GNPX Technology at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Challenge

The Knight Foundation and Mozilla have just launched the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Challenge. It is an initiative to harness open-web innovation for journalism. The program will select 15 fellows through a series of innovation challenges and community events, who will be embedded in leading newsrooms around the world. These fellows will create new tools, ideas, and news experiences that benefit both readers and newsmakers, always using open technologies.

During the first stage of the program, the attendees had proposed creative solutions for three main design challenges:

1.  Unlocking Video: despite video is a central part of many people's daily news experience, most online video is more like "TV on a web page," separated from the rest of the page content, avoiding a deeper engagement by the viewers. The challenge consists in using the new open video tools enrich the news video through added context, real time web, etc. and explore the “untapped possibilities inherent in many-to-many web video”.
2. Beyond Comment Threads: the challenge is how to enable more coherent and elevated discussions and how to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in public news commentary.
3. People Powered News: the challenge is about forgetting old conventions (story form, column inches, deadlines, etc.)  and propose new ways to connect news producers and to news readers, basically answering the question: “what should a news website look like in 2011 and beyond?”

Submissions are closed and 315 projects are available to the crowd evaluation. The audience can vote for its favorite ideas and leave comments. This feedback along with the review board will determine who advances to the next stage. 60 of the best participants will be invited to take part in the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab in July 2011 in Berlin and work together to refine, combine and develop their initial ideas and during Fall 2011 take part in the most energetic hackfests to begin building working prototypes.

The winners will be embedded as Knight-Mozilla Fellows in newsrooms at publishers such as Al Jazeera English, BBC, Boston.com, The Guardian, Zeit Online, etc. The Knight-Mozilla Fellowships are one-year paid positions, placing 5 fellows in Fall 2011 and more 10 in 2012.

So far, only one Brazilian project was detected and it is the Platform to Support Dynamic Ontologies for News submitted by GPNX Tecnologia, one of the Campinas’ startups. Using standard presentations technologies like HTML5 and Javascript plus dynamic model representations, the project intends to create easy to use tools, allowing everyone to edit and structure content in several different formats (maps, graphs, posts, etc.), allowing the community to engage and contribute. Check out the functional demo here.

The project has already received comments from Ben Moskowitz, one of the organizers and a recognized Mozilla’s community member.

Any other Brazilian project submitted? Please, let us know! You can visit the challenge’s website to support the Brazilian work with votes and likes for the project(s).