Phillip Smith here. Not a VHS member (yet!), though a long-time maker and very keen to get involved now that I’m settled in Vancouver.
I wanted to drop a note here, however, because I’ve started a new project called the Uncharted Journalism Fund – a DIY-inspired undertaking to bring new forms of storytelling to life. I think of Uncharted as something very similar to a maker space – we’re providing a platform to help people experiment (by providing some seed funding).
You may be asking yourself “But what does this have to do with VHS?” Here’s my take: much of the way that citizens interact with information is changing, and some of those shifts are likely being dreamed about, or built, in maker spaces, hack labs, tool libraries, and so on. When I visited the NYTimes R&D lab many years ago, it reminded me very much of my local hacker space: wearables, internet-connected furniture, 3D printers, and so on.
I’ll cut to the chase: the application window for the first Uncharted Journalism Fund grant closes at midnight on October 28, 2016. That’s just over a week from today.
If there are individuals at VHS that would be interested in hearing about the Uncharted Journalism Fund, I hope I can encourage you to share this information with them. There’s a tweet here if that’s helpful, https://twitter.com/unchartedfund/status/784426590599909376
Many thanks in advance & I hope that some of you might consider applying,
Am I correct in understanding that what you are doing is grants for innovation in grassroots reporting/journalism applications/technology? So, more about creating new ways tools/uses of technology for reporting on events?
Interesting,
Is this both “grassroots” investigative gathering information and
“grassroots” engaging people that are difficult reach in a focused maner
with conventional mass media?
Just to emphasize something that wasn’t clear to me at first: I believe this is an ongoing project, and the deadline in a week is only for the current (first?) round. So if your ideas don’t meet that timeline, it looks like you can try again later.
I would say it’s both, and neither. The grant is open to projects that attempt to deliver information in new ways. That could be by gathering the information in a new way (sensors for example), or distributing it to people in a new way (which might apply if those people were difficult to reach in some way).
Yes, indeed, it is an ongoing project. I hope it will continue for a long time and that the fund will grow larger. Currently, we’re looking at a one-year period with four application cycles. The next application window will open in January I believe.
I think that sensors are just one of many interesting intersections of the maker movement and the role we understand journalism to play in our lives, e.g., informing people about the world around them, and helping them to make decisions.
@TyIsI: Yes, that is correct – experiments in new ways of delivering information or bringing important stories to light.
Being a technologist myself, I do hope to see some applications that are pushing the envelope in that way, i.e., exploring new ways of gathering or delivering information that leverage tools or technology in some way.
Many reporters have never been to a maker space, so much of what you might take for granted around tooling and technology are beyond their current awareness. So I’m curious what a collaborative project that bings together the tools of the maker movement and the civic role of reporting would look like.