 So I decided that I have to really change things a bit. So either change the rules or redefine the question. So I'm going to redefine the question. I'm definitely not here to teach, impart information, do what most of the other people do here. It's like, say smart things. Instead, I really need to be here for almost the opposite reason. I need to take away. I need to get feedback. I need to get ideas for the way the news challenge has been run, what it is, what we're doing, what our goals are, and some ideas for the future of either better, other, whatever. But I'm definitely here for feedback. So please, I've been told I don't have to ask for questions, but I do want to make sure that you do get out of this what you want to get out. And please make sure you ask questions. OK, so let me give a quick history on what the news challenge is and why we're doing it. Knight Foundation was founded in 1950. It was based from newspaper publishers. And throughout those years, there was a belief in certain things that publishers did. Right or wrong, here's the belief. The belief is that a good publisher can help identify the community to itself. And a good publisher can help the community decide through information what is best, what should be focused on, and how to bring together the collective wisdom of the community. Information becomes the glue. Well, in a world where newspapers are losing circulation and losing advertising and not even getting young readers, what happens to this function? And Knight Foundation believes that it's a very critical function. And actually, as we look at our programs over the past years, we've realized that there has emerged, sort of unconsciously, a defining mantra of ours, which is serving the information needs of communities in a democracy. And ultimately, that's what the news challenge is about. Ultimately, that's what many of our grants are about. This overall idea of what do communities need to function well, best, optimally, in a democracy. That led us to focus the news challenge on geography and specific communities in a specific geographic area. First thing people said is this obviously shows you don't know what you're doing. You don't understand the web. The web is about virtual community. And here you are requiring us to create physical community in a specific geographic place. And our reply to that is, but you know what? I don't vote virtually. And I don't live in a virtual world, even though I might attend one. I might, you know, kids go to school districts that are defined by geography. We vote for House of Representatives members defined by geography. We pay taxes defined by geography. Geography is indeed crucial to the way we function and crucial to the problems that we probably most easily can come together to solve. So therefore, the focus of the news challenge is on digital news and information that's new and innovative that can help build or bind community in a specific geographic area. And that's pretty much it. Those are the rules. And in a situation where there are so few rules, each rule is, of course, critically important. So again, it's digital innovation using news and information to build and bind community in a specific geographic area. So the challenge is not a newspaper preservation act. It is a new, we hope, a news organization, a news and information proliferation act. And if newspapers and traditional organizations use the innovations that come out of it, great. We're happy about that. If they don't, others will. But that's another of our concerns. If they don't, others will not only use them, but invent them. And we really hope that the people who are inventing the latest digital information technologies care about things like ethics and principles and freedom of speech and press and fairness and separation of advertising from news and news from opinion. These are vital to journalists. And if journalists aren't involved in the creation of the tools that everybody's using, and instead the tools are being created by technology companies that, frankly, don't understand, don't know about, or perhaps don't care about some of those things, it gives us pause. So we're hoping that we can lead a lot of the news industry into the digital revolution to help them gather new audiences, keep new audiences, and keep not only their perspective, but their important position. I mean, if newspapers die, that's one thing. If the news and information function in a community dies, that's a horribly different thing. And that's something that we should, I think, work to make sure it does not happen. So let me give you a few examples of grants that we made last year and why we did it. And then I'll talk a little bit about what I'm seeing this year and then we'll go on from there. So I have just sort of informally grouped some of these grants and I don't know if anybody would agree, and I don't even know if people at night would agree, so it doesn't matter. So, please. I'll be watching your video later. They will find out later. I don't know what those clusters are. What were you thinking? So I would say some of the grants sort of fall around the idea of what do we hope to learn? And I would say one of those is MTV. MTV is putting 51 youth journalists in each state in the District of Columbia to report on the presidential election, particularly for mobile media, and to use mobile media for people who natively use mobile media in the first place. So in other words, to report on the media that young people are most comfortable using anyway. I don't know much about that. We don't know much about that and we don't know much about that as conveying political information. Does it matter? Does it work? Is it effective? That's what we hope to find out. MIT. The MIT grant is, of course, the combination of the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies. And the idea there is to go into communities, study the information needs of communities, and then, and I think this part is important, not necessarily create products for them, although that's one aspect, but also to create new processes. There might be totally wonderful products there already that could be used differently. And so the processes they might create might enable greater information sharing among a community, greater knowledge to allow people to come together to decide community goals and