conference

Last June we held our Future of News & Future Civic Media conference, here at MIT, with many recipients of the Knight News Challenge meeting, speaking, and demoing their work. We chose to use the "barcamp" un-conference technique for most of the sessions, where all participants to the conference were able to host a session.

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.

Attendees pitched 19 brand-new projects, and three of them--TweetBill, Hacks and Hackers, and the WordPress Distributed Translation Plugin--won cold hard cash to develop the ideas further. And the creators can thank their fellow attendees, because everyone used Mako Hill's preferential voting tool Selectricity to vote on the spot.

About the winning projects...

Video clips from The Future of Civic Media, our first annual conference held last month at MIT, are now available:

June 11th, Part 1

June 11th, Part 2

June 12th, Part 1

June 12th, Part 2

June 12th, Part 3

June 13th

This week, the MIT Center for Future Civic Media is hosting a major three-day conference retreat for our fellow recipients of recent Knight News Challenge grants. The conference, titled “The Future of Civic Media,” is now in full swing.