who attended a recent meet-up in Nairobi hosted at the FrontlineSMS offices.

The FrontlineSMS meet-up held in Nairobi at the beginning of April brought together a number of organizations, individuals and experts who focus their work on elections and conflict resolution-related issues -- and who all have an interest in the potential use of FrontlineSMS for monitoring Kenya's upcoming 2013 elections. Over lunch, we talked about how to manage a FrontlineSMS system from both a program-design perspective and a technical perspective.

My attendance at the meet-up was motivated by my own desire to use technology to reshape and reconstruct patterns of social interdependence, and thus have a positive influence on peace and stability. Being a self-made technologist, I have worked to train communities on both FrontlineSMS and the Crowdmap and Ushahidi platforms. I have found great satisfaction in training others to perform important communications tasks with the support of community participation -- and all enabled through technology.

It's important to connect with others using technology for social change, because technology does not, in itself, make an enterprise -- relationships do! Daudi Were of Ushahidi emphasized that during the meet-up, saying that technology makes up less than 10% of social tech projects, and human partnerships and relationships play a significant part in engendering transformational social and economic change in the long-term.

why collaboration matters

It's true that the most exciting breakthroughs in our time will not occur because of technology as such, but because of our expanding ability to support each other. This can be enabled through technology, but it is the people themselves who make it happen.
FrontlineSMS has created a customized platform, which can be used to connect with and target communications with local people. During the meet-up, we explored the need for improved collaboration between those seeking to monitor the Kenyan elections using FrontlineSMS and other open-source technology tools. It was highlighted that it's important for groups to share key information to avoid duplication of efforts. Continued networking and communication is needed between all stakeholders.

To keep this collaborative ethos on track, a few days after the meet-up a Google Group for it was formed which will help provide a platform to share information and developments of various organizations working around Kenya electoral issues. The Google Group will help people stay connected -- but technology does not drive change, it enables change. We should all use this and other channels to share details of our own work, if the group will reach its potential.

Meanwhile, the demand for innovative technology grows, and I continue to train community-based organizations. Soon I will be moving from Kenya to the U.S., where I hope to join FrontlineSMS user community members based there and continue to exchange shared learning!

If you would like to join the Google Group for FrontlineSMS users based in Kenya planning to monitor upcoming elections, click here. You can also engage with FrontlineSMS' use community on the support forum, and if you'd like to suggest a meet-up in your region or find out where other FrontlineSMS user meet-ups are happening across the world, then join the Meet-Ups group on the forum today!

Joseph Owuondo most recently served as a project support manager in the Partnership for Peace Project - PfP, a European Union and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung-funded project in Kenya. Under the same project, he trained and served as Local Peace Expert. Courtesy of the PfP and Institute of for Technology and Social Change - TechChange, he specialized in FrontlineSMS and Ushaidi-Crowdmap technologies and has trained a number of community organizations on these technologies for enabling social change within those communities.

A version of this post also appeared on the FrontlineSMS blog.

ROFLCon Attendees Get a Memes Blast From the Past

stempeck@gmail.com (Matt Stempeck) — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

It's 2012. Nerds are in, and Internet memes can actually make you famous IRL. But way back in 2000, things were different. YouTube didn't exist, and a video had to be sent around as an email attachment. (Remember RealPlayer?) Your mom yelled at you for tying up the phone line, and GeoCities plastered banners all over your creations.

At ROFLCon, the past was well-represented during a recent presentation by Eric Wu of Eric Conveys an Emotion (founded in 1998); Zblofu of Zombocom; and Jonti Picking of Weebl's Stuff. They were all online in the '90s, but things really exploded in 2000.

revisiting old memes

With Eric Conveys an Emotion, Wu shot still photos of himself conveying requested emotions, gradually growing more complicated, from sad to conveying sarcastic respect for an authority figure.

During the presentation, the crowd groaned as we revisited hamsterdance.com and saw how commercialized the once-pure GIF-overloaded page has become. But its spirit lives on at sites like omfgdogs.com.

Then we turned to Weebl, who's created an unreal amount of animated GIFs on Weebl's Stuff. We got to revisit one of the Weebl classics, Badger Badger.

Next up was Zombocom. According to BoingBoing's Rob Beschizza, the event moderator, Zombocom perfectly represents the experience on the Internet in 2000: content solely consisting of Flash animations, a permanent loading circle, and a repeating sound clip perpetually welcoming users to Zombocom.

how they got started

Wu came to the internet via AOL, like many of us in the 1990s. He started his site over a summer in college, complete with a Jackie Chan image gallery and movie reviews. A friend encouraged him to post faces and solicit emotion requests. A few months in, people who were not his friends started sending requests. He obliged. "I always said I would stop when it stopped being fun. And I haven't updated since 2006, so ..." Weebl similarly reflected on his beginnings on the Internet with AOL.

Zblofu started Zombocom as a test. At the time, SpunkyTown was a company of 50 or so people paid with venture funding to do nothing but create Flash animations.

where they are now

Wu went to Silicon Valley and worked for Yahoo for six years. He's now a general manager of an ice cream shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he's experimenting with a Nyancat flavor: cream cheese ice cream with a swirl of raspberry and chunks of poptart and rainbow sprinkles. He's also working on a new project: He's looking for a huge dataset of faces occupying different emotions to use as an educational tool for helping people with Asperger's and autism.

Weebl continues to make funny animations.

Zblofu makes music and works for a calendar company, which ironically, only takes six months a year. "I don't even want to go into calendars ..." Beschizza asked: "What goes into making a calendar?" "Not much," Zblofu replied.

What's changed online since 2000?

The Internet has "definitely become more social," Wu said. According to Weebl: "Back then, everyone had personal websites. But now, the destinations are always the same: Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc." Zblofu agreed: "There are basically only five websites out there ... I miss the individual creativity."

Beschizza sees lower barriers to entry to producing content online. The technical and financial barriers are lower -- you can just go to YouTube. This allows the culture to become more centralized in these privately owned repositories of content.

We're talking about monetization now. Back in the day, website owners sold ad space in order to pay for their own hosting costs. Independent websites found themselves in the unwelcome position of hiring an ad sales person rather than rely on pennies from AdSense.

As the conversation waned, we returned to omfgdogs.com -- because you can't go wrong with animated dogs and rainbows. As Wu said, "I like cool cats and dogs. Every night I trade cat and dog pictures."

Q&A

The following is an edited transcript of the question-and-answer session that ensued.

Q: What's the average visitor time on Zombocom?

Zblofu: A pretty long time. Some people would just leave it on 24 hours a day.

