The Village Square

Breaking news: The Village Square’s “We the People” awarded Knight Foundation grant through the Community Foundation of North Florida as one of 24 innovative ideas nationwide

Our project:

Recipient:  The Community Foundation of North Florida

Project: We the People

Award: $72,000

In an effort to revitalize the dialogue among the city’s diverse residents, this grant will help launch “The Village Square: We the People,” a 21st century virtual and real world public square.  The project will offer unique town hall forums in addition to constructive online engagement and a community problem-solving Wiki. Organizers aim to renew Tallahassee’s marketplace of ideas where good solutions rise from an informed citizenship, and where abundant information can be channeled into constructive results.

The entire Knight Foundation Press Release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Knight Foundation Spurs New Round of Local News and Information Projects Nationwide

Knight Community Information Challenge Winners Are Part of a Growing Number of Local Foundations Seeking to Meet Local Information Needs

MIAMI (Jan. 13, 2010) – Twenty-four innovative ideas that will help meet America’s information needs have received $4.3 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The projects – submitted by community and place-based foundations nationwide in a Knight Foundation contest – include:

Examining the Chicago area’s changing media landscape – and funding journalism innovators to fill the information voids; 
Creating information campaigns to spread the word about pressing issues, including how to end gun violence in New York City, and improve early childhood education in Boulder, Colorado, and  
Funding journalists and online news sites in Wyoming, Arkansas, Connecticut, New Jersey and Florida to produce news in the public interest. 

The projects represent the second-year winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, a five-year, $24 million contest that helps community and place-based foundations find creative ways to use new media and technology to keep residents informed and engaged.

“Information is as important to a thriving democracy as clean air, jobs and schools. As leaders, local foundations are taking the initiative to meet those information needs,” said Trabian Shorters, Knight Foundation’s vice president for communities, who leads the challenge. “These projects help ensure that everyone has the information necessary to make decisions about their governments and their lives.”

Among the winners – a full list is below – are foundations rural and urban, large and small. For the first time, several foundations joined together this year to create regional projects for greater impact.

All are part of a growing movement to help fund local news and information projects and ensure that residents are informed and engaged. In fact, J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, recently found that more than 207 foundations have funded $135.86 million in grants to 128 projects since 2005.

The Chicago Community Trust, one of the nation’s oldest community foundations, is now a two-time winner.  With its grant, the trust will expand its Community News Matters program, which fosters new ways of informing the Chicago region through grants to local media innovators. In addition, the trust will conduct a study examining strengths and weaknesses of the area’s information infrastructure and convene a conference on the topic.

“The Trust, like other community foundations, is acutely aware of the changing media landscape in our communities. We recognize that access to information is essential for the quality of life and democracy of those we serve,” said Terry Mazany, the Trust’s president and CEO. “We applaud Knight Foundation for motivating community foundations across the nation to become real laboratories invested in the development of the future of community news and information.”

The challenge complements the sweeping recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, a joint project of the Aspen Institute and Knight Foundation.  In its report issued in October, the Commission asserts that democracy in America is threatened by the lack of equal access to quality information. In addition to 15 urgent recommendations, the report provides a checklist that communities can use to determine which information needs are being met, and which need attention. The report is available at www.knightcomm.org.

Both the Knight Commission and the Knight Community Information Challenge are part of Knight Foundation’s Media Innovation Initiative, a $100 million plus effort to meet America’s information needs. More at www.knightfoundation.org/mii

Knight Foundation will again accept applications for the Knight Community Information Challenge beginning in early February. For more information on the challenge, visit www.informationneeds.org

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation advances journalism in the digital age and invests in the vitality of communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Knight Foundation focuses on projects that promote community engagement and lead to transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

Add comment January 13th, 2010

Babies: Diversity rocks

New movie this spring. Worth watching the trailer.

Add comment January 2nd, 2010

Ron Sachs Communications: Santa, Whipping Boy of Pundits and Politicians

HERE’s a clever Village Square-ish sort of newsletter from Ron Sachs Communications.

Add comment December 16th, 2009

Annie Little: Fly Me Away

Amazon Kindle Commercial featuring the song “Fly Me Away”

Annie Little | MySpace Video

Add comment November 8th, 2009

The Scene Last Night at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Add comment November 1st, 2009

Help us try out an option for live audience polling..