aspirations. Arizona State is creating an incubator. Actually, it's an entrepreneurial center. They have a digital innovation lab and that digital innovation lab is now going to be sort of extended with a digital entrepreneurial lab. So they're gonna try to take the ideas that come out of the innovation lab, pass them over to the entrepreneurial lab and see if they can be turned into products. And also they're gonna take students off the street who have an idea and want to create a product or community news and information and don't know how to go about it, they're gonna help them through that process. And then similarly, there are seven universities that banded together to create a digital sort of incubator process, how to think about problems in new ways, how to come up with various solutions and then go out into the communities and test. Okay, examples of where Knight Foundation is using these grants to, I hope, lead. And one of those would be the Chi Town Daily News, which is a project in Chicago to put a reporter in a citizen train, citizen hired reporter in each of Chicago's neighborhoods. If this works, there will be more covers of Chicago than any of the newspapers even together are doing. I think there's something like 79 or 80 neighborhoods in Chicago and the project is to hire a community organizer, find and train citizen journalists and then retain them is what our big goal is. How do you find them, train them and retain them? Also in Chicago is Adrian Holobody who's doing a project called Every Block. And the idea there ultimately is for people to be able to put in their address and find out everything occurring on that street in their block in the next block. So it might be something like, one block over from you, there's a proposal to build a new school. On your street, the street cleaning schedule has been changed. Block over, the street's gonna be closed for a parade in two days. In addition to that will be whatever people are blogging about and whatever is in the newspapers that pertain to that geographic area. And then we've also, we gave three grants for games, all of which are looking at them differently, looking at either how to do them differently or what they're doing differently. One is at Berkeley, one is at University of Minnesota and one is the Gotham Gazette in New York. But the idea is how do you use games to explain particularly ongoing stories and can you create templates that newspapers would want to use because they would be easy enough to in essence write your own dialogue. Because obviously games take a long time to create and they're not necessarily designed for breaking news. They could be used for news that lasts a little longer but it has to be easy for a newspaper, a news organization to use it. So that's one of the tests. Okay, examples of, I would say how we hope to serve, how we hope to help the profession would be the Berkman's Citizen Media Law Project on gathering all the information of what's going on with citizen lawsuits in the various states, categorizing them, learning from them and getting a sense of which state has a problem with XYZ, which one has a problem with ABC. And then also providing information for things like how to incorporate and important business decisions. So things that will help a lot of individuals because they will now know what to think about, what to look for and how best to proceed. Same thing with Rising Voices. The idea of microgrants for expanding storytelling capability, expanding citizen involvement in areas throughout the world that don't have it, again, examples of where we're hoping to serve the information needs of cultures that need it, cultures we don't know about, cultures we all need to bring into the fold. VillageSoup is a grant that we're ultimately, we hope, will create a free content management system for any citizen that wants to start a newspaper and have a complete system and have advertising figured into it and administration. And it's like, here's your newspaper box loaded up. And we're hoping it's easier to load than Drupal. So we'll find out. That's a joke that goes ever well. And then another, how we're hoping to serve is at Northwestern where they're going to give nine scholarships to computer science students to get a master's degree in journalism. And the idea is, of course, to get people who first of all are interested in that and to bring them into the world of journalistic problem solving. We have seen that people like Adrian have gone from journalism to the tech world and have used their journalistic background to create new information telling storytelling methods. Can we, can we do the reverse? Can we take people with the skills already and teach them journalism's principles and ethics? We'll find out. Okay, that was last year. This year, we made several significant changes that I think related to the fact that we almost doubled our number of applications from 1,650 to 3,000. They're still being read. They're almost done. And we created different processes for this whole thing. One is that you could, when you submitted an application, you could decide whether you wanted it to be open or closed. If it were open, that would mean that your application would be visible for the world to see. But also to rate on a one to five star system and to vote on, I'm sorry, and to comment on. Now, let's say that you submitted, then the contest opened back in the summer. So let's say that you submitted an application and you got 18 comments. We then allow you to take what you think are the best ones of those and rewrite your application incorporating those comments and resubmit. So we're truly trying to say, we want to enable the wisdom of the crowd, but we don't want it enabled just so that people can look at it and go, gosh, aren't those commenters smart? We would like it to go a step farther. Aren't those commenters smart? And, oh, they helped improve that application. It is now much better. Or you could choose the closed route as traditionally most people did before. We advertised in 10 languages. And as part of that, we worked with both a public relations firm, but we also worked with MTV and MTV International. And the way we got to work with MTV was that we created an award, we called the Young Creators Award, and we set aside $500,000 of the five million in new money that we plan to give away to awards