Who's the voice behind Zombocom?

Zblofu: That's the one thing I'm not allowed to talk about.

Speaking to the idea of past, present, future, do you think what you were known for then would have been successful today? If our online environment is more saturated today, how do you stand out?

Picking: I think if you knew the answer to that you'd be very rich.

Wu: Very funny, immediately understood. If I did it today, it'd be much more social. The requests would go to a big list, and the best face would win.

Why are we just finding out who's behind Zombocom?

Zblofu: [The ROFLCon organizers] are the first people who called, so I said, "Sure." My name is on the WhoIs.

Do you like pancakes?

Picking: Yes.

Which creation is your favorite?

Picking: Walk in the woods.

Did anyone ever take Zombocom seriously and think there'd eventually be a real site there?

Zblofu: I did. [There are people who study this sort of thing and have over-analyzed it and written papers on it.]

Who do you wish was on this panel?

Wu: The Homestar Runner guys. I looked them up on Wikipedia, and they're working on Yo Gabba Gabba. Superbad. Not the movie, but the site.

If I buy you a beer later, will you sing one of your Weebl songs?

Picking: If you make it a whiskey, then yeah. [Sings "Kenya." The crowd goes wild.]

Harvard student Lexi Ross contributed to this post. A longer version of this post can be found on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog.

How the Indie Audio Community Is Transforming Storytelling

jesse@metalab.harvard.edu (Jesse Shapins) — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

A version of this post also appeared in the Association of Independent's in Radio monthly AIRBlast.

I first started working with independent producer Kara Oehler in 2005. Almost a day didn't pass without her telling me about something that happened on the "AIRDaily" listserve. I'd been on listservs before, but I had never actually talked to other people about them. These conversations with Kara were my introduction to the network of more than 800 makers brought together by AIR.

At the time, I was living in New York but was partially still in Berlin, where I was completing the multimedia project The Colors of Berlin. In Brooklyn, I was enmeshed in starting UnionDocs, a documentary arts center in Williamsburg, and also engrossed in launching Yellow Arrow, a place-based storytelling project combining stickers, mobile phones and the web. A self- taught artist and designer, documentary bled through all of my work, more as a way of seeing the world and approaching artistic practice than as a specific set of rules -- let alone a single medium, despite the fact that when most people hear the word they immediately think of a film.

As I continued working with Kara and better got to know this remarkable community of indie audio producers, what struck me most was its open, heterogeneous approach to documentary. It's very hard to put a finger precisely on the reasons why this exists. But my hunch is that because audio documentary is a relatively fluid genre that operates in so many different contexts at such varied lengths (broadcast news magazines, long-form series, live performance, "listening rooms," etc.), the people engaged in it are more open to redefining and experimenting with its boundaries than those who are entrenched in more established modes of documentary (e.g., classic voiceover-driven video docs).

I am now deeply involved in collaborating with this community through Localore. Since the beginning, Zeega has been involved with AIR's Localore, a broad constellation of producer-led innovation projects embedded at local radio and television stations across the county. Over the next nine months, Zeega is working with eight of the 10 Localore projects. Each project is tackling the same set of problems, but every one will have a distinctive design and conceptual framework.

At Zeega, we love this challenge. We create projects across multiple platforms, connect digital media to physical spaces, and develop open-source tools that enable anyone to experiment with the web as a creative medium. These days, this means spending a lot of time talking about the future of interactive documentary from SXSW to the launch of the OpenDocLab at MIT, from the European i-docs Festiva to dialogues with colleagues at Frontline and PRX to a day-long session at the TriBeca Film Festival to last week's Hot Docs. During all these conversations, I've been thinking about what distinguishes Localore from other initiatives.

Here are a few speculative early stage thoughts.

Audio is driving innovative web experiences

By and large, the public discussion around the future of interactive documentary has been led by the film community (e.g. Mozilla's Popcorn project) and researchers (e.g., Mandy Rose and Sandra Gaudenzi). The most significant venue for experimentation over the past years has been the National Film Board of Canada.

While filmmakers and TV stations are a part of Localore (we are thrilled to be working with Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar!), the primary impetus for the initiative is the audio community. In my mind, this starting point offers a very unique opportunity.

One of the things we've been talking about a lot at Zeega is how important sound is to high-quality immersive experiences online. Probably my favorite interactive documentary is "Welcome to Pine Point." Made by The Goggles, a design duo formerly behind Adbusters, the visual design is certainly a major part of what makes the work so incredible. But it's the sound which grabs you right from the beginning, with the buzz of the fly playing with the loading animation, and is sustained throughout with atmospheric music, archival audio and other simple, but highly evocative effects, such as slight rustling when we see wheat in the foreground. (For more on The Goggles, see this recent Transom post).

Another recent Canadian Film Board project where audio drives the experience is "Bear 71." What's fascinating to me, is that this is basically a linear audio segment that was written for voice, around which users can explore a trove of interactive experiences at their own pace. Overall, I think this works remarkably well. The linear story sustains your attention and narrative engagement, while you control the visual unfolding.

A first wave of thinking about radio's transition to the web seemed to be simply how to make audio files that were produced for broadcast available online. Then there was podcasting, a unique digital distribution mechanism that opened up new audiences and forced a rethinking of format. Increasingly, reporters have been asked to produce text in tandem with their audio pieces, plus images or slideshows that illustrate the sound. The problem with all of these approaches is that they are looking to translate traditional audio practices for online instead of thinking about what unique characteristics drive the web and how audio can inform these.

Neither of these Canadian projects were made by people whose backgrounds were primarily in audio, but I think they illustrate the capacity for audio to be the backbone of rich, interactive experiences that could only be realized in an online environment. And I think these approaches are just the beginning of the potential for creative combinations of sound, story and interaction.

A recent project with audio that Zeega worked on at the foundation is Pejk Malinovski's "Passing Stranger," a sound-rich chronicle of poets and poetry associated with the East Village. Initially developed as an audio tour, we worked with Pejk to conceive of a web-based experience. Instead of trying to illustrate each location with tightly synced visuals, we focused our thinking on how to keep sound at the center of the experience, but use video to draw people into the embodied sense of standing on location. Explicitly rejecting a literal attempt at illustration, each location has a simple full-screen video of the contemporary location, shot from a tripod, coupled with Pejk's produced audio.

To drive home the unique relationship of sound and moving image, you can pause the audio, but the video continues playing, which mimics the experience one would have standing on the street -- you can pause an iPod, but the world outside will always keep moving. (You can see this interaction here.)

