Knight News Challenge Winners: Lessons Learned

Knight News Challenge
A look at what
we’ve learned
Observations and lessons from our
2010-2011 News Challenge winners
what
we’ve learned
Observations and lessons from our
News Challenge winners
Commissioned by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation • Prepared by Kenneth Dautrich, The Stats Group

Knight News Challenge Findings Report 1
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Table of contents
Executive summary 3
2011 News Challenge Winners 6
2010 News Challenge Winners 8
Lessons Learned 10
Lesson one 11
Lesson two 12
Lesson three 14
Lesson four 15
Lesson five 16
Lesson six 17
Lesson seven 19
Lesson eight 21

Executive Summary
D
isruption and innovation have
become regular features of the
news and media landscape.
Social media feeds and newsreaders
are replacing printed words and pages.
Ordinary citizens with smartphones
and Twitter or Instagram accounts
increasingly stand in for trained
reporters. Hacker journalists—wearing
the hats of both journalist and coder—
crunch massive data sets to find the
insights buried within, as major news
media organizations struggle simply to
keep up with the crowdsourced pace of
social media.

That’s where the Knight News Challenge comes in. Launched in September 2006 by the John S. and James
L. Knight Foundation, the News Challenge invests in people who are testing new ideas for engaging citizens
with news and information. It is an open contest designed to accelerate innovation in the ways that we create,
consume, and share news and information by developing new ideas to reach more people more effectively. In
each round of the News Challenge, Knight Foundation trustees approve the winners as recommended by Knight
staff, with the advice of outside advisers. Since its inception, the Knight News Challenge has provided more than
$37 million to fund 111 projects in the United States and around the world.
In 2010 and 2011, the Knight News Challenge supported a diverse set of media innovations—from a platform to
help local newsrooms use and analyze municipal data to a tool to help journalists make sense of vast amounts
of social media activity. In Vermont, 2010 News Challenge Winner Front Porch Forum uses an online platform to
strengthen the sense of offline community in towns and cities across the state. When Hurricane Irene produced
record flooding in 2011, Vermonters used the platform to organize community response and to connect towns
in need with volunteer help. Across the world, in Indonesia, palm oil farmers use FrontlineSMS—a 2011 News
Challenge winner that uses mobile technology to share and disseminate community information—to organize
collective efforts to challenge encroachments on their rights by big palm oil corporations.
Knight Foundation hired evaluation firm Arabella Advisors to explore the innovations and impact of these winners.
Arabella reviewed grant materials, analyzed Web metrics and social media data, surveyed the winners, and
interviewed both winners and key informants in the field. Through that research Knight discerned lessons about
what contributes to a successful media innovation. These include:
• Measure success based on how funding improves the field, not just on the adoption or impact of
individual projects: Innovators and their sponsors often view wide-scale adoption and sustainable organizations
as critical measures of success, but these are not always the best barometers. Building the capacity of innovators as
leaders in their fields and strengthening their networks of supporters and collaborators can be just as important.
• Target users with “a need you can feel”: Projects that have scaled based their innovation on a core audience
and proven need. However, a large number of projects faltered because they developed a tool without first
identifying target users. Unless a media innovation addresses a proven need, news organizations often cannot
spend money and time on projects or invest in the technical capacity to take full advantage of new tools.
KNC
AT A
GLANCE
5YEARS
27MILLION
DOLLARS IN
FUNDING
76PROJECTS
SERVED