specifically to people who are 25 years old and younger. And that certainly ties into MTV's interest and they helped us advertise it both through, they did PSAs, we did PSAs on the website and on television on MTV for various concerts that they had and then also we hooked up with MTV International and they started advertising it on various, their pages in Hong Kong, which is I think the largest MTV international site, the news challenge was on the homepage. Same thing in Latin America. So our MTV connection I think helped us immensely, both in getting young people, where we went from probably a handful last year to 356 this year and half of those are international. So I thought that was also pretty good in terms of goals because we wanted to extend this contest internationally. We know what we don't know, which is why we're doing this contest and why it has so few rules. And we also know that there are a lot of people doing things in other countries that we should be doing and could be doing and haven't quite migrated over here yet and their ideas that we want to tap into. So you might wonder, what are we seeing this year? First the disappointments. The disappointments are that what we're seeing is people not really understanding what we mean and therefore probably us not explaining well enough what we mean by innovative. People tended to look at last year's winners or look at what is and apply it to a new, delightful, wonderful, helpful, sweet, kind content area that just made us cry when we rejected it because it would, you know, we have stopped giving money to AIDS orphans like 19 times in this contest. And it's again, it's a great content area but the way that people were proposing it, I want to create a website for AIDS orphans. Websites are there and you can probably don't need our money to do it. So one issue with the contest this year is that people took what is and applied it to a new content area and because it was a new content area they thought that it would be a good application. Our definition of innovation is squishy sort of like the definition of pornography in the sense that you know it when you see it. And ours was sort of the same way. If we've seen it already, okay, it's not innovative. If we can easily imagine it, we pretty much assumed it's not innovative. And if it was a winner last year, it's definitely not innovative this year by definition. And people really did not, I think, understand that and we need, that'll be an area for us to work much harder explaining next year. So the types of things that we are seeing are applications for Facebook, much more use of global positioning devices and information technology, much more use of sort of place tagging, not for wireless. So if I'm walking by, if I'm walking on a tour and I go past a certain building and I've got either my phone or whatever wireless device set up right, it will tell me what the history of this building as I pass it. So various uses of that sort of technology are certain things, the types of things that we're seeing now. A lot of people wanted to do training for X, Y, and Z and that's not really where this contest is heading necessarily. So because of the changes, what are some of the problems that we've had? One is that we wanted to reach out internationally. Last year there were 15% of the applicants were international, this year there were 40% were international. So the outreach really worked. But did we defeat ourselves because we decided that the standard is an absolute standard? So we still believe that innovation is innovation and it has to reach an absolute standard as opposed to what is innovative in a given country. An individual told me what's innovative in Afghanistan is television. Well, that's not what we're gonna give a grant for. So we decided that we would go for the absolute standard but that is obviously going to cut out a lot of our international applicants and we're just crossing our fingers that it doesn't cut out a whole lot. And we don't know the answer to that yet. It's also very difficult now with the Patriot Act to make grants internationally to individuals and we have to figure out ways to do that or individuals to work through or they have a lot of paperwork that they have to fill out and IRS stuff and all this where they have to certify that they're not a terrorist organization and all of that. So what if we give a grant to a guy in Bolivia who doesn't have the means to deal with the paperwork? So how do we provide that? We haven't quite thought that through yet. And then how do we monitor it? How do we monitor a grant in China and another one in Bolivia and another one in Uzbekistan? We'd be traveling even more than you have. Yeah, exactly. So then also, this whole open-close thing, I can imagine that it could create intellectual property issues. We of course tried to avoid that by saying and forcing people to go through the disclosure thing that says if you comment on any of these applications, you are doing so only to improve the application and to improve the individual's application. You are not doing so to create any intellectual property claim on your own. You're doing so specifically to help improve this application. If you can accept that, then go ahead. Are lawyers comfortable with that? I can still imagine that if an application that was revised because of several comments ends up being awarded a million dollars, there could be issues. We're just waiting. Young creators, I would love to give an award to a 16-year-old. And actually, one of them wrote to me and said, my parents are divorced. I live with my dad, but I don't like him and I would not want him to get the money. I want my mom to get it. And we're like, oh my. I guess we haven't thought this all through yet. So those are the sorts of issues that we have created for ourselves this year, intellectual property, dealing with young people, making grants internationally, and those are the sorts of things for which I'm seeking feedback. So it's your turn. Thank you very much. Well, so I have to say first and foremost, I'm thrilled to hear that the international outreach has gone as well as it did. As happy as we were to be recognized with a grant last year, we said some snarky things about the fact that we were the only international grantee and as someone based at the University University, I heard that. Yeah, no, I