Authorship in this new space is essential

The changing nature of authorship is one of the questions discussed over and over in the interactive documentary community. In part, this is fueled by general enthusiasm throughout the media industry for user-generated content and the (I would say misplaced) notion that now that the tools of recording are so widely available, everyone can be a producer and share their story. One thing I've learned from the audio documentary community over the years is that good storytelling is very, very hard -- in any medium.

Because radio can't rely on images to carry a narrative or evoke a mood, radio storytellers tend to be some of the most exceptional at crafting poignant stories and refusing to let a single moment of potential boredom creep into a narrative. In my experience, This American Life and Radiolab are two of the most successful examples in any media form of tying quality reporting to captivating, surprising personal stories. And it's no coincidence, in my mind, that The Moth is a part of the public radio ecosystem and not TV or film.

This expertise in quality, short-form storytelling will be a huge advantage for the radio
community as it makes the transition to creatively combining broadcast and the web from the beginning of projects. This editorial rigor translates not only into the audio components of interactive projects, but to works as a whole.

Another thing we've been talking a lot about at Zeega is the notion of "editing interactive" -- in other words, submitting interface ideas to the same intense editorial process that a story would receive. This forces us to treat interfaces as forms of time-based media, imagining in great detail the sequence of a user's experience. And it requires giving special attention to moments of transition (a classic editorial challenge), which in an interactive context can be addressed in many ways, such as through subtle animations from one click to the next or by atmospheric sound that persists through scenes.

Participatory experiences are also authored. Audiences may be able to participate in new and powerful ways, but they can't necessarily craft extraordinary stories on their own. A great example of this editorial rigor applied to interactive experience is Chris Milk's "Johnny Cash Project." Not a conventional documentary, the starting point is a web-based music video for "Ain't No Grave," Cash's last studio recording. The site has a very simple structure -- you start by watching the video. Music begins in tandem with evocative, grayscale hand-drawn images. Below the main player, there is an unconventional timeline composed of a moving grid of tiny thumbnails. If you click to explore this, the video stops on that frame, and you realize that each of the little images is a different drawing of that frame. And you are then prompted to draw your own interpretation of the frame.

But instead of a totally open format, the site has a built-in drawing feature that provides you a reference image from the original video on top of which to draw. You are provided highly constrained tools (e.g., it must grayscale) for drawing. Instead of feeling limited, these constraints are incredibly enabling, as it's fun and simple. The rule set focuses a contributor's creative energy. After drawing the frame, you can submit it to be included in the website, and your name is added to the credits of the overall project.

Interactive documentary tied to broadcast fosters the unexpected

One of the major challenges facing interactive documentaries is distribution. The Canadian Film Board's work has the benefit of being showcased on a site that receives significant traffic and promotion by the government. Many interactive documentary projects, though, are independent initiatives (even if they have broadcaster support), and to my knowledge, no major projects recently have been tied directly to broadcast series.

A requirement for all of the Localore projects is that they're to be developed in the context of a local public media station. I think this is brilliant and one more quality that sets the initiative apart from others internationally. The potential for this broadcast element is tremendous. It ensures a significant initial audience, enabling novel forms of participatory documentary.

My first experience with tying broadcast to digital was Mapping Main Street, a project made with Kara, Ann Heppermann, and James Burns as part of MQ2, AIR's first-generation innovation project preceding Localore.

What I loved about creating a project like this is that you initiate something open-ended, and you actually have no idea what people will do. And you can learn from what people do -- and the surprising things they do can become the center of a project. For example, Amy Fichter (aka xenia elizabeth) heard the series on her local station, along with the prompt to contribute photos of Main Streets nearby. She proceeded to use the project as an impetus to travel around her region of western Wisconsin, taking photos and talking to people in towns that she had often passed through but in which she had never stopped. Amy documented so many Main Streets that when a gallery owner ran into her taking photos on the gallery's Main Street, the ensuing conversation led to an exhibition of her Mapping Main Street photos.

While it's possible to create sustained engagement with a project that is not tied to broadcast, I think broadcast makes a major difference in generating an initial wave of participation and having a constant connection to a community of contributors. This is a huge advantage for the radio community.

We hear over and over about the death of local news, but local public media stations are unique beacons, where audience is growing and the business model is not driven by advertising, but instead by people invested in content and supporting their local communities.

At ROFLCon: The Spread of Memes in China, Brazil and Syria

stempeck@gmail.com (Matt Stempeck) — Mon, 07 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

ROFLCon returned recently to MIT, bringing together the things and people who are famous on the Internet. Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media and co-founder of the citizen journalist network Global Voices, was the moderator. He's probably best known for the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism.

There are all kinds of great Internet memes out there that we don't get to understand just because we don't speak the languages. Memes require an enormous amount of background contextual knowledge to understand what, exactly, makes them funny.

Ethan referenced his previous ROFLCon appearance, where he talked about Makmende and challenged the organizers to bring in a more global outlook. Fortunately, ROFLCon responded in force and provided Ethan with an all-star panel of international Internet culture translators.

An Xiao Mina is a social media artist, strategist, translator, and many other things. If you're reading Ai WeiWei, it's probably due to her.

Bia Granja curates São Paulo Social Media Week and YouPix, a series of Brazillian meme festivals. She recently held a memes conference in Brazil with 6,000 attendees.

Anas Qtiesh is a Syrian blogger and program manager at Meedan, a non-profit community which bridges language barriers between Arabic and English about Mideast events. He aims to help us ask, how do we laugh along with the Syrian revolution?

Censorship and memes

An Xiao Mina started with the train crash in southern China, where government censors attempted to cover up the actual reasons for the crash, but failed to keep up with the speed of Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The censorship department's propaganda was ridiculed online in a variety of memes both comical and dramatic.

As most of us know, the Chinese web is censored in a variety of ways. There's a censorship algorithm looking for certain keywords. There are human censors. And there's real-name registration, so they know who you are when you post something. And lastly, the most powerful form of censorship is the self-censorship they force via chilling effects.

China has 512 million people online, 312 million of whom are using microblogs. An Xiao Mina is interested in political memes, because they're almost impossible to censor.

Many of the Chinese memes, like Grass Mud Horse, evade censorship by keyword detection by relying on clever plays of language and euphemisms. Grass Mud Horse became the lolcat of Chinese political memes. There are plush toys, cartoons, fake Happy Meal toys, rage comics. This has turned into a metameme, The Ten Mythical creatures of Baidu.

