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The Knight Foundation has announced the first winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, a five-year, $24 million initiative to help community foundations support creative ways to use new media and technology to keep communities engaged.

The 21 winners receive grants ranging from $41,250 to $500,000, totaling to $5 million.

Julia Angwin at the WSJ reports that the foundation, which had $2.6 billion in assets at the beginning of 2008, has suffered significantly in the stock market collapse.

As some of you know, my muse project MobiChange is in the running for the Knight News Challenge, which gives away $5 million a year to innovative ideas that develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news, conversations, and information distribution and visualization.

In a month when 8020 Media, which use online crowdsourcing to create printed magazines like JPG and Everywhere, announced that it was ceasing operations and speculations about NYT moving to an online-only model increased, Joshua Karp has started The Printed Blog, “the world’s first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user generated content” (via Wired).

Earlier, in my post on the top five newsworthy events in the Indian blogosphere in 2008, I had written about Indian group blog Mutiny.in starting a monthly print version, Mutiny Print, which includes a selection of the best posts from the blog.

Also, one of the 2008 Knight News Challenge winners is Don Pacheco’s Printcasting, which promises to “allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information”.

Such blog to print models are an untested model, but they may work, if they manage to keep overheads low and attract local advertising. I’ll be watching this space closely.

Cross-posted on Social media in Business, Development and Government.

Here is the big announcement on MobiChange I had promised earlier: I am delighted to welcome Ken Banks and Dina Mehta on the MobiChange team.

Ken Banks runs kiwanja.net, an organisation that helps grassroots non-profits around the world figure out how to use mobile technology in their social change work. Ken’s FrontlineSMS project has previously received grants from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and the Open Society Institute.

Dina Mehta is a partner in Mosoci (research for web 2.0 strategy) and Explore Research & Consultancy (qualitative market research). Dina has contributed to building several communities on the internet, such as Worldchanging, Tsunami Help, KatrinaHelp, WorldwideHelp Group, SkypeJournal and Global Voices Online.

Both Ken and Dina are widely acknowledged as thought leaders in the mobile for development (Mobile4D) and social media space, write regularly on their blogs about these topics, and are frequently quoted in the media.

The MobiChange founding team now combines a rare set of skill and experiences: (1) expertise in the emerging markets in Asia and Africa, (2) understanding of the emerging mobile social networking space, and (3) experience in using mobile and social media applications to engage non-profits and grassroots communities.  Read More

I have some good news: MobiChange is through to round 2 of the $5 million Knight News Challenge 2009.

MobiChange is my work-in-progress muse project: an open-source, multi-lingual mobile social networking platform, accessible by voice and SMS, designed to support local communities and help mobilize social change. I had earlier written about submitting MobiChange for the Knight News Challenge.

The Knight News Challenge is a great fit for MobiChange both in terms of the stage the idea is in and amount of funding required to realize the idea. Other contests like NetSquared USAID Development 2.0 Challenge and Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Challenge either offer a very small grant or fund projects in a different development stage. So, getting funded by Knight News Challenge may be the most important thing for MobiChange now.

Of course, the Knight News Challenge has multiple rounds of screening and the winners will only be announced in Fall 2009. MobiChange itself is evolving as an idea, I’m still in the process of putting together the rest of the team, the actual development work may only start in Spring 2009, and my grand vision for MobiChange may only be realized by end of 2010. So, MobiChange promises to be a very long journey of (self-)discovery for me.  Read More

Apart from Google’s Project 10^100, I’m also submitting MobiChange at the Knight News Challenge. Here is the full text of my submission to the Knight News Challenge Garage. As you can see, some of the ideas here are based on your feedback on my Project 10^100 submission. As before, I’ll request you to take out ten minutes and share your thoughts on how I can improve my submission,

Describe your project:

MobiChange is a social entrepreneurship venture that will leverage mobile social networking for mobilizing social change.

Even as the ubiquitous use of mobile phones bridges the digital divide between the developed and developed countries, another digital divide — digital divide 2.0 — is opening up between the haves and have-nots. Digital divide 2.0 is not about access to communications devices; it’s about the ability to leverage the power of group-forming social communications technologies to collaborate with others, self-organize into grassroots communities and create crowd-sourced content that is relevant for these communities.

MobiChange will enable disadvantaged communities to benefit from the power of group-forming social networks by bringing these technologies to the $50 mobile phone that can only be used to make voice calls and send text messages.  Read More