Crossposted from Apps for Communities blog

Behind the Scenes with Apps for Communities

So, who's behind the 50+ apps that we've received so far? Curious to know some details?

Apps are coming in from communities across the country — from Native American reservations and cities in California, Georgia, Oregon, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, New York, Washington, and Michigan.

What are the apps about? They're for accessing information to help with traffic and physical road condition alerts, diabetes, tribal issues, rental property openings, expanding opportunity for low-income kids, pediatric services, emergency use of hashtags, student records, homeless services, greening cities like Detroit, and much more.

The apps are made by men and women, young and old, from teens to elders, local leaders, community organizers, students, new media fellows, engineers, and developers. We're pleased to inform you that every-day Americans are getting involved with the Apps for Communities Challenge and are putting on developer hats to help their communities.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke earlier this week at an event at LivingSocial in Washington, DC and painted the broader picture on apps (download his full speech here): "Our 'apps economy' is envy of the world. With U.S. software developers leading the way, there are now more than 500,000 mobile applications available, and apps sales are projected to approach $38 billion by 2015. It wasn’t long ago when the mobile apps economy didn’t exist at all. Mobile, local, and real-time are each big trends, creating jobs and opportunity here now and with huge potential for the future."

Reed Hundt, above, former chairman of the FCC, is among the leaders interviewed for "The Digital Revolution & Democracy." 

The 21st Century’s digital explosion of information and interactivity floods our lives with new media and new opportunity. Yet we know this digital renaissance isn’t serving communities equally or democracy fully. And we don’t know whether we can get from the patchwork present to a better future.

The Digital Revolution and Democracy, a series of idea-inspiring videos over the next few weeks on KnightBlog, examines the fast-moving trends transforming our lives. From Arab Spring to the Digital Divide, from the promise to the peril of these new tools, we talk with thought leaders who are shaping the future of media and democracy. Follow along as foundation vice president Dennis Scholl interviews 17 people who believe passionately in self-government -- but have different visions of how it will evolve.

You’ll see Madeline Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State; Wael Abbas, the Egyptian blogger persecuted for telling the truth; Steven Clift, founder of e-Democracy.org; Craig Dubow, CEO of Gannett, the largest newspaper company in America; media policy-maker Reed Hundt — and a dozen other trailblazers and frontrunners.

The Digital Revolution and Democracy interviewees shared their insights this year at the Aspen Institute’s 2011 Forum on Communications and Society. If their thoughts spur yours, join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #infoneeds. The interviews will be archived at www.knightfoundation.org/focas.

With the school year underway, students at the James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte are busy inside the classroom. But they’re also busy outside of it - looking for ways to bring what they’re learning about digital and media literacy to the larger community.

Students are already working with several local libraries where they volunteer weekly as tech tutors. There, students provide one-on-one computer help sessions and teach other library patrons how to access the Internet as well as how to use online applications like Microsoft Office.

Undergraduates have also partnered with Citizens Schools, which promotes student achievement and education in Charlotte and several cities around the United States. Through Citizens Schools, students are working with low-income elementary schools in the community to help build digital media apprenticeships for kids. They also teach valuable skills like how to do news reporting and what it means to blog. 

Last year Knight Foundation endowed the James L. Knight School of Communication so that it could develop programs to teach digital and media literacy to its students and the community, a priority of Knight’s journalism and media innovation program.

Jennifer Hull, community coordinator at the Knight School, says she hopes these types of activities are just the beginning of others that will be rolled out later this year, such as a partnership with the YMCA of Greater Charlotte to implement digital literacy programs.

Earlier this month, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced a $4.1 million grant to American Public Media to expand its network of citizen sources that help provide local news coverage.

According to the announcement, Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s investment will add new citizen sources to American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, a Knight-funded program that provides journalists with the tools and training to tap its growing network of sources to produce high-quality journalism.

The grant will allow the network to expand to an additional 50 public media newsrooms which will better serve communities across broadcast, online and mobile platforms:

“This expanded network of informed citizens will broaden the size and diversity of sources that inform public media journalism, providing reporters with new and different perspectives to help promote greater accuracy and transparency in their coverage.”