• Be open to the idea that your project may appeal to a different audience than you imagined: Some projects designed to help
the media analyze and visualize data struggled to find journalists and news organizations that would pay for the products. Instead, the
products have gained traction among clients in other industries. Small budgets in journalism and a lack of technical understanding
among journalists can inhibit adoption.
• Spend the time to get the user interface right: An intuitive user interface is vital for attracting and retaining users. But a simple
interface can mask a high degree of planning and technical complexity. Innovators should not underestimate the time and expense
behind developing such deceptively simple interfaces.
• Provide substantial support to grantees beyond money, such as creating a cohort of peers and providing access to influential
networks: News Challenge winners expressed a desire for support that comes from access to advisers who operate within the
foundation’s network and a desire to share their experiences with other winners through in-person convenings that encourage the
development of new connections.
• Anticipate resistance to innovation and the disruption it will cause, and plan around it: Innovations frequently shake up their
fields and meet with entrenched institutional resistance. Successful innovators anticipate such resistance and plan accordingly.
• Identify the elements of a project that require full-time staff and those that can be entrusted to volunteers—and invest
resources accordingly: An active community of users and evangelists can perform certain functions that are critical for the
development of a media innovation. Other functions can only be performed by dedicated, compensated, full-time staff. Innovators
should identify who can accomplish which elements early in their project, and invest accordingly.
• Recognize the benefits and challenges of open source code: The News Challenge requires winners to use open source code and
to publicly release it. This approach encourages iteration and improvement, but the benefits may be to the wider community instead of
the challenge winner, who may bear the cost of development.
The Knight News Challenge has evolved significantly since its inception. Knight continues to review the challenge and learn from
the winners to help news and information industries navigate the disruption in traditional strategies and uncover new models of
sustainability.
In the pages that follow we provide additional detail on these lessons, ideas and insights—as well as on the progress of each of the
winners of the Knight News Challenge from 2010 and 2011.

2011 Knight News Challenge winners
Project Grantee Innovation Current Status Grant
Awesome
Foundation
News Taskforce
The Institute on Higher
Awesome Studies Inc.
A vehicle for issuing micro-grants to support
innovative local journalism and civic media
projects
Active $244,000
Document
Cloud Reader
Annotations
Investigative Reporters and
Editors (IRE)
A new DocumentCloud feature designed to
engage readers by allowing them to add notes
and comments to original source documents
Active $320,000
FrontlineSMS Social Impact Lab Foundation
(formerly The Kiwanja
Foundation)
A platform that enables journalists to more
effectively use text messaging to inform and
engage rural communities
Active $250,000
iWitness Adaptive Path A Web-based tool for aggregating and cross-
referencing news events with user-generated
content
Closed $360,000
NextDrop NextDrop An interactive voice response and text message-
based service that notifies residents of Hubli-
Dharwad, India, when their water is available
Active $375,000
OpenBlock
Rural
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
A standard process and structure for scraping
public records that allows rural newspapers
to gather, format and publish municipal data
through the OpenBlock platform
Closed $275,000
Overview The Associated Press An open source tool that can make patterns
within large document sets visible, helping
journalists find stories in large amounts of data
Active $475,000
PANDA Investigative Reporters and
Editors (IRE)
A set of open source, Web-based tools that make
it easier for journalists to clean and analyze data
Active $150,000

Poderopedia Miguel Paz A crowdsourced database that visualizes
relationships among the political, civic and
business elite in Chile
Active $200,000
The Public
Laboratory
The Public Laboratory for
Open Technology and
Science
An online community and set of toolkits that
enables citizens to gather environmental data
about their communities
Active $500,000
ScraperWiki ScraperWiki New journalist-specific features within an existing
tool to collect, store and publish data from across
the Web
Active $280,000
Spending
Stories
Open Knowledge Foundation A tool for contextualizing government spending
data and improving fiscal literacy among
journalists and the public
Active $250,000
The State
Decoded
The Miller Center Foundation A digital platform for parsing and displaying state
codes, making laws readable and accessible to
the average citizen
Active $165,000
StoriesFrom The Tiziano Project A storytelling platform for combining user-
generated content with professional sources
Closed $200,000
SwiftRiver Ushahidi An open source platform that helps identify
trends and verify user-generated content
emerging from mobile phones and social media
Active $250,000
Zeega Media and Place Productions A platform to empower citizens and local news
organizations to create multimedia stories about
their communities
Active $420,000
Total $4,714,000

