When Ashoka’s Changemakers launched Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition with Google a few weeks back, we were intentionally broad in our instructions – and were correspondingly unsure about how entrant would respond. “What do we mean by [citizen media]?” we wrote. “Well, we’re waiting for you to tell us.”

Now, they’ve begun to tell us. As of today, we’ve received 116 entries from 38 countries. And we’ve just announced the two winners of our early entry prize — $500 apiece, plus mentoring from Google staffers. Those early winners may be a barometer for what we’ll end up with when the competition closes Sept. 14 – and indeed, they may signal something about the future of citizen media.

The Changemakers/Google competition is a quest for new solutions that dramatically improve media access and participative citizenship around the world. We’re hoping to identify many, many new innovators whose work will advance the way people get, share, and use information. Among other things, we’re looking for innovations that:

Give voice to underserved, vulnerable populations, introducing them to media creation and distribution;
Equip journalists and publishers with tools or channels to report important news that otherwise gets missed;
Advance free speech and privacy protections;
Address the financial sustainability of quality news; and
Help people better navigate information and ascertain content reliability and authenticity.

So, to those early winners: FreedomBox is a platform to ensure private, anonymous, and secure interpersonal communication. It will, writes founder James Vasile, “put in people’s own hands and under their own control encrypted voice and text communication, anonymous publishing, social networking, media sharing, and (micro)blogging.

“Much of the software already exists: onion routing, encryption, virtual private networks, etc. There are tiny, low-watt computers known as plug servers to run this software. The hard part is integrating that technology, distributing it, and making it easy to use without expertise. The harder part is to decentralize it so users have no need to rely on and trust centralized infrastructure.

“That’s what FreedomBox is: we integrate privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy. Data stays in your home and can’t be mined by governments, billionaires, thugs or even gossipy neighbors.”

Winner #2 is The Viewspaper , an online platform engaging thousands of young people in India and the United Kingdom. Shiv Dravid, Viewspapers’s ambitious young founder, writes: “The Viewspaper provides a web platform, which uses open source technology and online marketing to crowd source the views of young people from around the world. In the last 4 years we have received around 20,000 contributions and over 6,000 young people’s opinion have been publish. We are read by 150,000 people every month and have a strong community of 148,000 Facebook fans and thousands of RSS readers. In the last year we have grown from 1 paper to 10 papers.

“We are replicating The Viewspaper in other countries and launched our UK edition last year. We hope to launch our US edition in the coming year. We have also launched 5 subject specific papers targeted at young working professionals. We hope to have 50 such papers in the next 18 to 24 months. We are now launching school and college magazines with the objective of getting 13 to 17 year olds to start expressing themselves. We currently have 2 such magazines but are targeting to have a 100 school magazines in the next 18 to 24 months. By launching all these papers we hope to increase our contributor base to 20,000 and double our readership.”

We think that projects like FreedomBox and The Viewspaper are moving us closer to full information citizenship, a world where all people can engage freely and powerfully with information to advance their own lives and society. In a rapidly changing world, news and knowledge is the basis of action – the currency that gives one standing; reveals the horizon of what may be possible in a world where everyone is a change maker; and determines how we interact with others.

So, the Citizen Media competition is open for four more weeks. Winners get $5,000 cash prizes and consideration for an Ashoka Fellowship. Know someone who should enter? Tell us about them here: http://www.changemakers.com/node/add/nomination/107101