News Challenge says no, but life goes on
I actually received the “thanks, but no thanks” e-mail a couple days after my previous post, but have been too busy to mention it. I knew my application was a longshot, so I’m not too terribly crushed by this. And I have so much going on already that maybe this is a good thing. Anyway, there it is. It was worth a try at least.
Sphere: Related ContentA modest proposal to the News Challenge
A couple weeks ago, I received word from the Knight Foundation that my News Challenge proposal is “progressing to the next round of judging.” For those who don’t know, the Knight News Challenge is a contest that awards grants for “innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.” Please feel free to read more about the News Challenge and have a look at last year’s winners.
Being plugged into the new media blogosphere like I am, I’ve already heard of other applicants being asked for proposals more than a month ago. My modest proposal is “not at that stage, yet.” I’m not quite sure what this means, but I’m guessing that I’ve been placed in some sort of pool of alternates just in case there’s any money left over after funding the top projects. Naturally this is quite all right with me as I felt all along that my application was a long shot at best. Although I’ve worked in Web development for more than five years, I’ve only worked in journalism for about seven months… and I’m not even a journalist! We’ll see what happens.
It occurs to me that somebody out there may actually be curious about my proposal. I applied for the minimum - a $15,000 blogging award - to blog about “creating a virtual community united by a passion for Malawi.” Here is an excerpt from my proposal:
Third world countries around the globe are slowly entering the digital age. One of these countries is Malawi - a place where I lived for two years as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer. Internet access is becoming gradually more commonplace and several Malawians are now blogging from within the country as well as from elsewhere in the world. In addition many travelers and expatriates (including current Peace Corps Volunteers) are blogging about their experiences in Malawi. Thousands of other people around the world - Malawian and otherwise - seek out current information on the country each day.
As it currently stands, no central online meeting place exists for the many people blogging about Malawi and those simply seeking out information. I plan to use open source software (primarily Drupal) to create a central meeting place anchored by forums, but also including blogs, photo galleries, videos, links, news summaries, and maps. With the exception of the forums which will be hosted on the site, the other information will be imported and aggregated via RSS using a collection of external sites. This “mashed up” data will be gathered from individual blog feeds, Flickr and Picasa tags for photos, YouTube and Metacafe for videos, del.icio.us for general links, Google News for news summaries, and Google MyMaps for personalized maps. All of these services are relatively mature with stable API’s. The aggregation of relevant data from so many external sources will add significant value to the site with very little impact on the bandwidth and disk space needed to serve the site to visitors. The main source of disk space will be the Drupal database holding all of the forum data.
It is my sincere hope that this approach will succeed in building a thriving online community of people passionate about Malawi and that it will be easy to replicate and apply to other third world countries in the future.
There’s quite a lot more in my proposal, but that should provide the gist of what I’m looking to do. It’s a project I would love to take on, but I really need the funding in order to invest the amount of time it would take to have a chance at succeeding. I’m not sure when I’ll get another update from the Knight Foundation or what the news will be, but I will be sure to let everyone know. Thanks for reading.
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