Currently, American Public Media is the second largest producer and distributor of public radio programming and the largest owner and operator of public radio stations in the country.

Almost 800 stations carry American Public Media’s 20+ national programs. It reaches 26 million listeners each week.

NJ Spotlight, an online investigative news service focused on state policy issues in New Jersey, was recently honored with an award for General Excellence in Online Journalism at the 2011 Online Journalism Conference in Boston, Mass.

The full list of 2011 Online Journalism Award winners are available online.

The conference is held by the Online News Association, the world’s largest association of online journalists whose mission is to inspire innovation and excellence among journalists to better serve the public.

Earlier this month, Knight Foundation profiled how the Community Foundation of New Jersey exhibited leadership by partnering with NJ Spotlight to help ensure residents had information on statewide issues. The community foundation won matching funding from Knight to support the site through the Knight Community Information Challenge.

Dr. Frank Douglas, President and CEO of the Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron

Yesterday, the Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron and partners received a $500,000 award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) to fund the Accountable Care Community (ACC) initiative, a collective effort aiming to create a healthier community and lessen the burden of disease in the Akron region. The initiative involves more than 60 local organizations  and Akron’s plan will become national model for improving health. This grant is a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Community Transformation Grants to support public health efforts to reduce chronic diseases, promote healthier lifestyles, reduce health disparities, and control health care spending.

Every year, more than 100 leaders and thinkers in online engagement gather at a remote retreat center on Cortes Island in British Columbia to share strategies on how to use technology to improve the world. 

Called Web of Change, this years’ event included Knight grantees The UpTake, Free Press and SoChange as well as other activists, community organizers, web developers and non-profit leaders from groups such as Color of Change, presente.org, and New Organizing Institute.

From this group of digital leaders working on advocacy, organizing and movement building, we wanted to know how they try to engage more people in creating change and where they saw the future of engagement headed. This video shares some of their perspectives.

In short, while online petitions, social media and other digital tools figure prominently in the attendees' work, the conversations also explored aspects of engagement that technology can't easily solve.

Successful engagement, even in today's digital landscape, requires deep relationships, good listening, attention to individual needs and a patience for the right type of outcomes.

Video and report by Charles Tsai. Photos: Christina M. Samala. 

Can social media help foundations become better grantmakers? What do tools like Facebook, Twitter and blogs mean for philanthropy?

This morning, Knight Foundation participated via Twitter in a session that brought together a group of foundations to explore these questions. The session, “Good Grantmaking: What’s Social Media Got to Do With It? was hosted by Philanthropy New York.

Two of the key questions discussed: Why would a foundation use social media? And, how is social media helping some foundations do their work better?

Here at Knight Foundation, we use social media as a way of building the best networks of partnerships and grantees that we possibly can. We see it is an integral part of the foundation’s overall communications strategy to engage and inform people about our work. To that end, we use a variety of tactics to communicate with various audiences, including our website, blog and Twitter feed.

BME is a new effort that seeks to highlight the stories of unsung heroes among Philadelphia and Detroit’s black men and boys. So far, over 1,000 men have stepped forward to tell their stories in writing and through video at BMEChallenge.org. In this blog post, Philadelphia Program Director Donna Frisby-Greenwood talks about why BME (pronounced BME) hits home.

By Donna Frisby-Greenwood

For more than a month, we’ve given Black men in Philadelphia an opportunity to highlight their stories of how they help their neighbors and even strangers in ways big and small to strengthen our community.  I want to thank the more than 700 men who have shared their stories with us thus far as well as the people who nominated them but I know there are hundreds more. 

I grew up in Philadelphia, in a family of strong, intelligent and civic-minded black men. I had no idea until I was 21-years-old and teaching a seventh grade class in Philadelphia that there were children growing up without that kind of influence in their lives.

