SiliconBeat

Starting today, I’ll be at MIT attending the Future of News and Civic Media conference sponsored by the Knight Foundation. You can follow tweets from the conference at #fncm.

The conference brings together past winners of the foundations’ News Challenge program (of which I was one) along with some other folks working at the edge of new journalism forms. The News Challenge program funds innovative ideas to build new news tools. I’ll be posting some summary thoughts from the sessions over the next few days. But to start things off, the foundation is announcing the 2010 winners of the News Challenge program.

Each of the grantees provides a little glimpse at how people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds looks at the future of news: video games for news; local wikis; community video editing tools; live news maps; community funded journalism. I wanted to highlight a two from the Bay Area:

CityTracking
Award: $400,000
Winner: Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen Design
Web URL: http://stamen.com; http://crimespotting.org
Location: San Francisco, Calif.

From the press release: “To make municipal data easy to understand, CityTracking will allow users to create embeddable data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos. The dynamic interfaces will be appropriate to each data type, starting with crime and working through 311 calls for service, among others.”

Local Wiki
Award: $350,000
Winner: Philip Neustrom and Mike Ivanov
Web URL: http://daviswiki.org
Location: San Francisco, Calif.

From the press release: “Based on the successful DavisWiki.org in Davis, Calif., this project will create enhanced tools for local wikis, a new form of media that makes it easy for people to learn - and share - their own unique community knowledge. Members will be able to post articles about anything they like, edit others and upload photos and files. This grant will help create the specialized open-source software that makes the wiki possible and help communities develop, launch and sustain local wiki projects.”