People in the web startup scene celebrate failure with as much gusto as some of us celebrate $2 waffle iron sales. The concepts of failing fast and failing often are already core elements of the lean startup philosophy (to the point of inspiring a contrarian stance).

As I wrote last year,

Twitter itself was an offshoot of a failed podcast service called Odeo. Facebook takes pride in their fails as proof that the company is confronting real challenges. Jimmy Wales gave a TEDx Tampa presentation on his three rather massive failures prior to starting Wikipedia.

Leo Bonnani updates the civic media community on Sourcemap, a Center-sponsored project to help citizens map where things come from...from laptop parts and IKEA beds, to campaign contributions.

Download!

Charlie DeTar walks us through prototype software to aid medium-to-large groups in consensus-based decision making.

Download!

Lost in Boston Real Time turns bookstores and burrito joints into bus stops by delivering the MBTA’s live bus and T data to these value add locations via LED signs. The first few deployments of the project validated the hypothesis: indeed knowing that the CT2 is still ten minutes away is much more valuable while sitting at Anna’s Taqueria with friends than standing alone at the bus stop.

LIB Real Time may be of limited value to all of us with smartphones and bus apps. But imagine you’re not sitting at Anna’s with the bean juice running down your arm as you check your smart phone app; instead you’re a client living at a residential treatment program for drug and alcohol addiction.

Say today is the first day of a new job and you need to find your way there on the bus. You don’t have a bus schedule, never mind a smart phone. You leave for the bus stop hoping that today the cards aren’t stacked against you and the bus is running on time.

(Photo credit: Christopher Fabian of UNICEF & Global Pulse)

Just got back from the UN "Pulse Camp 1.0".

Global Pulse is a new and quite ambitious UN initiative "to improve evidence-based decision-making and close the information gap between the onset of a global crisis and the availability of actionable information to protect the vulnerable" (Full overview at http://www.unglobalpulse.org/about).

Please to enjoy the visual fruits of last week's Future of News and Civic Media conference plenaries. Below--available for viewing, downloading, and reusing--are the three plenary videos...

Announcement of the 2010 Knight News Challenge winners

Available for download at MIT TechTV.

Via Knight Foundation...

Knight News Challenge Winners, In Brief from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Congratulations to this year's (yet-again-amazing) class of Knight News Challenge winners.