2010 Knight News Challenge winners
Project Grantee Innovation Current
Status
Grant
Basetrack November Eleven An online journal and social media resource cen-
ter providing continuous coverage of the entire
deployment of a U.S. Marine battalion to southern
Afghanistan
Active
$202,000
CityTracking Stamen Design LLC A Web service and open-source tools to display
public data in easy-to-understand, highly visual
ways
Active
$412,000
Front Porch
Forum
Front Porch Forum Inc. A network of online neighborhood forums in Ver-
mont that allow users to read and share posts with
their neighbors
Active
$220,000
Game-O-Matic Georgia Tech Research Corp. A free, easy-to-use tool that allows journalists to
build cartoon arcade games based on their news
content
Active
$378,000
LocalWiki WikiSpot An easy-to-use, open-source “wiki” platform tai-
lored to the needs of local communities Active
$360,500
NowSpots Windy Citizen Open-source software allowing “real-time” ad-
vertising that can be updated at any time by local
businesses using social media
Active
$257,500
OpenCourt Trustees of Boston University A pilot project to demonstrate how digital tech-
nology can increase public access to the courts Active
$250,000

PRX Story Ex-
change
PRX Inc. A crowd-funding platform that allows local public
radio stations, producers and listeners to find and
help fund stories
Closed
$75,000
SeedSpeak Arizona State University An application with mobile, Web and widget
components that provides citizens an easy way to
suggest community improvements to local lead-
ers, volunteer groups and each other
Active
$93,600
SocMap Society Technologies Foun-
dation
A map-based social network where users can
browse news and engage in civic action through
an online local community map
Active
$265,000
Stroome Stroome An online video editing community which allows
users to upload content and collaboratively edit Active
$230,000
TileMill Development Seed A suite of open-source tools that local media can
use to make custoim, embeddable hyperlocal
maps
Active $76,960
Total $2,820,560

Lessons Learned
T
he winners of the 2010 and 2011
Knight News Challenges encompass
a diverse range of approaches,
audiences, geographies, goals and
technologies. However, the progress and
challenges the winners faced illustrate
common lessons which may apply to other
innovators who seek to improve the ways
communities produce, disseminate and
consume news and information.

Measure success based on how funding improves the field,
not just on the adoption or impact of individual projects.
The best barometer of success isn’t the outcome of individual projects but the effects
projects may have on their sectors or industries. Funders should focus on building
the capacity of innovators as leaders in their fields or strengthening their network of
supporters and collaborators for long-term impact—regardless of the sustainability of
particular projects.
For example, in developing The State Decoded, a 2011 winner, Waldo Jaquith hoped
to build upon work in Virginia to make state laws more readable and accessible to
citizens. The goal was to create a platform that could be adapted to state codes across
the country. In doing so, Jaquith became a leader in the open government field. His
success is attributable to several factors. An active community of users supports The
State Decoded, and the platform has been adapted for use in a number of states
and municipalities across the country. But Jaquith also set very clear goals for the
project, and most importantly, he stuck with his original timeline. He outlined a clear
beginning, middle and end for his involvement in The State Decoded, and eventually
handed off its development to the community of open government activists and
hackers. This has contributed to Jaquith’s leadership within that community. He
continues to use his prominence to advocate for greater governmental transparency.
As his involvement in The State Decoded was concluding, Jaquith launched—with
Knight Foundation support—the U.S. Open Data Institute, which replicates a British
effort to encourage governments and businesses to adopt open data standards as a
way to promote economic growth, innovation and social change, demonstrating his
ongoing leadership in the open government field.
Funders should
focus on building
the capacity
of innovators
as leaders in
their fields or
strengthening
their network of
supporters and
collaborators
for long-term
impact—
regardless of the
sustainability of
particular projects.