My uncles. older cousins, and father, almost all of whom are now deceased along with my dad, were doctors, teachers, professors, chemists, pilots, lawyers, servicemen (one of whom was the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy), high ranking civil servants, and a trolley car driver (the first black in the city).

In addition to having great careers, being the heads of their households and raising me and my cousins, they all used their talents in the community to help others. They taught literacy classes to adults, tutored children, served on school boards, provided free medical care, ran Police Athletic Leagues, coached baseball and basketball and served as leaders in their NAACP chapters and churches.

That was - and is - the norm in my family. That was - and is - the norm in this city. But it’s not something we get to hear about everyday, and we should.

What is the future of urban social change? And where do innovative ideas come from? Living Cities, a collaborative of 22 of the largest foundations and financial institutions, will ask those questions tomorrow at a livestreamed event in honor of its 20th anniversary.

By Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

A new study shows that local news ecosystems are far more complex than is commonly understood. The digital transformation of news is causing us to mix and match content with media in new ways – and in different ways across generations. Mobile media, for example, are becoming popular for "out and about news" like restaurant tips or weather reports. The web is seen as especially good for education news and local business news. Local TV is popular for weather, breaking news and traffic. Newspapers are best for overall civic news, especially government news.

Crossposted from the Council on Philanthropy's blog.

With community and place-based foundations increasingly supporting local information projects – they spent $58 million on the sector last year  - the audience for the “Journalism and Media Grant Making” session at the Council on Foundations’ Fall Conference came prepared with sophisticated questions and their own insights to share.

Here’s a sample of the conversation:

How are nonprofit news sites becoming sustainable – particularly since there isn’t one magic business model?

The most successful have diversified revenues sources that include foundation grants, advertising, major donors, memberships and sponsorships, said Eric Newton, Knight Foundation’s senior adviser to the president. People will pay for content, Newton said, noting that the public has funded public media for more than half a century. But sites have to be entrepreneurial by nature.

The expense equation is important too. A budget solely devoted to good journalism is doomed to failure, said Michele McLellan, a Knight Foundation consultant who helps guide community foundations investing in this area. Funders need to take a close look at the site’s business development plan and technical capacity, both key to building and engaging audiences who will sustain the site.

This afternoon Knight Foundation will help lead a discussion on measuring civic health at the 66th Annual National Conference on Citizenship, an annual event that explores the revised roles of citizens, nonprofits, and governments in a 21st century democracy. The theme for this year’s conference is “Redefining America’s Social Compact.”

The Civic Health Index, funded in part by Knight Foundation, is an annual report that elevates the discussion of our nation’s civic health by measuring a wide variety of indicators. This effort to educate Americans about civic life also seeks to motivate citizens, leaders and policymakers to strengthen it.

Tomorrow on Sept. 23, Paula Ellis, vp/strategic initiatives at Knight Foundation will present on a panel titled “Best Practices in Creating Civic Strategies” from 10 - 12:15 p.m. The session, moderated by Lattie Coor, chairman, Center for the Future of Arizona will bring together local, regional and national leaders to talk about civic strategies that help communities thrive and discuss the future of our nation’s civic information infrastructure.

In less than two weeks, the Apps for Communities contest closes. We challenged developers and designers with creating apps that improve daily life in cities by making local public information more personalized, usable and actionable for all Americans.  We’ve had over 45 submissions so far and more are rolling in as the deadline approaches. 

Knight Foundation has partnered with the Federal Communications Commission because we believe there is great synergy between the two organizations' ability to reach out and improve the lives of residents by gathering technologists to focus on the needs of local communities.
 
We are fortunate to have some fantastic judges:

·         Marc Andreessen — Co-Founder and General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz
·         Charles Best — Founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org
·         Cory Booker — Mayor of Newark, New Jersey
·         Brad Feld — Managing Director of Foundry Group
·         Tom Lee — Director of Sunlight Labs
·         Jennifer Pahlka — Founder, Executive Director and Board Chair of Code for America

Knight Community Information Challenge Winners from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

We’re excited to share with you the newest winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, receiving a combined $2.26 million in matching grants for news and information projects.

