DJCamp2011

Shorenstein Center paper argues for collaboration in investigative reporting Thursday, June 2, 2011 Sandy Rowe, former editor of The Oregonian, and Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center fall 2010 and spring 2011. Photograph by Martha Stewart Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School Contact: Janell Simsjanell_sims@harvard.eduhttp://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/index.html Media organizations may be able to perform their watchdog roles more effectively working together than apart. That is one conclusion in a new paper, “Partners of Necessity: The Case for Collaboration in Local Investigative Reporting,” authored by Sandy Rowe, former editor of Portland’s The Oregonian. The paper is based on interviews and research that Rowe conducted while serving as a Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Rowe’s research examines the theory underpinning collaborative work and shows emerging models of collaboration that can lead to more robust investigative and accountability reporting in local and regional markets. “Growing evidence suggests that collaborations and partnerships between new and established news organizations, universities and foundations may be the overlooked key for investigative journalism to thrive at the local and state levels,” Rowe writes. “These partnerships, variously and often loosely organized, can share responsibility for content creation, generate wider distribution of stories and spread the substantial cost of accountability journalism.” Rowe was editor of The Oregonian from 1993 until January 2010. Under her leadership, the newspaper won five Pulitzer Prizes including the Gold Medal for Public Service. Rowe chairs the Board of Visitors of The Knight Fellowships at Stanford University and is a board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists. From 1984 until April 1993, Rowe was executive editor and vice president of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Virginian-Pilot won the Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting under her leadership. Rowe’s year-long fellowship at the Shorenstein Center was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Read the full paper on the Shorenstein Center’s website.

The challenge As noted in Open Data Stories’ first story, there are calls from various quarters for more data on the utility of governments releasing data and other material for re-use. The challenge would seem to be this: if people and organisations want governments to continue to invest in open data initiatives, they should jump into the feedback loop and tell governments, and the world, when they are putting open government data to good use. The scale or nature of beneficial use shouldn’t matter. It might be economic, creative, cultural or environmental. Or it could be something else. But tell us your story. Equally, interested stakeholders such as Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation can tell us their stories too, even if that is only drawing us to relevant (and openly licensed ) articles that we can repost on Open Data Stories. And, of course, agencies who see the data they steward being put to good use should tell us too. Whatever the case, share your stories with others. The more you do, the richer the feedback loop and that, in turn, is likely to enable open data policies to be better developed and refined and, ultimately, to be sustainable.

Published: May 21, 2011 Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009 Nonprofit organizations have to file tax forms, known as 990s, listing each grant recipient. The following are excerpts from the Gates Foundation’s filing for 2009, the latest available, and runs for 263 pages and includes more than 3,000 items. Sam Dillon highlights a few of the more notable examples of how the foundation has increased its attention and dollars devoted to education advocacy. Related Article »

<< previous blog | recent blogs | next blog >> #bbcsms: BBC processes for verifying social media content Alex Murray | Wednesday 18 May 2011, 10:40 From Tunisia, via Egypt, to Libya and Syria, verifying and acquiring eyewitness/citizen journalist/user-generated content has become increasingly complicated as the material has become more sophisticated. At the UGC (user-generated content) Hub in the BBC Newsroom in London, our process has become much more forensic in nature and includes: - Referencing locations against maps and existing images from, in particular, geo-located ones. - Working with our colleagues in BBC Arabic and BBC Monitoring to ascertain that accents and language are correct for the location. - Searching for the original source of the upload/sequences as an indicator of date. - Examining weather reports and shadows to confirm that the conditions shown fit with the claimed date and time. - Maintaining lists of previously verified material to act as reference for colleagues covering the stories. - Checking weaponry, vehicles and licence plates against those known for the given country. That's not an exhaustive list, but those are some of the most common things we do in BBC News.

TransparencyCamp '11 Recap Nicole Aro May 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. Sunlight’s fourth TransparencyCamp was this past weekend, and I’d like to take this moment to say to all of our attendees: Thank you -- you guys rock. To everyone else, I’m sorry that you missed such an awesome weekend, but we hope to see you next time around! This weekend was made possible by the generosity of our sponsors: Microsoft, Google, O’Reilly, Governing, iStrategyLabs, Forum One, and Adobe. I’d like to say a special thank you to Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft who stayed late to make sure we could finish setup and even helped us carry supplies(!). The weekend brought together about 250 government workers, software developers, investigative journalists, bloggers, students and open government advocates of all stripes to share stories, build relationships, and plan together to take on the challenges of building more open government. This year, TransparencyCamp also went global, bringing in 22 amazing transparency advocates from around the world to teach, learn and share with us here in the states.

TransparencyCamp '11 Recap Nicole Aro May 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. Sunlight’s fourth TransparencyCamp was this past weekend, and I’d like to take this moment to say to all of our attendees: Thank you -- you guys rock. To everyone else, I’m sorry that you missed such an awesome weekend, but we hope to see you next time around! This weekend was made possible by the generosity of our sponsors: Microsoft, Google, O’Reilly, Governing, iStrategyLabs, Forum One, and Adobe. I’d like to say a special thank you to Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft who stayed late to make sure we could finish setup and even helped us carry supplies(!). The weekend brought together about 250 government workers, software developers, investigative journalists, bloggers, students and open government advocates of all stripes to share stories, build relationships, and plan together to take on the challenges of building more open government. This year, TransparencyCamp also went global, bringing in 22 amazing transparency advocates from around the world to teach, learn and share with us here in the states.

DropboxAddons Note: In addition to the Addons listed here, there are many other applications available at the Dropbox Apps Page.

INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web To

INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web Tools

Places & Spaces: Mapping Science is meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. It has two components: the physical part supports the close inspection of high quality reproductions of maps for display at conferences and education centers; the online counterpart provides links to a selected series of maps and their makers along with detailed explanations of how these maps work. The exhibit is a 10-year effort. Each year, 10 new maps are added resulting in 100 maps total in 2014.

Reactions to Osama bin Laden’s death: Female and non-U.S. residents more ambivalent. Via the NYT Reactions Matrix