believe in being very honest about these things. But it's really useful to hear those concerns about how you support an international grant. So where my question was sort of going on this is to what extent are other funders looking at what you're doing with this challenge and do you have funders who are deep in the former Soviet Union, for instance, saying, hey, can we work with you on this and do a former Soviet Union news challenge? Or can we learn from your model and do something in an area where we have the geographic expertise, the capacity to monitor, but we can do stuff that's innovative for this local environment rather than necessarily internationally innovative? I think that is a great way to go that we have not gone yet. What we've done so far is tried to work with international organizations that we know, and that typically, those are ones that are based in the US and then extend, you know, on, and our foundation itself is getting more and more into international work, but we're not heavily known for it, like Ford or Rockefeller, and that's a growth area for us. So therefore, we don't know who might be good to work with in Russia. Those are things we need to find out. I think it would be a good way to do it. The way we've thought of it so far is we've given grants to internews and we've given grants to the World Association of Newspapers and to International Center for Journalists, and they have programs throughout the world, and they might be some of our monitoring assistance or evaluation assistance or, you know, even administration. I just, I have the strong suspicion that if you sat down with Open Society Institute and sort of said, let's co-fund something for the former Soviet Union. Speaking as a board member, and I'm not saying that my board best, that is my portfolio over there actually, because I do software over there rather than media, but I suspect that there's a number of places where there might be that traction. I think it's a really useful acknowledgement that it's hard to fund where you don't have boots on the ground to monitor, but I also think there's the danger of sort of sending the message that all the innovation in the space happens in the US, which we all know not to be true. Yeah, and we definitely do not want to send that message whether or not we're going to be successful with that this round. I don't know, because as you know, we really didn't give any international grants last year. I mean, I wouldn't count yours as international, really, in the sense that it's, you're based here and it's, I can monitor a lot easier by talking with you later. Yeah, so one of the benefits that's accrued to my project is the networking we've done with other new challenge winners. And first of all, is that something that Knight anticipated was going to happen, that there was going to be this sort of tight camaraderie amongst the winners? And second, is there a way to further develop that and make it even more of a positive for this next group? Actually, we expected just the opposite. I thought that we would have such big egos in the room of people who've just been given, you know, $300,000. Especially if it's Ardia. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's always a lawyer. It's always a lawyer. It's like, oh my God, we got to deal with this. And, you know, give a million dollars to a 25-year-old kid, he might think that he's really something. And so I anticipated a lot of ego problems in the room and it was just the opposite. The group melded and meshed and got along and supported each other. And it was absolutely delightful to see. So obviously, we will do everything we can to continue that and support that and we've gotten the groups together a couple times now. And then, of course, the next year's winners and first year's winners will start being folded together. And so we're going to keep doing all that because we, in Toronto in October, we got all the winners together and they sat around a table, a room like this, sort of in a horseshoe, and they all went around and explained their projects, what they were doing, where they are with it. And by the end of that, you were thinking, I was thinking, holy cringey, there's the future right there. The future of the news and innovation industry is sitting in this room. And any of the people at this conference who are not paying attention to this are really missing out. And the other thing I thought was that, by accident, a lot of these projects tie together. And it almost looks as if there was a grand intent to create an Uber project. There isn't, but I can see that projects will meld together and work with one another, which I think is fantastic and another benefit of this. For the open and closed application process, how many people applied through the open process and how many comments did they get? Did they use them effectively? I don't know about the using them part right now. 40% of the applicants used the open process. And yeah, which I thought that was pretty good. And there was an average of two comments per application. Some had many more, many had zero. And some people did indeed resubmit. It was a huge minority, sounds wrong to say, but very few people did resubmit, but some did based on the comments. But the overall, the average was two comments per application and 40% of the applicants were in the open route. Yes. Did you advertise that open process in any way other than people who were already applying would know that they can comment on other entries? Like for instance, was there any way that the public could find out about this and then go in and comment on the entries? We didn't advertise the open process per se, we just advertised the contest. And then once you got to the contest page, you could read about it. I literally didn't know about it, despite writing several blog posts, pushing people towards the contest. I didn't realize that commenting on applications that was in there. I don't know to what extent it would have motivated me to do it other than to sort of give props to the ones that I was already aware of. But I don't think it was widely known. Yeah. That or I've been deleting a lot too much email lately, which is all. And how are you gonna evaluate whether that was successful and whether you'll do it again next year? We're going to sort of backtrack with the winners. And after the winners