Investments in leadership sometimes pay off significantly even when products are not
particularly successful or widely adopted. Brian Boyer developed PANDA as a set of
Web-based tools that could serve as a newsroom’s data library. As conceived, PANDA
would help journalists import, search, share and work collaboratively with large public
data sets. Although PANDA has received praise for its technical sophistication and its
usability, newsrooms have not adopted it as widely as hoped. The underwhelming
adoption rate is partly attributable to the fact that Boyer and his project team were not
able to dedicate themselves full time to developing and marketing PANDA. However, as
he developed PANDA, Boyer’s stature in data journalism rose. Based on his work at The
Chicago Tribune—and, presently, in his role as news applications editor at NPR—Boyer
became a leader in the field, someone who could help bridge traditional journalism
with the more technically sophisticated aspects of data analysis and visualization. Today,
PANDA is no longer in active development, and by conventional measures, it failed
the test of sustainability. But the project strengthened Boyer’s position as a leader and
advocate in the field of data journalism—an outcome with potentially farther-reaching
implications than that of a single tool, even if the tool had been widely adopted.

Target users with “a need you can feel.”
Many News Challenge winners develop innovative tools or approaches that target
journalists, their employers and other media organizations, but selling innovations to
news organizations is extremely difficult because they may lack the money and time
to spend on innovative projects or the technical capacity to take full advantage of
new tools. The innovation may also be entering a market guarded by institutions that
may be resistant to change. Fundamentally, unless an innovation addresses a pressing
need, journalists and news organizations will not adopt it. In fact, innovators need to
Although
PANDA has
received praise
for its technical
sophistication
and its usability,
newsrooms have
not adopted
it as widely as
hoped. The
underwhelming
adoption rate is
partly attributable
to the fact that
Boyer and his
project team
were not able
to dedicate
themselves
full time to
developing
and marketing
PANDA.

anticipate resistance, and create development and marketing plans that address it. Innovators may
need to diversify their user bases beyond journalists and news organizations to promote wider
adoption and project sustainability.
In many cases, media organizations—especially in small or medium markets—lack not just the
need for innovative tools, but also the resources and capacity to support ambitious technology
development. One of the 2011 News Challenge winners, Zeega, aimed to build a platform that
enabled local news organizations to create multimedia stories about their own communities. By
developing an easy way to combine video clips, audio clips and images from a variety of sources,
Zeega would make it easier for news organizations to tell stories in different and compelling ways.
Initially, the project team provided consulting services to local media organizations to help them
produce customized multimedia experiences with the Zeega tool. But they quickly found that
providing custom consulting drained limited staff time and resources and detracted from their
ability to develop Zeega as a product that could have appeal to a general audience. The local news
organizations that Zeega had identified as its target users were not willing to pay for the tool. Zeega
ultimately changed both its product and its business model. Zeega’s leaders now view the target
audience as the wider tech-savvy population equipped with smartphones and tablets.
In other cases, a real need for a new tool might exist,
but the barriers to its adoption might simply outweigh
that need. This is especially true in data-driven
journalism. ScraperWiki, for example, a 2011 News
Challenge winner, received funding to adapt its tool
to help journalists collect, store and publish data from
across the Internet. But the project team found that

news organizations were either unwilling to pay for the tool or that the learning curve
was too steep. ScraperWiki has since developed a more user-friendly version of its tool,
but adoption rates among journalists remain below expectations, and ScraperWiki is
still dependent upon non-media corporate customers to support development costs.
Be open to the idea that your project may appeal to a
different audience than you imagined.
In some cases, a project’s ultimate audience or user base can differ dramatically from
that for which it was originally conceived or designed. Several 2010 News Challenge
winners made significant changes to help their projects gain traction. While developing
their respective tools, the project teams behind Stroome and Game-O-Matic tried
to broaden their original audiences from journalists and editors to include citizen
journalists and casual users. CityTracking moved in an opposite direction: Finding that
journalists were too broad of an audience, it now focuses on serving the need of more
technically proficient developers.
Overview, a tool to help journalists visualize patterns within large sets of documents,
also faced a choice about whether to continue serving its intended audience or to
shift to a new model. However, the project leaders also had to weigh their own values
about what they hoped to achieve within their own innovation, even if those values
might steer them away from models that made more financial sense. From the outset,
Overview’s target audience was journalists, and its mission was to empower them to
tell stories that might otherwise remain hidden in large, inaccessible or disorganized
document sets. As the tool was being developed, Overview received an increasing
amount of interest from potential customers in finance, business consulting and the
While developing
their respective
tools, the project
teams behind
Stroome and Game-
O-Matic tried to
broaden their
original audiences
from journalists and
editors to include
citizen journalists
and casual users.
CityTracking moved
in an opposite
direction: Finding
that journalists
were too broad
of an audience, it
now focuses on
serving the need of
more technically
proficient
developers.

