Thought I’d share a quick embedded presentation here for folks who aren’t yet following me on SlideShare. (Although after performing tag-team PowerPoint Karaoke at PodCamp Boston, perhaps I should think twice?).
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, among many other philanthropic initiatives in culture, community, and journalism generally, has been running the Knight News Challenge since 2007. Its basically a grant competition, in which various digital journalism initiatives compete for a pool of grants amounting to $25 million total over five years.
One aspect which makes the Knight News Challenge unique – other than the size of the grant pool – is that the winning grantees are required to:
1. Use digital, open-source technology.
2. Distribute news in the public interest.
3. Test your project in a local community.
It looks like a fantastic strategy: encourage innovation, provide funding without forcing the grantees into short-term, must-build-immediate-ROI type thinking, and share the results with the broader community through open source.
Knight - Photo by Ruth L., cc-by-nd license
Two recent successful projects from Knight Foundation grantees – EveryBlock and Village Soup (which I’ve written about before in this blog), however, suggest there might be some gaps in the Foundation’s overall plan.
The core of the issue is this question: once the Knight Foundation funding is expended, what happens to the open source project the grant process mandates?
Do the creators truly create, engage with, and sustain an open source community around the code they release, contributing to and supporting the open source version, or do they “take it private”, leaving the open source seed to either take root and grow (or wither) on its own?
I was excited last month to see a blog post on ReadWriteWeb about Sears and Kmart adopting OpenID. In that post, Frederic Lardinois writes:
Users on Kmart’s and Sears’ web properties can now use their OpenID credentials to sign up and log in to these sites. MyKmart.com and MySears.com, which are both owned by the Sears Holding Company, implemented technology from Viewpoint and JanRain to allow users to use their login credentials from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Live, as well as from any other OpenID provider. This marks one of the first times that such a large, mainstream online retailer has adopted OpenID.
As Sears points out in its press release, it simply makes good business sense for the company to allow its users to use their social IDs to log in to its properties. After all, not having to sign up for yet another new account on yet another site greatly reduces the likelihood that a potential customer would just abandon the process and head to a competitor’s site.
I’m a huge supporter of OpenID – and identity portability generally – and would absolutely agree that it makes good business sense to lower the barrier of entry for new registrations, in order to encourage more reviews, comments, questions, and ultimately purchases from end users.
Given all the raging debate about paid media online – whether users (or consumers, if you prefer) will pay for access to content, whether paywalls and micropayments have a place, and the like – it’s refreshing to see an independent podcaster demonstrating the value of well curated content and the willingness of folks to pay for it.
Coverville's Original Logo
Coverville is a podcast hosted by Brian Ibbott and recorded in his home near Denver, which features cover songs and the topic of covers generally. He does a fantastic job, hosting theme shows like originalville (in which he plays the original versions of songs people mostly know by a famous cover) and cover story (in which the whole episode is devoted to covers of and by a specific artist). Check out the Wikipedia entry on Coverville for a sense of how popular the show’s become.