As traditional media continue to struggle, community and place-based foundations have an increasingly important role to play in helping groups provide local news and information. And they’ve stepped up to the challenge over the last four years, along the way strengthening their leadership and making an impact on issues facing the environment, children, urban planning and so many more.

Community and place-based foundations spent $58 million on news and information projects last year, according to a recent survey – and 38 percent of those who answered so they expect that investment to increase in coming years.

Making decisions about your Wednesday morning sessions at the Council on Foundations’ Fall Conference? Here are five reasons why we think you should attend the session on “Informed and Engaged Communities Through Journalism and Media Grant Making,” beginning at 8:30 a.m. in the Yerba Buena Ballroom, Salon ¾.

 Attend if you are:

-       Thinking about investing in media grant making and/or journalism but aren’t quite sure how to go about it: To get your juices flowing, Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton will be talking about our new publication on five things you need to know about journalism and media grant making, and five ways to get started. Copies of the publication will be available at the session, too.

-       Curious about how other foundations are making an impact through investing in news and information: We have lots of examples of successful projects helping foundations to move the needle on issues they care about. You can also pick up a copy of our new report on three foundations' projects: Opportunities for Leadership: Meeting Community Information Needs.

-       Looking for a way to boost your community engagement efforts: As Silicon Valley Community Foundation Emmett Carson recently said: “Good information is a cornerstone of civic engagement at its best.” Read our recent blog post about how many Knight Community Information Challenge winners, including Silicon Valley Community Foundation, are using information to engage residents around important issues.

-       Wanting to be the first to know who won this year’s Knight Community Information Challenge: We’ll be announcing the fourth round winners and talking about their projects.

-     Interested in asking questions of people with deep experience in community news and information:  You’ll have the chance to ask questions of and talk to Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton, an award-winning journalist and now special adviser to the foundation’s president, Trabian Shorters, who leads the Community Information Challenge, consultant and journalist Michele McClellan, and Program Directors Susan Patterson and Bahia Ramos-Synnott. Also, many community foundations already engaged in the field will be there.

Last week, Knight Foundation released a new report in honor of Constitution Day, showing that as social media’s popularity has grown among teens, so has appreciation for the First Amendment. In fact, more than 91 percent of students who use social networking to get news and information on a daily basis believe people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions.

Today, Fast Company wrote about the report, focusing on the underlying tensions between teachers and students when it comes to teens’ use of social media and its impact on freedom of expression:

“Conducted through interviews with 12,000 students and 900 high school teachers in the U.S., the study found a solid majority of American teachers believe limits should be placed on what their students say and do on social networks. For example, only 36% believe students have the right to express their opinions of teachers and school administrators online without the risk of in-school punishment.”

Join us for a conversation on journalism and media grant making at the Council on Foundations' Community Foundations conference.

We'll be discussing ways to make an impact on the issues community foundations care about, through investing in news and information projects. Everyone who attends will get a copy of our guidebook to journalism and media grant making. There will be lots of time to ask questions, and get answers, from both Knight staff and community foundations making news and information grants.

In addition, we'll be announcing the latest winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge. See which 19 of your colleagues are leading their communities in helping to meet local information needs.

The session takes place at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday Sept. 21 in the Yerba Buena Ballroom. See you there!

In a unique private-public collaboration, 11 of America's top foundations - including Knight - have joined with the National Endowment for the Arts and seven federal agencies to establish ArtPlace, a nationwide intitiative to drive revitalization in cities and towns with a new investment model.

The projects will integrate artists and arts organizations into key local efforts in transportation, housing, community development and job creation. First round grants will total $11.5 million and include 34 locally-initiated projects from Honolulu to Miami.

By Ellen Martin 

Third in a series on “Opportunities for Leadership: Meeting Community Information Needs.” Read Day 1 and Day 2.

July, 2008: The Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey announced it would force the early retirement of 25 percent of its staff  - many of them experienced reporters - to avoid selling the paper. 

