The Global Ideas Blog

21st Century News Challenge

Been meaning to mention this for a little while, the Knight Brothers 21st Century Challenge:

"Turn the web on its head. Show us how online news can help people improve their lives and shape their communities.

Knight Foundation is seeking new ideas, pilot projects, commercial products and leadership initiatives that will improve the flow of information and news in the public interest.

In 2007, we will award a total of $5 million to individuals, organizations or businesses that can show their ideas will transform community life."

Apply before December 31st with your great ideas...it looks very interesting for creative social inventor types out there (maybe the GIB should be applying?), particularly:

"Those who receive awards in this category must agree to share their ideas with others, further developing them publicly in a blog on a Knight-designated web site for at least a year.

The public would be encouraged to comment on the idea. The author would reply and nurture the discussion."

 

Social Innovation Conversations

Just a brief mention for an interesting resource: Social Innovation Conversations, a collaboration between the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Business, and the Pittsburgh Social Innovation Accelerator. They've launched with a re-broadcast of some Globeshakers conversations hosted by Tim Zak (who I met at the Skoll Forum...see previous posts).

It's a podcasting channel, basically, for what they call "cross-sector and multidisciplinary learning for social change" and for what I call "interesting conversations with interesting people". You can read their full mission on the site, but it's basically about dissemination and promotion, which can be no bad thing.

Sign up via iTunes or whatever....

FeedDigest and content creation

Have spent the afternoon creating some new content for the School for Social Entrepreneurs' homepage using a new tool to me: Feed Digest. Absolute genius: allows you to mix RSS feeds into one feed, allows you to then incorporate that content easily on your website (as html, as php or whatever), allows you to customise it and so on. Numerous applications of this, so will be using again. You can check my trial uses on the SSE homepage above: one is a simple feed of SSE Delicious links, while the other is a mixed 'sector' news feed (with a social enterprise leaning).

Geekcorps and blog effects

Really interesting interview on World Changing today with Ethan Zuckerman, the guy who started Geekcorps and is involved in a tremendous amount of other stuff. The interview covers some interesting ground on whether blogging really helps make under-reported stories more widely known, about talk radio blogging, about bottom-up technology-led change and much more besides. Well worth a read.

[On a similar tip to Geekcorps, we have ideas on the Global Ideas Bank: see Volunteers taking IT skills into the developing world and Digital Divide Data]