The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a private non-profit dedicated to fostering media innovation and "transformational ideas that promote quality journalism," has announced the 22 recipients of its Knight Prototype Fund, with three hailing from the Windy City.
The Prototype Fund is the organization's initiative to help technologists and media professionals turn ideas into live demos, committing $35,000 in funding to each project. This year, the Fund's awards total hit $77,000.
“The Prototype Fund provides an opportunity for wide experimentation with ideas in their early stages,” said the Knight Foundation's Director for Media Innovation Chris Barr in a release. "It provides teams the chance to test their assumptions, while fostering important lessons for a wider community of people looking to innovate in media and information."
The 22 projects address a wide array of industry problems, including an editorial workflow management app that coordinates coverage across a variety of publishing platforms and a platform that enables media organizations to recruit volunteers. Outside of the media sector, several projects are focused on improving the spread of and access to civic information, another core mission of the Knight Foundation. For example, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Placelet develops sensors that collects data on movement, audio and air quality in urban places.
The three Chicago-based projects that received funding are:
Scrubadub from Datascope Analytics, a local data science design and strategy firm.
Led by Datascope co-founder Dean Malmgren, Scrubadub is a tool that enables researchers and journalists to more "easily and ethically analyze unstructured text" by automatically scrubbing out personally identifiable information from raw text. Also, with this tool, FOIA officers will be able to rapidly de-identify unstructured text, allowing documents to be released to the public in a shorter amount of time.
Visualizing Thick Data from the IIT Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology
Visualizing Thick Data is a web app that allows researchers to easily package and visualize qualitative data, resulting in fast, efficient data exploration. This project is led by Kim Erwin, an assistant professor at IIT.
YourNextRepresentative from Datamade, a civic technology company.
YourNextRepresentative is a crowdsourcing platform that lets users easily gather and share important information about election candidates. The project is a collaborative effort between Datamade and Argentina-based Congreso Interactivo. It's co-led by Derek Eder, founder and partner at Datamade and a co-founder of Open City, a Chicago-based non-profit that uses open city data to create civic web apps.
The next application deadline for prototypes is August, 17th.
(Image via the Knight Foundation)