An Xiao Mina called memes "the street art of the social web." When artist Ai Weiwei was arrested and held without charge in 2011, he became famous on the Internet. His face showed up everywhere in many kinds of remixes online, from currency to propaganda posters. People turned sunflower seeds into a symbol for him, and a snack as common as Skittles proved impossible to censor. And then his face became actual street art in Beijing.

Memes of Beijing smog have been particularly successful, leading the city to take action to clean up the air. Many viral Chinese hits prove that humor is universal: a man in a bear costume sliding headfirst down a staircase.

Chen Guangcheng has also been the subject of memes. Most recently, sunglasses have been used to symbolize Guangcheng. (He is blind.) Artists are leading this initiative, similar to the Million Hoodies March for Trayvon Martin. One example is the Free CGC knock-off of Kentucky Fried Chicken. When Christian Bale tried to visit Guangcheng, he was roughed up by a heavy-set guard. So people on the Internet created "PandaMan versus Batman" posters. And when Chen Guancheng escaped, he referred to the meme in the website. Others have created movie posters "Dong Si Gu redemption."

How powerful are these going to be? We don't know yet. However, An Xiao Mina thinks that the participatory culture of memes is leading to more participatory societies.

When Ai Weiwei was censored for pornography, people started posting photos of themselves partially nude. So Chinese human rights lawyer Li Tiantian has followed suit, posting a nude photo of herself as well.

Ethan asked An Xiao Mina where she finds the memes. She answered that she looks for them by following people on Weibo. As far as she knows, there's no Reddit for China.

The youpix party

Next up was Bia Granja of @youPIX, a convenor of meme-based events in Brazil. She told us about the event, which brings in around 6,000 people. "Joining a youPIX Festival is like jumping into the Internet." At YouPix, they party, they listen to music, and they discuss Internet culture. Other events involve a web culture quiz, which puts pies in people's faces when they get Internet facts wrong. M00t came and danced to Sou Foda.

What's Internet culture like in Brazil? The most famous meme is "Tenso," a version of photobombing where a GIF zooms in on the face of a person in the background of a photo. She also talks about Cala Boca Galvao, a meme where Brazilians trolled people on the Internet to protest soccer presenter Galvão Bueno.

Bia hopes to use local memes to explain to us what goes on in Brazilians' minds.

The Brazilian media landscape is consolidated among only a few companies and owning families, and these players have extended their dominance into the online space. Traditionally, Brazil has had very little in terms of alternative media. But 67% of Brazilians are on social networks. It's the third-largest country for Facebook, the second largest for Twitter, the second largest for Tumblr, and the third largest on Google+. Brazilians own Orkut: 90% of Brazilians online have an Orkut account.

Bia showed us a series of popular Brazilian memes, including "Nipples are Very Controversial" boy.

One predictable rule for Brazilian Internet memes is that if it comes with a funky beat, it'll likely be popular. The biggest Brazilian viral video of all time is the 2011 video "Sou Foda" which received 14 million views. A young boy dances in front of a green screen while rapping explicit lyrics. "Sou Foda" plays like a Brazilian Rebecca Black, low-fidelity music video and all.

Brazilians love to have fun. Bia said he was nervous coming into this panel with fellow speakers from Syria and China, because much of Brazilian online culture is focused on good times. As a developing country, things like literacy and Internet culture can be contentious, as the intellectual elites will say that Internet culture is using language wrong and lowering society. Bia thinks we should let them debate with each other and just have fun. After all, Brazil is incredibly powerful online. The most influential person on Twitter, according to the New York Times, is Brazilian Rafina Bastos.

Ethan pointed out that Bia knows every line of all these videos -- that we need a meme dance champion smackdown.

the role of memes in the Syrian Revolution

Next up was Anas Qtiesh, a Syrian blogger and program manager at Meedan, a non-profit community which bridges language barriers between Arabic and English about Mideast events.

He said that governments have control over how much fear they cast on the people. Memes are important because they help break that.

You couldn't have a "Daily Show" or "Colbert Report" in Syria -- they'd be taken down in a second. So Syrians rely on these Photoshopped images for solidarity, to know that they are not alone, that there are others resisting.

"Conspiracies are like germs, which increase every moment," Syrian President Bashar Assad said on June 20. As soon as he said this, CGI germs from cold medicine commercials everywhere began appearing in satirical images.

Walid Muaellem, Syrian foreign minister, said "We'll forget that Europe is on the map." This led to a world map where Muaellen has eaten Europe, complete with cartoons of an engorged Muaellem scarfing down the continent.

Another quote, "He was a lion -- we turned him into a giraffe, but he turned out to be a duck" led to fun animal-based mocking.

Beyond helping people break beyond fear, memes can also be propaganda. People created mock weapons with pipes and fireworks. Someone created a website for a fake Qatari Revolution, which led to other parody websites for Chinese Revolutions.

In these campaigns, official state propaganda was remastered, and then the meme evolved to "Chinesify" all of the things. Chinese clothing and culture was added to photos of Syrian leaders. This wasn't meant to be racist against Chinese people, but rather mocking Syrian leaders and their denial of revolution.

And, Anas said, no revolution is complete without rage comics. The memes weren't just against the regime. There are also cartoons challenging Islam with secularism, where secularism is represented by rage guy and a challenge accepted game. Others have created a history of their revolutions in rage face form.

Ethan concluded: "If Scumbag Assad doesn't come out of this conference, we have missed a tremendous opportunity."

Jonathan Zittrain Takes the Stage at ROFLCon

natematias@gmail.com (J. Nathan Matias) — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:48:54 -0500

Today with MIT Civic Media Center's Matt Stempeck and Stephen Suen, I'm live-blogging ROFLCon, a conference for things and people who are famous on the Internet. The livenote index is here.

Christina Xu, the event organizer, starts off ROFLCon to cheers. It's an amazingly packed venue. "One out of eight people in this room have done something crazy on the Internet," she says.

Zittrain on memes and society

Jonathan Zittrain is an Internet phenomenon. Emerging from humble beginnings as a longtime CompuServe forum sysop, he is now professor of law at Harvard Law School where he co-founded the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

He starts by saying that fame can be tricky: "Just before the talk, someone came up to me and said, 'are you the huh guy? I thought you were the huh guy! I'm not that famous. I can aspire. In this room is the engine that makes the Internet sing ... Who's minding the store? Is this going to be a day without memes?"

"Where's Tron Guy?" asks Zittrain. Tron Guy, in full costume, raises his hand, and the room bursts into applause.

Zittrain says he isn't sure if he's one of these "Internet ROFL people" -- hence the tie. It's hard to explain what you're doing this weekend to friends and family who are not part of this tribe, he quips.