“They got rid of the education, environment and healthcare beats – issues that we cared about because they’re important to the health of our communities,” said Hans Dekker, CEO of the Community Foundation of New Jersey.

The same story played out across the United States as the recession settled in and old business models faltered. But in Morristown, the Community Foundation of New Jersey decided to tackle the issue head on. 

That fall, the foundation funded NJ Spotlight, a nonprofit news start up focusing on state policy issues. The foundation ultimately established a partnership with the group, becoming the site’s most significant investor and planning a founding role in the development of the enterprise. The community foundation also secured funding for the site through the Knight Community Information Challenge, in addition to attracting other significant funders. 

By Ellen Martin 

Second in a series on “Opportunities for Leadership: Meeting Community Information Needs.” Read Day 1 here. Read the full report here.

Last spring, a group of 100 people gathered at a public regional planning forum in Oakland, Calif., trying to figure out how the area could best absorb the 2 million people expected to move to the area in the next 25 years.

Where would they live, shop and work, they wondered.

The conversation was rich - but perhaps most importantly – there were lots of new faces in the crowd.

Community planning can often be an arcane conversation amongst insiders. With so much at stake, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation wanted to ensure that more people were informed about and engaged in the decision-making.

So the foundation, with support from the Knight Community Information Challenge, launched a community information initiative called YouChoose Bay Area. It centered on an interactive website that publishes region-specific information about Bay Area communities and hosts a series of exercises that allows visitors to choose regional development options and see the consequences. For instance, a user could prioritize things they value such as a “big house with a yard,” or “public transit within walking distance,” and receive a report on what the overall region would look like because of it and other factors.

The effort coupled the online experience with in-person meetings, making both more engaging. As the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s CEO Emmett Carson said: “Good information is a cornerstone of civic engagement at its best.”

We looked at Silicon Valley’s experience in a new report, Opportunities for Leadership: Meeting Community Information Needs, which we’re releasing this week at informationneeds.org. Read the full report here.

All three community foundations profiled in the series are investing in news and information to make an impact on issues they care about. Along the way, they’ve increased their own leadership in the community.

Yesterday, we wrote about the Community Foundation of Greater Buffalo, and how it has increased the impact of the environmental justice movement through a new information hub, GrowWNY.org. Tomorrow, check back here to learn more about how the Community Foundation of New Jersey’s support of a local news site has helped shine the light on critical, statewide issues.

Silicon Valley’s efforts helped bring more people into the community planning process – with some 15 percent of the 800 residents participating attending a regional planning meeting for the first time. In addition, the regional planning agencies were so impressed with the YouChoose Bay Area site, the groups eventually adopted YouChoose as a central component of the public planning forums.

In doing this work, the foundation has developed new partnerships with government agencies, nonprofits and even schools that allow it to reach more residents.

Good information helped bring them together.

This week, read the series, “Opportunities for Foundation Leadership: Meeting Community Information Needs,” at www.informationneeds.org.

To learn more about how community foundations can make an impact by investing in news and information, attend the session on Journalism and Media Grant making at the Council on Foundations’ Community Foundation Conference, at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday Sept. 21 in the Yerba Buena Ballroom.

Ellen Martin is senior consultant at FSG who authored the new report.

Crossposted from the Council on Philanthropy's blog.

What does a foundation do when pollution poses an immediate health threat to the community – and the nonprofits there to help aren’t connected to each other?

Consider what's happened in the Greater Buffalo area, a passageway for 20 percent of the world’s fresh water supply - and home to the first U.S. Superfund site. Due to the region’s industrial heritage, the area continues to fight contamination and a lack of green space, contributing to elevated rates of asthma, obesity and heart disease.

The Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo saw an opportunity to make a difference. Already 150 nonprofits were working on environmental justice issues – but they weren’t working together, and weren’t making far-reaching progress.

So the foundation decided to launch an information hub, funded through the Knight Community Information Challenge, where people and groups can share information for action. So far, the investment is paying off.