have been selected, then we're going to ask them, number one, what process did they use and did they get comments and did they use them? So we'll sort of do an investigation after we've selected the winners. So you don't know how people applied? I mean, I know, I can go and find any individual application as to whether it was open or closed. Yes. But by the time the applications get to the final set of reviewers, they won't have that information. They're all going to be pushed together. Yes, Colin. Can I go back to the Uber project and the sort of some of the original goals of the challenge and ask how you're going about trying to get some of these ideas, these innovations connected with the existing newspaper or kind of mainstream media, traditional media, whether they're sort of, if you think about kind of investing in a startup, if you're trying to help them to kind of move up the chain or get these values instilled in them, instill their technological and innovativeness in other organizations. First, let me take how are we trying to get the information out to say traditional media? And that two ways, well, one main way is that we go to the conferences and we bring the winners to like the editor and publisher interactive media conference. It's a bunch of publishers from newspapers across the country. And so all of the news challenge winners are there to introduce their projects and talk about them and do a panel and discuss it. So that's one public sense way in which we're doing it. The other thing we've done is we just started a blog called Idea Lab. And it's on PBS and it's, Mark Glazer is the host of the PBS MediaShift blog. He is now also the host of our Idea Lab blog which is part of the PBS MediaShift blog. It's sort of a separate section of it. And the idea there is to do a couple of things. Show the problems that everybody are trying to solve and the problems they're having when solving these and how do they overcome them. But then also let the world know this is what's coming. This is what's being worked on. These are the projects. And whether that means seek public input or whatever, I mean, that's what we're trying to do tomorrow on the Idea Lab blog and a couple others will be announced a project that is going to involve 12 newspapers. And it's springing from the work that one of our news challenge grantees is doing. And it's going to be tested in the waters of 12 different newspapers and announced tomorrow. And we'll be very, very hot. Max, in the back. If you look at the open application process it's like a good thing that you want to encourage and move up a quarter percent, have you considered incentivizing people who apply open by either increasing the possible cap of the grant they could receive if you apply open or I mean, it would probably not be a good idea to say you're more likely to get a grant if you apply in the open process but something to incentivize it. Actually, I'd like to talk about that a little bit because we took the opposite route in the sense that what we decided to tell people was we didn't want to punish you no matter which way you applied that if you have a good idea and you want to keep it quiet and you think it's already good and you've vetted it out and you're worried about someone stealing your idea, fine. And if you're not sure about your idea and you want public input, fine. And we didn't want people to think that depending on which category they entered they had a better chance of winning. We also had internally, frankly, a lot of arguments about this. As an administrator of the contest I was freaking out about it because I was, again, the whole intellectual property thing was scaring me. I was afraid that what's gonna happen is somebody is going to read an application in the open category and then apply in the closed category. And that individual, the person who submitted the idea in the open category, let's say that the other person too modifies it a little bit and submits in the closed category person one will never know. And neither would I probably. So those sorts of things were scaring me in terms of how to administer a contest fairly. So I think the best thing we can probably do next year is to publicize better the fact that there are advantage, and we did try to say this, that there are advantages to submitting an open application and the advantages are this. You think you've got a great idea but you don't understand the whole community, physical community, geography requirement. Well, perhaps others can volunteer to test it in their community or step up and make your proposal more whole, more complete. So you can get a better proposal if you are, if you have any questions about it it's possible to use the open process to strengthen your proposal. And that's about as far as we want with it. I'm a wedding economist in Mexico. First I was going to raise the question that given that your talk is already posted on the media shift blog, are bloggers in fact too fast and not giving time to defend and digest before? I'm just jealous that you got to post it before I did. The question about waiting to hit publish, so wait to see what you say. I have too much to digest here. So you got 1600 last year, you got 3000 this year. I'm wondering if the curve continues ever upwards or whether at a certain point the well starts to run a little dry. And I'm sort of curious basically how many years you think this particular model of open solicitation will work? Is there probably sort of a finite number of interesting innovative journalistic ideas that are gonna come up in the first couple of years and then we're gonna sort of work through the consequences of them? Or do you think that there's sort of a constant level of innovation that you'll see coming up here to year? My guess is that we will see a constant level of innovation. And the reason I say that is only because of looking backward. So some of you were probably doing this, where I'm sure doing this long before me, but I started in digital media in 1995. So one of the fun things about doing digital media then was the fact that there was no right way to do things. There was no right way to create a website. There was no right way to do news online. There was no right way to do communities or comments on stories or anything. And every year there's a new technology, there's a new process, and that just