legal profession. Pursuing these clients, however, would have required a shift of
emphasis, a shift of resources, and a shift in organizational structure. The project
team considered reincorporating Overview as a for-profit venture, but they kept
coming back to the same conclusion: Although they might be able to develop a
for-profit venture to attract funding to finance additional development costs, this
would necessitate a shift away from their original target users—journalists. The
Overview team determined that they didn’t want to become “just another startup.”
They wanted to focus on their original social-driven mission and their original users.
Spend the time to get the user interface right.
User interface can play a major role in determining whether a media innovation is
actually adopted by its audience—an interface that’s fun to use or saves the user’s
time can make the difference between a tool that’s used and one that gathers dust.
Among the innovations developed by News Challenge winners, the most effective
interfaces frequently have been those that appear simple or straightforward. But
such user-facing simplicity is hard to build. The user interface of Front Porch Forum,
for example, was deliberately designed to be clean and straightforward, unadorned
with extraneous features. Although it is an online tool, Front Porch Forum’s end goal
is to strengthen the sense of offline community in Vermont towns and cities. The
project team has designed the site’s features and functionality around this social
formula by keeping the interface deliberately sparse. This allows users to get what
they need from the site and build their offline community, while discouraging them
from spending “all day in front of a computer.”
The project
team considered
reincorporating
Overview as a for-
profit venture, but
they kept coming
back to the same
conclusion:
Although they
might be able to
develop a for-
profit venture to
attract funding to
finance additional
development
costs, this would
necessitate a shift
away from their
original target
users—journalists.

If media innovators aspire for wide adoption of their tools, they cannot
overlook the development of an effective user interface; it’s often more
important than the features or functionality of the tool itself. Indeed,
according to Ian Bogost of Game-O-Matic, developing features and
functionality may represent 80 to 90 percent of the effort in developing
an innovative media tool. But that last 10 to 20 percent entails developing
usability and polish, and that’s often the hardest part of bringing a tool to
market. Given the fast pace of innovation in the media marketplace, News
Challenge winners may only have one opportunity to release their tool for
wide use.
Provide substantial support to grantees beyond
money, such as creating a cohort of peers and
providing access to influential networks.
Many 2011 News Challenge winners expressed a desire for a greater degree
of support in building strong and resilient project teams with the skills
necessary to develop and scale their innovations; in developing effective
marketing strategies to find new users; and in planning for sustainability
beyond the period of the News Challenge grant. While Knight may be
capable of providing some of this support, access to its networks of thought
leaders and advisers can be invaluable for grantees negotiating these issues.
Just as important to the News Challenge winners, however, was the
expertise of other winners. The 2011 winners reported that the opportunities
Indeed, according to
Ian Bogost of Game-
O-Matic, developing
features and functionality
may represent 80 to 90
percent of the effort in
developing an innovative
media tool. But that last
10 to 20 percent entails
developing usability
and polish, and that’s
often the hardest part
of bringing a tool to
market. Given the fast
pace of innovation in
the media marketplace,
News Challenge winners
may only have one
opportunity to release
their tool for wide use.

