Last May, I went on vacation (picture on blog with my son Liam) right after being announced as a Knight News Challenge winner at the Interactive Media conference in Miami. I never got around to sharing the good news on DoWire.

I am one of their “idea bloggers” and will start sharing a big idea a month to bridge the world of online citizen engagement with citizen media and online news. I am joined by a stellar cast of winners all focused on local e-goodness.

E-democracy often focuses on original conversation, engagement, and expression that makes the news, while the goal of “citizen media” seems to be the generation of the original news. I see an egg and chicken opportunity. Media – big and small – are often ideal hosts of e-participation activities and depending upon the country or political culture, the best leader of such efforts (often shorter-term that leverage free publicity). Governments themselves and NGOs make the best e-democracy project hosts for long-term endeavors particularly as you move from expression and news to engagement and problem-solving or advocacy, but funding remains quite scarce.

The Knight Foundation asked me to pass along their announcement about the next round of funding for 2007. Why don’t you stick something in? (If you’d like to collaborate with E-Democracy.Org, let us know as well: team@e-democracy.org )

Here it is:

It’s time to enter this year’s Knight News Challenge, which awards big money for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Citizens and Participation, International, Local, Media, National, Projects, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.