complicates the fact that there's again no right way to use that process. And I think that we've seen that every year. There's been a new this and new that, whether it's YouTube or MySpace or whatever, or whether it's RSS feeds or other tools, there's still in many ways no right way to use them or there's no right way to use them for this new process in which we've decided to try to use them. So I think that so far we can maintain ourselves. We can sustain this. But I should tell you that our goal is to just sustain it until it dies out. I mean, if it continues to be interesting, if we continue to get applications, if they continue to be cool, we'll continue to do it. At least we'll continue to go back to the board. We've been authorized for five years and we don't consider five years to be magical. Next year we got a hundred applications and maybe we're all bad, we'd probably end it. But if it keeps going, we're certainly willing to keep it going because I would say it's tying in again with this overall goal of ours, the information needs of communities and in a democracy. And I need to mention that along that line, Knight Foundation is having a conference in February for specifically that purpose of bringing together community foundations to say, you know what, although you've always been worried about things like after daycare and health centers and all that, you really ought to also be worried about information in your community. Number one, a lot of communities are losing it or they never had it and without it, how can we decide what our priorities are in the first place? How can we decide whether we need or want that daycare center or where it should be if we don't have a healthy information structure in this community? So you community foundations, we are going to challenge them and say, you have a new area that you just simply have to get into and that is information, protecting it, guaranteeing it, supporting it. And John had a question. I just wanted to follow on this theme of democracy. First up, just as I think you know, most of us around this table need to rely on foundations like yours to sustain ourselves. And Harvard Law School, for instance, doesn't support the Berkman Center. We've made rent for this facility and all the food and so forth. So it's extremely wonderful that you not only made grants, of course here, but also that you're willing to share with us the process by which you go through to conceive it. I'm not sure I've ever seen a senior program officer in public stand up and say, this is how we do it. So bravo to you guys for this. Not on the record, at least. Not on the record, yeah. I didn't want to out you, Ethan. Not exactly a program officer. But anyway, thank you for doing this. I suspect others will be playing this podcast for some time to try to figure out how you think about it. But going to the goals of what you're trying to do as you're reviewing thousands of applications, you've now a couple of times said this relationship between information provision and democracies. The other day in the Berkman Center we were whiteboarding here, our efforts in the area of internet and democracies is something near and dear to what we're trying to do. Obviously one big chunk of it is the sort of citizen media field with CMLP and Gold Voices and others in there. But I wondered if you could talk through sort of two aspects of it. One is, what do you think that relationship is about? So what is it that you're trying to fund that might be, is it more information is better for democracy because XYZ or is that path well laid out? And the second would be, as you go internationally when you say something like we want to use these tools to improve democracies, is it that you're aiming for a certain kind of democracy in which you hope it to be evolving? Or are you quite happy to give a grant in a authoritarian regime which is not democratic at all but where you're trying to install democratic values? So the second one really being are you willing to make grants in non democracies with the hope that they will become more democratic through these processes, whatever they may be? Let me answer that one right away. Yes, we are. We're willing to make grants in non democracies. And let me just use as an example of that the State Department in Tunisia. And the only reason I have this example is because I was there and it's the only one I know. For a world press freedom day about two years ago, three years ago, Tunisia has one of the most repressive press systems in the world and is rated, you know, I think almost as bad or worse than the Soviet Union was when it was a Soviet Union. And the ambassador there decided that the way to help support information flow is to try to support the online editors. And so the embassy decided for world press freedom day they would give online editors cover by inviting them all to a conference hosted by the ambassador to talk about press freedom. And they came. And then as part of that conference I conducted a seminar on economic sustainability of online news operations. And the embassy, the reason they did this was because they see it as the nose, the proverbial nose through the camel's nose through the tent of the beginning of the, you know, creating cracks in a authoritarian regime that can do nothing but help eventually the information flow in the country. So even the US government is, of course, supporting information flow in non-democracies. Including for the Berkman Center, so to be clear. Yeah, so yeah, so we would support that. And then the other question concerning what is... What's, so there's a lot of theoretical debate there are empirical debates about why does more information or whatever it is that you're after here result in stronger democracies? What is the process by which you go from the first statement, more information on the web is better to democracies or stronger. Or in fact, do you guys have one sense of what that line is like? Are you just engaging in debates? Do you think it's a hypothesis? Or what's the, what's in between those two things? I would say the background of it is, you know, most of the people in senior management at the United Foundation came up through journalism. In that role, they came up through the ideas of Milton and Mills and the idea of there is a kernel of truth out there somewhere more information is better