to interact directly with fellow News Challenge winners—such as events held in
Cambridge, Mass., Palo Alto, Calif., and Miami—proved to be extremely valuable,
especially sharing information with projects that were either in different stages
or had experienced similar challenges. Several winners expressed the desire
for additional opportunities to interact with, and learn from, their fellow News
Challenge winners. The opportunities that were most valuable were the in-
person events in which winners could build connections with one another, and
discover new connections with winners working in seemingly different arenas.
The value of these in-person convenings of News Challenge winners extends
beyond individual cohorts. The 2011 winners valued their interactions with
News Challenge winners from other years, and would have welcomed greater
opportunities to nurture those relationships. Winners said they were more likely
to seek support and advice from other winners via e-mail and other means if
they first met in person and developed some degree of familiarity.
Anticipate resistance to innovation and the disruption it
will cause; plan around it.
Whether it takes the form of a new product or tool to empower citizen journalists
or a new process to engage consumers of news and information, a media
innovation often enters a space that is already occupied by time-tested methods
and approaches, and one that often is guarded by institutions that may be
resistant to change. These institutions may not react kindly to new innovations
invading their space, because the innovation disrupts their normal course of
Several winners
expressed the
desire for additional
opportunities to
interact with, and
learn from, their fellow
News Challenge
winners. The
opportunities that
were most valuable
were the in-person
events in which
winners could build
connections with one
another, and discover
new connections with
winners working in
seemingly different
arenas.

operations. Innovators need to anticipate this resistance, and create development and
marketing plans that reckon with it.
The 2010 News Challenge winners were no strangers to resistance. OpenCourt, for
example, sought to change the way that citizens of Massachusetts were connected
to their judicial system by live-streaming court proceedings and trials in Quincy. But
this represented a fairly radical change in how the court system in Quincy interacted
with the media and with citizens at large, and OpenCourt faced numerous lawsuits
that attempted to prevent it from streaming trial footage. Ultimately, OpenCourt
prevailed on appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, setting the precedent
that OpenCourt—or other innovators in Massachusetts—could install cameras in
courtrooms and broadcast their proceedings on the Internet. It succeeded in part
because John Davidow, the project director, anticipated the strong institutional
resistance he would face, prepared for it and had the support to persevere in the
...OpenCourt faced
numerous lawsuits that
attempted to prevent
it from streaming trial
footage.
Ultimately, OpenCourt
prevailed on appeal
to the Massachusetts
Supreme Court,
setting the precedent
that OpenCourt—
or other innovators
in Massachusetts—
could install cameras
in courtrooms and
broadcast their
proceedings on the
Internet.

face of litigation and delays. Perhaps most importantly, the project had the benefit of an
established home—Boston University—which paid for OpenCourt’s legal expenses as it
fended off resistance.
Basetrack represents another example of a News Challenge project that sought to shake
up institutional norms. In its effort to create an online, social media reporting network,
it embedded a team of reporters and photojournalists with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine
Regiment during its deployment to Afghanistan. The military has strict rules governing
how journalists can embed with deployed units in combat zones, and it was no small
achievement that the project was able to embed with the Marine unit in the first place.
Only a few months after deployment, however, the Marines asked Basetrack to cease
its project, due principally to concerns that the project’s location-based reporting was
revealing sensitive information about the position of U.S. forces. If the Marines were
uncomfortable with the location data that Basetrack was providing, however, they could
have worked with the project to remove the potentially dangerous information. But
fundamentally, the military was extremely wary about unconventional efforts to report
news from the battlefields and there was a limit to how far Basetrack could push the
military’s standard practices regarding journalists.
Identify the elements of a project that require full-time staff
and those that can be entrusted to volunteers—and invest
resources accordingly.
Many projects plan at the outset to rely upon a dedicated user community to refine
and promote an innovation, and upon vocal evangelists to drive wider adoption of their
tools. In many cases, user communities and evangelists can become indispensable (and
But
fundamentally,
the military
was extremely
wary about
unconventional
efforts to report
news from
the battlefields
and there was
a limit to how
far Basetrack
could push
the military’s
standard
practices
regarding
journalists.