But he does have some background in the Internet. He shows us a picture of him using a Texas Instruments home computer with a 300-baud modem, with the obligatory model rockets, and the Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus -- just because you might run out of words.

Zittrain used to work for CompuServe and also got involved in politics. He threw his weight behind Mondale/Ferraro 1984. "At least I carried Minnesota," he says. "And the District of Columbia." When he wasn't doing those things, he was usually spending time stuffed inside a locker. "Whatever that does not stuff you so that you die, makes you stronger," he noted.

Zittrain thinks the image of a nerd stuffed in a locker helps us understand memes -- the dramatic moment of pathos.

"They're all crazy; I'm normal ... they're bad, and we're good. And here's to us for being good," he says. But that opens us up to the charge that this culture, the Internet, is not real life, and is rather a form of retreat. At the base of a lot of memes is some authentic, unguarded voluntary moment, Zittrain says. There's artifice around it, but there is often something authentic beneath it. That's not always the case -- consider Dramatic Hamster. Sometimes a hamster isn't a hamster. But there are other times that it's striking closer to a certain chord.

Wires can be crossed when this culture is commercialized. The nerds struck back against Hot Topic when they produced a T-shirt of Rage Guy.

unstaged authenticity

There's something about commercialization which is always at arm's length of Internet culture. Zittrain talks to us about the most recent Calgary Comic Con, where they invited the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Going to the cons involves waiting in lines to get your photo with the cast. It has an Apple Commercial 1984 feel to it -- take a photo with the cast, you cannot touch the cast. He tells us about one of the least proud moments of The Oatmeal, a contest for advice features. There appears to be a negative attitude towards those who intentionally try to "engineer" a meme. People don't like being prompted -- it feels like trying too hard, feels inorganic.

We like unstaged authenticity, like Disaster Girl, who grins deviously as a house burns to the ground behind her. She rather enjoys the attention, and we are pleased to see her embrace her inadvertent success, but there are still lines that you can cross. The point at which you're running your own network and have a store-- maybe not.

Internet Fame is like winning the lottery -- it seems good until someone gets killed. What better example of this ambivalence than Star Wars Kid? So far as he knew, this was an exercise that would be completely private. He didn't realize that when he turned the camcorder in at school that it would be posted to YouTube. Jonathan shows us the video of the the Matrix Version of Star Wars Kid. In Wikipedia, there's a debate on the talk page on whether or not it is right for Wikipedia, the knowledge repository of record for humanity, to include his name in the page. Ultimately, they decided not to name him, despite the fact that the mainstream media has done it several times. And people on Wikipedia fell into line-- upholding the process with which they disagreed.

Can we build an infrastructure of meme propagation that respects people's preferences. He shows us one of the Awkward Family photo sites, with an image that says, "Image removed at request of owner." There are enough yuks to go around, so why not take down private content when someone asks us to?

Jonathan would love to see an infrastructure built native to the web which makes it possible for people to opt out of the celebrity of being a meme. This isn't DRM, but maybe something like robots.txt (a directive that tells web crawlers like Google which subdirectories not to index). Search companies respect robots.txt. No Internet organization created this. But people and companies respect it anyway-- a way to say, "Do you mind?" This is often used with court documents. How could we build this into our technology and our culture? One guy made a T-shirt that reads, "I do not agree to the publication of this photo."

In short, how can we enjoy the culture of Lulz which also respecting people's wishes?

A longer version of this post can be found on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog.

How We Got Here: The Road to Public Lab's Map Project

stewartblong@gmail.com (Stewart Long) — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Last week, Public Laboratory announced that public domain maps are now starting to show up on Google Earth and Google Maps. But how did the projects get there? Here's a timeline of a Public Laboratory map project.

Making a map

Public Laboratory projects take a community-based approach to making maps that differs depending on where you are and the reason you want to create a map. People map areas for a number of reasons, including because there's a need to monitor an area of environmental concern, a dynamic event is happening that there's a desire to capture, or you cannot find adequate aerial image data. Before going out to map, preparing for fieldwork starts with the Public Lab map tools page, where you can discover what type of equipment to use and how to safely use it. Multiple research notes on how to do things such as setting up a dual camera rig and stabilizing the camera with a picavet can help with specific problems, but there are also hundreds of people in the online Public Lab community of mapmakers, sharing tips and experiences on the site.

Upon return

After the mapping flight, the map making begins with backing up the images and sorting through the set, making a subset for map production. Depending on the time in the air, there will be hundreds and sometimes thousands of individual images. Depending on the area of interest, you can hone in on which images will be used in creating the map. Assuming the flight was at a steady altitude, the images that you want to select are the sharpest ones that are vertically oriented. If you have many images for the same area, pick the best one, but also pick overlapping images so that there is plenty of overlap among the different images in the next step.

Public Laboratory's MapMill.

Images can be sorted locally or online. Public Laboratory created an online tool where a group can do collaborative selection. MapMill.org is a web-based image sorting and ranking tool where multiple users can sort through a large dataset simultaneously.

Map production

With a smaller set of the best images on hand, the images can be dynamically placed on the map in a process known as georectification. After all the images have been added to the map, the project is exported. The MapKnitter export tool does all of the geographic information systems crunching behind the scenes with the geospatial data abstraction library (gdal.org) and produces a GeoTIFF map file. The GeoTIFF format is a public domain metadata standard that embeds geographic information into the image TIFF file. At this point, the map is now in an interchangeable format that can be easily distributed.

Public Laboratory MapKnitter web-based aerial image map production tool.

Public Laboratory Map Archive

Public Lab hosts its own map data archive for storing and sharing finished map projects. Each map in the archive has a "map details page" that hosts details such as: title, date, place, location, resolution, field map maker, field notes, cartographer, ground images, oblique images from the flight, and comments from website users. The map participants choose whether to publish the map as Public Domain, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, Creative Commons Attribution, or Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial.

Public Laboratory Occupy Oakland, November 2, 2011 -- General Strike map in Google Earth.

Maps are viewable on the archive itself, and you can subscribe to it as an RSS feed. However, it's also a place for distribution of the data. As we announced last week, Google Earth has started licensing our public domain maps. Google Earth plans to continue to publish public domain maps from the Public Lab Archive a few times a year.

It's quite exciting to see these Public Labs maps go online with a ubiquitous data provider such as Google. We look forward to more people participating in this activity, and more publishing of public domain data.

Google published some of the maps to Google Maps as well as Google Earth, which makes those maps widely accessible in the web browser and on mobile applications that use Google Maps.