than less information. And that the best way to combat bad speech is more security. And those are sort of ingrained in that. So take that. Right, traditional Western view. Exactly, so take that as a springboard. And then I would say, I guess we we are also willing to say that we don't know that more information is better for our community. We don't know that there's a relationship between more information and quality information and more useful information. So we're actually going to create a commission. We're going to study. We're gonna create a study on the information needs of communities. And we have one sort of underway right now as funded by us and Pew Center. University of Missouri is studying 51 communities. They're doing a scan of the media, all media in 51 communities over a three year period. And it's going to look at communities that have a lot of citizen generated media. Do they have higher levels of civic engagement and participation? Communities that have traditional media and the online sites of traditional media. How do the two compare or not compare? Are there things we can learn from them? So we're in the beginning processes of studying the information that exists in communities is a relationship to civic participation. Our assumption is probably that we want there to be. I don't know that there is. We're gonna try to find out. We're also, we will be doing more to study of the information needs of communities and democracies. And go from there. I mean, we're hoping that research that will be done in the next, say two, three years will inform more of our grant making. But right now it seems to be funneled around the idea of information needs of a community and democracy. I think we're willing to say, at least, democracies function best with information. Okay. And... It seems like a state statement. You know, that one other foundations can go ahead and quote and else it'll be okay. So, you know, from there, we're gonna see. That's an incredibly hard question, but. Yeah, it was. It was. Yeah. Yeah. You said that you're gonna get all these community foundations together and talk to them about how they have to get involved in community and information, for the reasons that you guys are just talking about. When you go talk to them, are you talking to them about funding community and citizen journalism efforts in their communities? Are you talking to them about ways for the organizations that they are already funding to become publishers and content producers and more product and content producers themselves? Because I think there's a, I think I tend to think that the ladder is sort of more what's happening in these communities on its own. Well, part of the idea for this came from the Birken Center, a fellow, Dan Gilmour, who wrote a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, I believe, about two months ago or so, and he basically said this idea, community foundations need to get involved in communities and information. And he, in his column, wrote suggestions like, perhaps they need to fund a local blogger. Perhaps they need to create a fellowship for investigative reporting at the newspaper, right? But they need to do something to help maintain, as newspapers cut back in investigative reporting, for example, because it's expensive. Should a community foundation fund it, create an investigative reporting fund? And things of this nature. So that's where the idea came from. We read this, we love the idea. Our president of our foundation hit on it immediately and said, this is it, this is what we need to do. We need to support information in communities in this way. He loved the column. He gave a speech a couple days later at the community foundation conference, and he challenged everybody to start doing this. We don't have a set way in mind. What we want to do is change a mindset first. Yeah. Information covers a pretty broad territory. So do you have a preference for particular types of information that you fund? Is it statistical information about what's going on? And over at the far left and or right of the spectrum, there are people who are writing opinions and well, right in the middle, I guess there's op-eds and reflecting on information, and then it goes all the way out to people talking about what matters to them, which might not be easily characterized as information, but it may have something to do with democracy and may have something to do with journalism. So do you have a set idea of what is the sort of information that you're most interested in helping people find promulgate and share? Which section of the newspaper would you rather fund? The front page, the op-eds, entertainment, lifestyle? No, I don't think it's, I mean, if we had to answer that question, we would fund the local section. We would fund the local recording. But that's not what we're going to do. And the only reason I say that is that we are trying to support the information flow on a local level in specific geographies. I mean, that's been our focus for the past two, three years now. We're not looking to fund bloggers. We're not looking to fund, I mean, in this project. We're not looking to fund editorial cartoonists. It's nothing like that. We're looking to create an awareness in communities that newspapers are changing. With them, some important roles that they performed might also be changing. Wake up and smell the roses and you should be trying to do something about this. And as far as I think we're willing to go is to encourage people to do something about this, but not to tell them where or how. I had my interest piqued last week in a meeting here about the reflective process of first you get the information and then is your decision-making enhanced in any way by the process that happens when you talk about the information and reflect on it and then go ahead and make a decision. And this is sort of feedbacking on John's question a little bit of do you see is there a line between the reflective process and the way that the information is processed that also goes towards democracy or are you looking sort of just at the information coming in and the best way to get information about? First of all, I have to ask that you have your information piqued this week. That's what she'll be saying. That's what Gary Keppel was saying. I don't think we've thought it through that carefully to be honest