inexpensive) cornerstones of a project, especially when a project is dependent upon
open source development. But without a core group of paid staff with the skills, the
time, and the incentive to devote themselves full time to a project, development of a
tool can suffer. Certain important elements of a project—such as product promotion
and content creation—can be outsourced in some cases to users, evangelists and
the open source community. But other critical elements—such as core software
development, business development and fundraising—should generally be entrusted
to dedicated, paid project staff.
When it comes to staff, passion alone is not sufficient—full-time commitment is
often necessary, along with the money to make that a reality. The Tiziano Project,
for example, won 2011 News Challenge funding to develop and refine its proprietary
storytelling platform into StoriesFrom, which would combine user-generatedstorytelling platform into StoriesFrom, which would combine user-generated
Certain important
elements of a
project—such
as product
promotion and
content creation—
can be outsourced
in some cases
to users,
evangelists and
the open source
community. But
other critical
elements—such
as core software
development,
business
development
and fundraising—
should generally
be entrusted to
dedicated, paid
project staff.

content with content from professional journalists to tell news stories in more
compelling ways. Relying on the strong reputation of its existing platform and on
the enthusiasm of the founders, the project team experienced initial success in
terms of developing partnerships and launched its platform ahead of schedule. But
it quickly faced challenges related to its staffing model. Prior to winning the News
Challenge, the Tiziano Project team consisted of highly motivated volunteers.
The team dedicated a portion of its News Challenge award to paying for a full-
time project manager and to providing part-time compensation for other team
members. But this ultimately proved to be a significant underinvestment. The
part-time team members lost the sense of commitment and excitement they had
possessed as pure volunteers, while not being compensated to a degree sufficient
to capture their full attention and energy. In addition, the team did not invest in staff
dedicated to fundraising or business development. They had assumed that once
the initial partnerships were forged, users would find StoriesFrom, use the platform
and organically raise the visibility of the platform. As it happened, without a full-time
staff member dedicated to business development and partnership management,
momentum behind the project quickly slowed. The initial enthusiasm that users
and partners expressed for the project faded as well, and without the investment in
full-time staff to carry the work forward, the project faltered.
Recognize the benefits and challenges
of open source code.
The requirement that News Challenge winners use open source code and
publicly release any code they create has definite advantages. It encourages
iteration and improvement, and it can magnify the impact of the winners’ work.
The team dedicated
a portion of its News
Challenge award to
paying for a full-time
project manager and
to providing part-
time compensation
for other team
members. But this
ultimately proved
to be a significant
underinvestment.
The part-time team
members lost the
sense of commitment
and excitement they
had possessed as pure
volunteers, while not
being compensated
to a degree sufficient
to capture their full
attention and energy.

DocumentCloud—which first won the News Challenge in 2009—produced
Backbone.js, an open source JavaScript library that has since become a
fundamental and widely used component for building Web-based applications,
and in the words of one key observer, has proven “sufficient to justify the
entire cost of the News Challenge.” But the open source requirement is not an
absolute good, especially for News Challenge projects that include the scaling
of an existing product or tool and that already have an established method
for code development and dissemination. Front Porch Forum, a 2010 winner,
represented such a case, with the project team reporting that the open source
requirement was a drain on valuable time and resources, and that it provided
little—if any—value to the project.
It is also important to consider where the benefits of open source accrue.
In some cases, the News Challenge winners themselves benefit from using
and sharing open source code. In other cases, it is the wider community of
developers that benefits most. It is entirely conceivable that the winner might
bear the cost of developing open source code, without receiving an equivalent
or offsetting benefit, which might accrue to someone else entirely. It is
important to consider such implications on a winner-by-winner basis, and to
be flexible with grant terms and conditions to create an arrangement that will
be most supportive of innovators’ efforts. The open source requirement could
also be improved and implemented in a way that grants more flexibility in the
types of open source licenses that winners can use.
It is also important
to consider where
the benefits of open
source accrue. In
some cases, the
News Challenge
winners themselves
benefit from using
and sharing open
source code. In
other cases, it is the
wider community
of developers that
benefits most.

Knight News Challenge Winners: Lessons Learned

Knight News Challenge Winners: Lessons Learned

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