Mobile Security Survival Guide Helps Journalists Understand Wireless Risks

melissaulbricht@gmail.com (Melissa Ulbricht) — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

The Mobile Security Survival Guide for Journalists from SaferMobile helps reporters better understand the risks inherent in the use of mobile technology. The guide covers both local journalists and those on assignment in another country.

As someone working with sensitive information, mobile communications are inherently insecure and expose journalists working in sensitive environments to risks that aren't easy to detect or overcome. This guide is designed to help navigate these challenges. (It should be noted that this guide does not guarantee safety. Rather, it's a foundational resource to understand and minimize the risks of mobile communication in the field.)

The Mobile Security Survival Guide is written with the workflow of a journalist in mind.

Here's a sampling of what the guide offers:

1. Mobile Network Awareness

What does your mobile use say about you?

Did you know? Activity on your phone creates a data trail that is logged on the mobile network, from placing or receiving a call, to sending a message, browsing the web, or just being connected and ready to receive communication. Identifying information logged on the network about you and the people you contact include your IMEI number (the unique handset identifier), the IMSI (the unique SIM card identifier), the time and duration of voice calls, SMS, and the photos or video you take while reporting.

Tip: Have an alternative in case you're unable to access one or more services. Carry SIM cards for other mobile network operators, and if possible, carry more than one phone. In some cases, only an out-of-country operator may have roaming service. Have a backup plan agreed upon in advance with sources and colleagues if you suspect that your specific line or the entire mobile service may be disrupted.

2. Preparing for Assignment

Assess your digital risks and prepare your phone.

You have been given your assignment. You may be traveling to cover a story, or you may reside in a given country. Either way, when it comes to your mobile communications, you should take some precautions and plan ahead. Here are sample tips on practicing on your phone.

Tip: Know your phone. It may sound obvious, but be sure to know how to work your phone. For example, become familiar with how your camera works and how to control its options. The flash of your camera or the sound when you click Capture may draw unwanted attention to you. Take the time to pre-set functions to avoid getting noticed by others.

Practice on your mobile keypad. Learn how to operate your phone without looking at it. You may need to know how to type a text message (SMS) without looking at your mobile keypad or perhaps while it's hidden in your pocket. Plan your shortcuts in advance, and be able to access needed applications without looking at the phone, too.

3. Reporting/In the Field

Have a plan of action ready when you're talking to sources and conducting interviews; checking in with your newsroom; or using your phone in emergency situations.

Tip: Use codes for SMS if needed. If necessary, use prearranged codes to communicate sensitive information to your contacts. Change your codes regularly, and make sure your system incorporates a way to let others know when you think the code may have been broken. To practice, try the code-making exercise in the SaferMobile training guide. Avoid words that could be considered "high profile" or inflammatory if you suspect keyword filtering of SMS is taking place. However, remember that information about the recipient of text messages (i.e., that person's number and other information) is still logged by the network operator. Take care not to put any sensitive sources at risk with your communications.

4. Filing the Story

How do you safely send updates, news bursts, or multimedia content from the field?

Tip: Disable MMS if not needed. Unless you really need MMS functionality on your phone, check the settings to see if it can be disabled. MMS, like SMS, can be intercepted and viewed by the network operator. Delivery rates for MMS tend to be lower as well, making this a more unreliable form of communications as well as a more insecure one. MMS can be an attack vector in another way: There have been cases where it has been used to sneak mobile viruses and malicious mobile software into unsuspecting phones.

5. Social Media

Make safer use of social media to follow news, connect with sources, share breaking stories, and promote your work.

Tip: Set a strong password and keep it safe. Keep your account details safe. Check out this guide from SaferMobile for more on setting a strong password.

While a strong password won't always protect you, it adds an important extra layer of security. Despite the risks involved, Twitter and other social media platforms are very powerful tools that can help report news from the field, especially when events are unfolding quickly, or you have limited options or decreased capacity and staff.

Tip: Avoid older browsers and browse securely. Your phone's web browser needs to support HTTPS. Avoid older browsers, particularly Opera Mini Basic 3 and below. All your communication with Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter should display a lock icon to indicate secure mobile browsing, and a web address starting with https:// rather than http://.

Check out the complete Mobile Security Survival Guide here.

At the International Journalism Festival: Can Data Journalism Save Newsrooms?

lucy.chambers@okfn.org (Lucy Chambers) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:54:48 -0500

PERUGIA, Italy -- Here at the International Journalism Festival the launch of three large initiatives have generated a lot of the buzz around the topic of data journalism.

The School of Data Journalism, organized by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation, is composed of three panels and five workshops and dives into some of the key issues that media organizations are currently considering: "Is it worth my while starting out trying to do data journalism?", "Will data journalism make us money?", "How do you get data that you can search, filter and analyze with a computer?" and "How do I make data stories sexy?"

In addition, the 58 nominations for the Data Journalism Awards (DJA) were announced. DJA is the first international competition that recognizes and showcases the great work done in data journalism. Prizes are awarded for data-driven applications, investigations, and storytelling through visualizations. It's hoped that these awards will encourage more news organizations to embark on more ambitious data projects and alleviate the "loneliness in the newsroom" which some data journalists experience when their colleagues don't understand what they do. The six winners will be announced May 31.

And on Saturday, the Data Journalism Handbook will be launched. The handbook was born at the Mozilla Festival in November. It's a collection of tips, anecdotes and case studies from more than 70 leading data journalists and data wranglers, including contributions from The New York Times, Zeit Online, the BBC, the Guardian and many more. The book will be an open educational resource with key lessons a beginner data journalist should know. You can see a chapter overview of the handbook here and an excerpt from the first chapter here. A free version will be available online at datajournalismhandbook.org, and an e-book and print version will soon be published by O'Reilly Media.

So what is data journalism?

The School of Data Journalism, a series of panel discussions and workshops at the festival, was led by leading practitioners from all over the world and aimed to show participants what data journalists can do and why they should take the plunge and learn new skills.

The definition of data journalism varies depending on whom you ask. For some journalists, it's simply the courage to tackle sometimes huge and messy datasets. For others, it's being transparent and open about "showing the working" behind their conclusions, backing up their stories with facts and numbers where one might previously have only evidenced their point with "he said/she said." For others, it's a new way of presenting data through visualizations and interactive news applications; news is no longer simply static words on a page.

Increasingly, though, many are coming to realize that data journalism is a set of skills, involving new methods for acquiring, analyzing and working with data which simply weren't computationally feasible before. In an age that is positively drowning in data, we need more data journalists who typically have better storytelling skills than statisticians and can act as translators of complex datasets for the benefit of the public.