with you, but I would say again, we're not trying to be prescriptive here. We're trying to say that for us, Knight Foundation thinks that information is important for the healthy life of communities. Now, is it important because you should take that information in a linear way and do something with it or is it important because you should reprocess it and think about it and spit it out differently? I think they're both great. And again, if it improves the life of a community, I don't think we care. Did you introduce yourself? Oh sorry, my name is Lisa Williams. I'm a Knight grantee. Gary, talk about information being important for the life of communities. Do you care about how that's sent out? How do you feel about the survival of the current journalistic institutions, big news organizations? That seems like that's where the big crack on this. Okay, again, one of the things I said in starting this was that the Knight News Challenge is not a newspaper preservation act. And now, I would say it is a news and information preservation act, but it's not a newspaper preservation act. And we personally are not hung up on the form of the information. We're hung up on the fact that it's there or not there and the quality of the people doing it. It's interesting to me that the high tech industry went through a very similar crack up during the mid 80s when all of our big institutions exploded in the deck. And there were a lot of op-ed pieces. I went back and looked at how will America stay on the cutting edge of technology? Our entire nation will fall behind. Kind of like the op-ed pieces you said here today about well, if we don't have a newspaper, we should throw in the towel on democracy. And of course that didn't happen. You know, what happened? What's those institutions died? But people, what technology? The functions were diffused. And I think that that will happen again. You know, the function of information imparting or information dissemination is certainly diffused now from what it was and will continue to be more so. The one to many model is pretty much dead. I mean, the many to many is alive and well. And I think, you know, back to the whole libertarian theory of the press, I think information will seek its way out. In that case, the compost plow turned out to be pretty important. The compost pile turns out to be pretty important. In which case it might actually be more important to allow people to opt in, to let their proposals be public after the judging, even if they've lost. Because maybe ideas just need to percolate. Yeah, actually that's another good point. That's something we have not done is make the applications winning or losing available publicly. I think part of it is just because we would have to get permission from every individual to do so and we haven't created a process to do that. And I suspect that it would be helpful for people to read both winning and losing applications. But the flip side of that is when it gets down to the final 200 out of 3,000, it turns into art, not science. I mean, let's be real. It's really easy to cut out 50% of the applications because they don't meet the minimum criteria. But from that point on, it gets progressively, I would say, geometrically more and more difficult to pick winners until you get down to the final whatever number. And then they're all good. They're just all good. Even though they're not useful to you, they might be useful to someone who can't tell you they'll be useful to you, even the ones that you reject right out of them. It might be good for somebody else. I agree. I think maybe just to build on that, within Rising Voices, a lot of what we're doing is re-granting. Essentially, there's a pool of money that we're able to give in quite small grants between about $2,000 and $5,000 to applicants from developing nations. And we had 30 acts as many as we could fund instead of the first round of that contest. One of the things that David Sasaki, who's actually running that project, did that has turned out to be brilliant, is to encourage everybody to participate in the community with one another to discuss what they were talking about in their grant, maybe why it didn't work, maybe why it did work. And that's actually proved to be a very effective community, because the truth is most of the people who are putting forth these ideas are going to try to get them off the ground, whether or not we give them $5,000 or not. And so what they're really looking for is the support of that wider community. One of the things that's interesting is that while there have been some really interesting synergies in the people who've received the challenge grants, I actually think in many cases you could have more synergies for the people who didn't receive them, or between people who received them and didn't receive them who might end up doing some sort of coaching or some information sharing. I think that's tremendously important. I think that institutions used to provide that little pool of people you could talk to. And it's those things that are gone. Those kind of communities have been very, very influential to me. Another way that we need to improve what we're doing, and I think this is one of them that you've just suggested, but another way is, in essence, how do we create a second life for some of these applications? And by that, I mean, there are other three-dimensional world we hope. Not in that, no, that's not what I meant. A lot of journalism foundations have told us that they would love to have, if we granted 25 grants for the news challenge, they would love to fund number 26, and 27 and 28. That's one thing. So how do we get that to them? And the other is a lot of these, the international ones, organizations like the International Center for Journalists or World Associated News Papers would want to work with some of these applicants. So a big challenge for us in the coming year is how do we take this treasure trove that we have of 3,000 applications and help more of them than just the ones that we're going to give money to? I didn't even notice that we were about five minutes longer than we would nearly go. But this is a great, great continuation as the usual, so I think we should probably do a little thank you and hard stop to release people. I suspect the conversation will keep going. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.