We’re thinking about making live audience polling available at some of our Village Square events. It will help us understand where the audience is on our topic and get us feedback as the event proceeds. Here’s one option we’re considering. Help us try it out by taking the poll, by simply clicking online, or by tweeting (@poll then 38821 for “no”, 38808 for “yes” and 38528 for “maybe” or texting your response (text the code you select to 99503).

Add comment September 28th, 2009

If you do this at your wedding, invite me.

Add comment July 25th, 2009

According to Luke: 2012 and 1912, what a difference 100 years can make. Or not.

Photo shows President William Howard Taft riding in carriage with Woodrow Wilson, on the way to Wilson’s inauguration at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

I know we’ve just elected a new president, and with the current state of the union it seems silly to even be thinking about this, but with the recent resignation of Sarah Palin, I started thinking about the 2012 election.

The 2012 election will be the 100th anniversary of the election of 1912, an election that some say changed America. This was the election that Theodore Roosevelt broke from the Republican Party (who nominated Taft) to start his Bull Moose Party and run for a third term. The Democrats nominated Woodrow Wilson instead of William Jennings Bryan who was the party’s candidate three times prior, and the Socialist Party ran Eugene Debs for the third time. Obviously as we all know Wilson was the victor, and helped, along with Roosevelt to usher in the modern presidency and continue the progressive reform of the early 20th century.

How fascinating this must have been at the time; but far-fetched 100 years later right? Current polls show Barack Obama’s initial popularity is wearing off, and if the economy doesn’t turn around pretty quick he might be looking at larger group of competitors for the nomination. I don’t think liberals are stupid enough to nominate someone over a sitting President, but our recent political history is full of surprises. Of course the Dennis Kucinich’s of the world wouldn’t have a chance but maybe an Al Gore, or even Hillary Clinton; perhaps Howard Dean will resurrect from the dead YEAARRRGGGHHH!!!

On the other side, the Republicans find themselves void of leadership. The candidate that emerges from the field in 2012 could say a lot about the future of the party, whether it is indeed becoming a regional party, or if it will regain its national dominance. Enter Sarah Palin. While her approval ratings aren’t high enough for a successful run right now, she does have that “It” factor. She is definitely well liked among conservatives and will not have as much trouble rallying the base as John McCain.

Maybe Ron Paul will mobilize a more formidable third party opposition with his popularity? Or perhaps someone like Joe Lieberman could mobilize from the middle?

Roosevelt, Taft, Debs, and Wilson meet Obama, Gore, Palin and Paul. What an election that would be. It’s the stuff that makes graduate students in political science squeal with joy. Of course it is a long shot. But 100 years ago nobody expected it either.

–Luke Inhen

Add comment July 18th, 2009

Put this in your pipe and smoke it.

Watch this.

Add comment April 16th, 2009

Easter, death, rebirth and Extreme Home Makeover

Tonight, Easter night, Tallahassee is being treated to a very personal, very profound, very vivid death and rebirth of our own. We’re watching our community, with the help of Ty Pennington and his ABC compadres, build a home for a family in our community as their father lay dying in the same hospital where so many of us have celebrated our own births, mourned our own deaths.

The building, if we didn’t participate ourselves, was done by the hands of our family, our friends and our neighbors. We got to watch them do it today on TV.

Gone is all ability to hold this as theoretical, distant. It’s real. Real dirt, real sweat, real pain, real death.

When ABC came looking for manpower, they drew – in part – on our churches. Today, for our Christian neighbors, is the most holy day of the calendar, the day that Christ is risen from death. Whatever you personally believe about faith, gone for Christians in this story, is the theoretical, the distant. It’s real, it’s death, it’s rebirth.

In a country of Jews, of Gentiles, of Muslims, of Buddhists, of agnostics, of atheists, at a time when religion has gone political and tends to divide us more than it unites us, it’s worth it to pause for a moment on this Easter Day, during Passover, on this Sunday in April, on whatever day it is to you in your tradition – to celebrate rebirth, the real daggone living thing.

Whatever flavor, whatever belief, we are neighbors, we live our lives beside each other. And we did this wonderful thing together.

We, as a people, are bigger than what divides us. We just are.

In the words of Barbara Kadzis, the mother of this family, “lots of somebodies cared on this planet.”

Happy Easter.

Add comment April 12th, 2009