Shhh! About one third of Knight News Challenge proposals are secret

By Mac Slocum

You’ve still got two weeks to come up with the brilliant idea that’ll save journalism — or, to be more realistic, an idea that’ll earn some Knight Foundation cash and let you try something new and innovative. And unlike last year, you can choose to keep that idea secret until the cash arrives.

That’s because the 2010 Knight News Challenge includes a private submission option, which allows proposals to remain secret from the date of submission until the News Challenge’s winners are announced in June. And people are taking advantage: While exact numbers are in flux as applications come in, as of late last week between 30 and 40 percent of applications had arrived via the new “closed” category.

Last year — the third round of the News Challenge — all applications were public from submission through the multistage judging process. That was itself a shift from the previous year, when Knight included a category for commercial projects that allowed closed entries. Kebbel said that was dropped because the competition’s strengths did not overlap with the needs of revenue-minded start-ups.

“Looking back on the second year, when we had both open and closed, the ultimate winners were fairly well split between the categories,” said Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer at the Knight Foundation. “More winners came from open, but a very significant minority was closed.”

The revised closed option is an attempt to broaden the appeal of the News Challenge to more applicants. Those might include people concerned about their ideas being co-opted before a project is released, or employed journalists who plan to leave their jobs if they win (but stay if they lose).

One thing that isn’t changing: Closed projects that win the 2010 competition must still adhere to the News Challenge’s requirements to open source their underlying code (an issue of some debate this summer) and release all supporting documentation under Creative Commons licenses. And when it comes time to select winners, closed and open applications will be competing in the same pool. Keep reading »

Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment

By Michael Andersen

Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.

How do you catch up?

If you’re the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.

Your cost for the operation? One full week from a software developer, a few days’ help from others in his department, and £50 to rent temporary servers.

Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking. We wanted the details, so I rang up the developer, Simon Willison, for his tips about deadline-driven software, the future of public records requests, and how a well-placed mugshot can make a blacked-out PDF feel like a detective story.

He offered four big lessons:

— Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. Willison started coding one week before the Thursday launch date, teamed with a designer on Tuesday, a system administrator on Wednesday and leaned on everyone in his 15-person department for ad-hoc help on Thursday. But the bulk of the labor would come from Guardian readers.

How to lure them?

Keep reading »