As activist and author Heather Brooke put it in the "Information wants to be free" workshop, data journalism is a misnomer -- one doesn't say "telephone journalism" if you contact your sources via telephone; journalists have to use data to do their job well.

Guerrilla Tactics: how to get started with Data Journalism

In the first panel of the school, "From Computer Assisted Reporting to Data Journalism," Pulitzer Prize winners Sarah Cohen and Steve Doig, highlighted their experiences working in the United States, where the notion of Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) has been around for several decades -- far longer than the budding data journalism scene here in Europe.

They described their experiences learning how to use tools and techniques -- unfamiliar to journalists but popular in other disciplines such as social science and history -- to stay at the cutting edge of journalism. They also described the "guerrilla tactics" they initially had to use to get their work into print. "If you produce an amazing visualization, your editor is going to find a way to get it published," Cohen said, adding that it's far easier to show someone what data journalism is than to explain what it is.

Next up, Aron Pilhofer described his journey to data journalism at the New York Times. He said it came from a feeling of frustration with the inefficiency of working practices and tools. This sentiment resonated strongly with the other panelists -- a common complaint concerned individual journalists holding onto their data, producing datasets that only they could understand, instead of resources that could be built on and expanded by others on their teams.

On the same panel, Elisabetta Tola of formicablu and Simon Rogers of the Guardian gave a European perspective on data journalism. Rogers demonstrated how the Guardian Datablog's interactive maps of the U.K. riots helped disband false statements by the government that the "riots were not about poverty." Tola then explained some of the more basic problems facing wannabe data journalists in Italy, some of whom would be lucky to get data even on paper, as it's common for officials to simply dictate the numbers to journalists.

The second panel, "How can data journalism save your newsroom?", examined perspectives and business models for data journalism, and attempted to answer the question: "Is it worth it?"

Caelainn Barr of Citywire urged journalists not to consider data journalism as a fix-all for any problem in the newsroom. She warned that editors are unlikely to be considerate and give you more time just because you're using complex data or working hard to present it better. Barr said journalists are constantly playing a game of catchup; advertisers are moving elsewhere; and journalists have less time to produce their stories and are struggling to keep up. All of this means journalists have to be more agile and learn to do things more efficiently.

To solve this problem, Pilhofer said, the New York Times has built resources that live on for future stories, allowing both journalists and the interactive news team to spring into action as soon as a related story breaks.

"What is the simplest thing you can do to start with data journalism?" ProPublica's Dan Nguyen asked rhetorically. "Keep your notes in a spreadsheet." He said often, the skills required to find stories involve sorting, grouping and averaging the data. With skills this simple, can newsrooms really afford not to teach them to their journalists?

The Future of Journalism is Bold

What does the future look like for data journalism? "Data journalism is just becoming journalism," said the Guardian's Rogers -- which was possibly the most encouraging statement from any of the panelists here.

Data journalism is no longer limited to only those who can afford to pay $900 for a piece of visualization software. Now incredibly powerful, open-source solutions are available.

However, a change in culture will be needed to get more journalists into the fold. As Tola explained, collaboration is key, both journalist-journalist and journalist-coder collaboration. As Wired Italia's Guido Romeo put it, "Journalism is a one-man band. Data journalism is clearly not."

Could Italy be a land of opportunity for data journalism? The enthusiasm with which the workshops were met gave the impression that he who dares first will have a serious competitive advantage.

The workshops will continue over the next couple of days, and many have spaces open. Any budding data journalists? Join us!

52 Applicants Move to Next Round of Knight News Challenge

des_everts@hotmail.com (Desiree Everts) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0500

The Knight Foundation has selected 52 applicants that will move onto the next stage of its News Challenge.

There's a theme you'll see running through the proposals that have made it thus far -- namely, networking. That's because networks are the focus of this year's first round. (The Knight News Challenge now offers three rounds instead of one competition per year.)

What sort of networks? "The Internet, and the mini-computers in our pockets, enable us to connect with one another, friends and strangers, in new ways," Knight's John Bracken wrote in a release when the round was first announced. "We're looking for ideas that build on the rise of these existing network events and tools -- that deliver news and information and extend our understanding of the phenomenon."

Consultant Ryan Jacoby wrote further about some of the trends he saw among applicants. You can read more about that here.

Here's the list of who's moving onward to the next round of the challenge (49 are listed because two were closed entries so we're not able to share them):

Amauta (Eric French)

Asia Beat (Jeffrey Wasserstrom/Angilee Shah)

Bridging the Big Data Digital Divide (Dan Brickley)

Change the Ratio (Rachel Sklar)

CitJo (Sarah Wali/Mahamad El Tanahy)

Connecting the global Hacks/Hackers network (Burt Herman, Hacks/Hackers)

Connecting the World with Rural India (Brian Conley)

Cont3nt.com (Anton Gelman/Daniel Shaw)

Cowbird (Jonathan Harris/Aaron Huey)

Data Networks are Local (Erik Gundersen, Development Seed)

DifferentFeather (Elana Berkowitz/Amina Sow)

DIY drone fleets (Ben Moskowitz/Jack Labarba)

Docs to WordPress to InDesign (William Davis, Bangor Daily News)

Electoral College of Me (John Keefe/Ron Williams)

EnviroFact (Beth Parke/Chris Marstall)

Funf.org: Open Mobile Sourcing (Nadav Aharony/Alan Gardner; MIT)

Global Censorship Monitoring System (Ruben Bloemgarten, James Burke, Chris Pinchen)

Google News for the Social Web (Sachim Kandar, Andrew Montalenti, Parse.ly)

Hawaii Eco-Net (Jay April, Maui Community Television)

Hypothes.is (Dan Whaley/Randall Leeds)

IAVA New GI Bill Veterans Alumni Network Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (Paul Rieckhoff)

m.health.news.network (Marcus Messner and Yan Jin)

MediaReputations.com (Anton Gelman/Daniel Shaw)

Mesh Potato 2.0 (Steve Song/David Rowe)

Mobile Publishing for Everyone (David Jacobs/Blake Eskin/Natalie Podrazik)

NOULA (Tayana Etienne)

Peepol.tv (Eduardo Hauser/Jeff Warren)

PreScouter (Dinesh Ganesarajah)

Prozr (Pueng Vongs/Sherbeam Wright)

Rbutr (Shane Greenup/Craig O'Shannessy)

Recovers.org (Caitria O'Neill/Alvin Liang)

