> my personal favourites are the HUGE
> php-stylee discussion boards and forums
> out there that trundle on regardless of
> tech fashion trends

Agreed. As I’ve often noted, LibriVox has built its entire operation on that excellent foundation.

> if publishing calendars is just a bit
> too weird for them

Of course people already do publish event data, on kiosks and via newspapers. Is doing it yourself, directly and electronically, weird? I guess maybe. But so is updating your status online, which is something that hundreds of millions of folks are now very happy to do.

my personal favourites are the HUGE php-stylee discussion boards and forums out there that trundle on regardless of tech fashion trends

best is http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/ 4 million posts, 93,0000 members in a city of 400,000 people where the newspaper has a circulation of about 40,000

jon i wish someone would fund you then we can see if people would use it or if publishing calendars is just a bit too weird for them

Your phrasing is 100% what the group of reviewers are looking for, and would make a great mission statement. The “scaffolding” of the application needs improvement, including the kind of boilerplate you received.

I’ll point some of the News Challenge managers at this post — it’s excellent feedback and I thank you for posting: no debate required!

That aspect — the narration of work — is hugely important but still very poorly understood. In your case, by doing it, you’re not only teaching math, you’re teaching math teaching.

This is something that any practitioner in any field can now be doing, and it’s a way to recover a key aspect of apprenticeship — observable work — that we’ve tragically lost.

Just as I debated with myself whether to apply (which I did last year, BTW, not this year), I also debated with myself whether to write this post.

But the stated definition of innovation as being “things we have never heard of before” really stuck in my craw last year, and it still does. That just seems so wrong. It’s as if Knight is saying: “Whatever will fix the news business is going to have to be news to us, because nothing on the table will work.”

As opposed to: “How can we creatively recombine what journalism already knows how to do, and what the Net already knows how to do, in ways that will serve the business of journalism and the needs of society?”

I’m not concerned about the fate of my proposal. But I do care about what Knight thinks can be achieved with its funding. And if it’s Shiny New Thing thinking, that worries me.

The way the approve / deny system works (which is terrible), the ultimate sending out of replies boils down to “not innovative because of tech”, “not innovative because it’s not really advancing news”, or “didn’t demonstrate impact on a local area”. The system could use improving.

If your project were to be proposed again, I would be happy to point out that it’s a really great idea, and the general event curation space is highly underserved.

I’m a technologist on the review panel this year, and there is a mix every year of news/journalism people, and technologists/new media folks. I think you’d also make a great reviewer / mentor for next year. In general, I’d like to improve the process next year by doing earlier mentoring of proposals.

In any case, thanks for posting, and be aware that there are a ton of applications, and that the tools for reviewing & feedback make it easy for some apps to slip through.

There are also a lot of perverse incentives in the independent consulting business that lead otherwise well-intentioned, smart people to become shiny-hypers. That’s another blog post entirely.

If Knight Foundation thought like you do, they’d get a lot more bang for the buck.

\\Greg