We recently visited the community foundation, and two others, to see how their investments in news and information projects were transforming their communities and their foundations. The result is a new report we will be releasing over the next three days at informationneeds.org, called Opportunities for Leadership: Meeting Community Information Needs. The first installment is available here.

Earlier this week Code for America announced the beta launch of Change By Us Seattle, a new application to support volunteerism in the community. The idea behind the project is to empower neighborhoods in Seattle to coordinate offline efforts to make their city better.

The new site helps you share ideas, start projects, connect with resources and make your community better. You can join a project or start your own and a network of city leaders is ready to hear your ideas and provide guidance for your projects. 

The recipient of this year's Inamori Ethics Prize is Beatrice Mtetwa, a human rights lawyer who has spent the last 20 years defending journalists and fighting for a free press in her home country of Zimbabwe.

In her remarks at a ceremony on Sept. 7 at Severance Hall in Cleveland, she said, "in one's career, it does not matter how much wealth you make, but how much good you do."

Jen Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America writes:

As we are nearing the end of Code for America’s inaugural fellowship year, we’re excited to announce the forward-thinking city governments we will be partnering with in 2012. Today we’re honored to share that the cities of Detroit, Macon and Philadelphia have been selected as partners for the Code for America program next year.

At the core of Code for America is a belief that we live in an age of participation, but that our public institutions haven’t benefited equally from the technologies and approaches that have so dramatically changed the business and social landscape in the past decade.  We are blessed to have the support of an institution that also believes fundamentally in the power of civic engagement to create a better world. The John S. and James L Knight Foundation is supporting Code for America’s engagements in these three cities, through its Technology for Engagement Initiative, which funds projects that help communities use technology to take action.

Philadelphia father William Spratley is raising his three grandsons after losing his only daughter. Recently, Spratley uploaded a video as part of the BME Challenge to talk about how his daughter’s death spurred him to be an advocate for eradicating domestic violence. 

“Whatever it takes me to do, to make sure I have my voice heard and listened to, I plan on doing it,” Spratley said in the video.

An animated video, Communication is Aid, makes the case that in crises, knowing what’s happening, where to go for assistance and who to call for help is crucial to survival and recovery. The video points out that during a natural or manmade disasters, information itself is as crucial to people’s survival as other types of more traditional aid. It also describes the positive impact of two-way communication in a crisis.

The video was produced by Infosaid, a collaboration of Internews and the BBC World Service Trust.

Knight Foundation recently hosted an interactive workshop to foster a greater sense of community in Akron with speaker Peter Kageyama. Over 200 people attended. To assist the effort, the team from The Civic Commons, a Knight-funded civic engagement platform, captured Akron residents’ sentiments prior to the workshop through a “nametag project”. During the workshop, the Commons put up its Mobile Engagement Studio and interviewed participants throughout the event about what might transform Akron and what they love about their city. You can check out the ongoing conversation here. 

The Charlotte Observer this week covered the launch of Power2give.org a new website that gives Charlotte art lovers the opportunity to choose exactly how they want their money to be spent on cultural projects.

The article highlights the new site’s unique way of engaging and connecting visitors directly with the wide variety of cultural events in the city and how it allows them to share their ideas with others:

“A visitor to the site can filter the requests by topic - such as music, visual art, history or science - or search for a specific cultural group. A viewer who's won over by a project can make a donation by credit card. Links to Facebook and Twitter enable donors to tip off their friends.”

 Akron's Neotropolis TV program recently featured Eric Johnson.

After only one year on the job, University Park Alliance’s executive director, Eric Johnson, is emerging as an Akron leader with a vision. 

His op-ed article in the Akron Beacon Journal offers insight into the promising future of Akron and the strength behind an engaged community:

Knight Foundation's Trabian Shorters on BME from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

What motivates you to engage in your community? Why do you lead others?

Any Detroiter’s list would surely include an uncommon love of city. Detroit in 2011 is a town bubbling with change agents: loyal and resourceful citizens are working together to create inviting public spaces, help our children succeed in school, build community-based small businesses, and much, much more.