[Air-L] Specify. Then Build. Seeking round two Knight News Challenge in-kind University partners - From E-Democracy.Org

[Steven Clift]

E-Democracy.Org is into round two for the Knight News Challenge - 
http://blog.e-democracy.org/posts/127 .

With our round two "Specify. Then Build." proposal we are looking for 
universities interested in partnering to host (in-kind) citizen media 
and engagement open source programming sprints. The partner would agree 
to provide space, bandwidth, and use of high speed (Internet 2) IP video 
conferencing equipment on a in-kind basis likely over a long weekend. We 
will likely be connecting a site in the U.S. to a U.K. site for virtual 
developer teams (typically 4 to 6 teams with 4 or 5 programmers at each 
site). We would also need discounted or in-kind on-campus lodging within 
reason for up to 20 to 30 people. We will be providing transportation to 
the site for the selected participants. If we win the grant, we expect 
to hold at least four programming sprints - two in 2009 and two in 2010. 
I want be up front and note that the tight $500,000 US proposal does not 
allow us to share funding to cover the physical space for hosting the 
sprints assuming we find appropriate in-kind offers.

Also, we are interested in learning about existing or proposed research 
that might be connected to this initiative.

Prior to the programming, sprints, we will be hosting very public 
citizen media and engagement module/plug-in software specification 
efforts. Instead of developing stand alone modules or modules/plug-ins 
for one open source tools used for locally-oriented citizen media/online 
engagement efforts, we are proposing an open specification process that 
will lead to the competitive build out of modules for key open source 
content management platforms (Drupal, Plone, etc.).

Finally, we may be able to leverage our evaluation budget to support 
some research based on this rather experimental initiative.

If this effort matches your project's existing mission or goals we might 
have a match and your endorsement will increase our chances of winning 
the News Challenge.

For a copy the draft application, drop me an e-mail ASAP - 
clift at publicus.net - because the final deadline for submission is Nov. 30.

Cheers,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

P.S. For a short description of our round one proposal see - 
http://blog.e-democracy.org/posts/127 and below is information about the 
scope of the Knight News Challenge:


THE KNIGHT NEWS CHALLENGE INITIATIVE SEEKS

• New ways for people to communicate interactively to help people better 
understand one another in geographic communities, share know-how and 
generate passion in solving local problems;
• New ways for people to use information, news and journalism in 
geographic communities to imagine their collective possibilities as 
communities, and to set and reach common community goals;

• New ways to dig for news and act on it in geographic communities, 
including new ways to collect, prepare and distribute information, news 
and journalism that reveals hard-to-know facts, identifies common 
problems, clarifies community issues or points out practical courses of 
action.

Keep in mind the purpose of the contest is to develop digital 
communication projects that will help better connect people in physical 
space, in the communities in which they work, live and vote.
In the words of Jack Knight: Thus we seek to bestir the people into an 
awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts 
and rouse them to pursue their true interests.