Secure, Anonymous Journalism Toolkit (Karen Reilly)

Sensor Networks for News (Matt Waite, University of Nebraska)

Shareable (Seth Schneider and Neal Gorenflo)

Tethr (Aaron Huslage/Roger Weeks)

The PressForward Dashboard (Dan Cohen/ Joan Fragaszy Troyano, George Mason University)

ThinkUpApp (Gina Trapani/Anil Dash)

Tracks News Stories (David Burrows, designsuperbuild.com)

Truth Goggles (Dan Schultz)

Truth Teller (Cory Haik/Steven Ginsberg, Washington Post)

Unconsumption Project (Rob Walker/Molly Block)

UNICEF GIS (Joseph Agoada, UNICEF)

Watchup (Adriano Farrano/Jonathan Lundell)

Water Canary (Sonaar Luthra/Zach Eveland)

A Bridge Between WordPress and Git (Robert McMillan / Evan Hansen)

In the Life (Joe Miloscia, American Public Media)

Get to the Source (Joanna S. Kao/MIT)

Farm-to-Table School Lunch (Leonardo Bonanni, Sourcemap)

Partisans.org (Michael Trice)

Protecting Journalists (Diego Mendiburu and Ela Stapley)

What do you think about the finalists? Who are your favorites and who do you think should win?

Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Sponsors Dual Journalism Hack Days

dansinker@gmail.com (Dan Sinker) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0500

There's no better example of the global scale of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project than the dualing hack days we recently sponsored in New York City and Buenos Aires.

In New York, we gave money for travel scholarships to bring top-notch developers to town to take part in the Wall Street Journal's Data Transparency Weekend, which brought more than 100 developers and privacy experts to town to create tools to help people see and control their personal data online. The "hackathon" grew out of the Wall Street Journal's excellent ongoing series that looks at how your online footprint is being used by corporations.

The three-day event (documented extensively here, here, and here) resulted in code for almost 30 different projects with winners in "Scanning," "Education," and "Control" tracks.

Five-thousand miles to the south, we sponsored the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires ShowTimeLine Hackathon, which brought 45 developers together to work on making new timeline-based visualization tools. The OpenNews sponsorship went to hosting the hack day, as well as a small amount of seed money to keep projects going afterward.

The team of developers and journalists in Buenos Aires took a series of different approaches to displaying data over time, from automatic data-and-date extraction from documents, to translating pre-existing timeline libraries into Spanish, and more.

These are exactly the kind of topic-driven code-based events that we're looking to help sponsor at OpenNews. If you've got an idea brewing for a journalism hack day, we'd love to hear about it. Let's work together to make this year the year of journalism code.

A version of this post first appeared here.

NextDrop: Water Utilities in India Need Good Data

anuragsridharan@gmail.com (Anu Sridharan) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0500

In places like the United States, we have access to more data than we ever know what to do with. We measure everything from what the average historical temperature is on a certain day for a city, to how good a restaurant is, to how much energy we consume. Because of this access, we base many of our critical decisions on this data (or at least that's the hope). Essentially, because we have had access, we know how to use this data.

However, this isn't the case everywhere.

Fact: Just because you have access to data, it does not guarantee that you will use it appropriately. Using it appropriately requires behavior change, something that, any person will tell you, is incredibly difficult.

This is the hard part about data -- not the production of it, but the usage. This means that simply providing technology is not a solution. It is technology and the realization of the potential results that will produce meaningful change.

making data-driven decisions

This is similar to the situation water utilities are facing in India. There's no real incentive to get good data, and it makes sense. They have many things to worry about -- mainly, the reduction of non-revenue water. Data is tricky, because the results are more of the intangible kind. You need initial buy-in, and lots of time, in order to build your case for making data-driven decisions.

We know that these data-driven decisions will, in time, reduce non-revenue water, but it will take some time. And unfortunately, in a world that wants sexy solutions along with fast results, this does not come easily.

We're hoping that in the future, other stakeholders will promote the acquisition of quality data, and will push the utilities to make data-driven decisions. From academics, to other government agencies, we see a need from other stakeholders to push this agenda and create this water data market for water utilities.

And when that happens, NextDrop will be there to provide that quality data to the utilities to help them become more efficient.

Public Lab's Community-Created Maps Land on Google Earth

shannon@publiclaboratory.org (Shannon Dosemagen) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0500

We've just announced that community-generated open-source maps from the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) -- captured from kites and balloons -- have been added to Google Earth. The 45-plus maps are the first aerial maps produced by citizens to be featured on the site, and are highlighted on the Google Lat Long Blog.

The Public Laboratory is an expansion of the Grassroots Mapping community. During an initial project mapping the BP oil spill, local residents used helium-filled balloons and digital cameras to generate high-resolution DIY "satellite" maps documenting the extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico -- at a time when there was little public information available. Expanding the toolkit beyond aerial mapping, Public Laboratory has been growing into a diverse community, both online and offline, experimenting with new ways to produce information about our surroundings. The lab's DIY kits cost less than $100 to assemble.

"We're very excited to be able to include some of the balloon and kite imagery from the Public Laboratory in Google Earth. It provides a unique, high-resolution view of interesting places, and highlights the citizen science work of the Public Laboratory community," said Christiaan Adams of Google Earth Outreach.

"The Public Laboratory is demonstrating that low-cost tools, in the hands of everyday people, can help generate information citizens need about their communities," added John Bracken, Knight Foundation program director for journalism and media innovation.

a mission of civic science

Especially exciting is a map of the Gowanus Canal Superfund site in Brooklyn, N.Y., that was created during the winter of 2011 and has been added to the primary layer of Google Earth/Google Maps. The New York chapter of Public Laboratory has begun an ongoing periodic monitoring campaign in partnership with local environmental advocacy group the Gowanus Canal Conservancy. Designated a Superfund cleanup site by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 due to pollution from decades of coal tar accumulation in canal sediments, and suffering from 300 million gallons of untreated sewage which are released into the canal yearly, local activists have adapted and improved many of the techniques developed for monitoring the effects of oil contamination in the Gulf of Mexico. That a group of local activists could create a high-resolution map of an area they care about -- and that such imagery could replace commercial and government data as a recognized representation of that place -- is a powerful example of the civic science mission of Public Laboratory.

Democratizing diy

Public Lab is a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible "Do-It-Yourself" techniques, Public Laboratory creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment.

The core PLOTS program is focused on "civic science" in which we research open-source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. PLOTS achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.

Please watch for the follow-up post by Public Lab's Stewart Long in the next week.