C4FCM Blog

One of the little gems that the Knight Foundation introduced at the Future of News and Civic Media conference last week was to award five grand to the best collaborative projects created at the conference. We thought it might be a tall order, what with everything else the attendees were doing, but boy did they ever respond.

"The pictures told the story of all of them, from different planets, representing different ethics, united by a common bond - the galactic Co-operation."

"Once you find your place in the galactic Co-operation - and I assure you that it is an important place - your fighting will stop. Why should you fight, which is an unnatural occupation, when you can push?"

"Specialist," Robert Sheckley

We've had to remain largely mum on the Future of News and Civic Media Conference, just held this week here at MIT--such is the reality of a popular-but-invitation-only conference and one whose big news, the announcement of the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners, was embargoed until the last minute.

The lucky and talented Knight News Challenge winners have joined us here at MIT this week to explore “The Future of News and Civic Media.” As they arrive, I am preparing to depart. This farewell post for C4FCM is inspired especially by them and by four experiences here this spring:

Via Mitch Resnick and others...

Scratch Day is a worldwide network of gatherings, where people will come together to meet other Scratchers, share projects and experiences, and learn more about Scratch.

Over the past few years, a great deal of effort has been invested by traditional news organizations in making their websites look and feel more "social."

"Now" meaning as of three minutes ago on Wednesday, May 13, 2009. This is pretty remarkable.

A close look at the recent presidential election shows that young people are more politically engaged now than at any point since the end of the Vietnam War era. 54.5 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 voted last November, constituting a larger proportion of the total electorate -- 18 percent -- then Putnam's bowlers, people 65-years-and-older (16 percent).

On the eve of our conference at MIT on "Learning in a Participatory Culture," Cable in the Classroom has joined forces with Project New Media Literacies to edit a special issue of Threshold which centers on the work we've been doing and the vision behind it.

Our friend Thomas Lowenhaupt of Connecting.nyc Inc. writes:

With the arrival of the .nyc TLD (like .com and .org but just for New York City), we'll will soon have the capacity to create neighborhood media centers such as astoria.nyc, brooklyn-heights.nyc, clinton.nyc, greenwich-village, harlem.nyc, etc.