The Wikimedia Foundation received a $600,000 grant Friday from the Knight News Challenge competition at the Walter Cronkite School to fund a project that would provide access to Wikipedia from basic mobile phones around the globe.
Wikimedia, along with seven other innovators in the field of mobile technology, were awarded a total of $2.4 million in grants from the mobile portion of the News Challenge to fund ongoing projects using mobile devices.
The projects ranged from enabling radio stations to broadcast over cell phone networks to authenticating media shared by mobile devices. Many focused on improving the quality of life in underdeveloped nations, while others sought to promote community involvement in cities throughout the U.S.
Liz Smith, outreach director for the Cronkite School, said the News Challenge: Mobile events took place over the course of two days. The competition itself lasted ten weeks and culminated with the Friday awards ceremony. Additionally, a mobile technology exposition featuring the projects of ASU students and faculty was held on Thursday, Smith said. She said the mobile technology exposition was followed by dinner with an address from ASU President Michael Crow.
“Michael Crow talked about how ASU is ahead of the curve in online space right now,” Smith said. “He has a progressive vision of the school.”
The Wikimedia Foundation’s project to bring access to Wikipedia to people around the world received the largest grant. This was nearly double the second-largest grant of $350,000, which was awarded to Textizen. Their project will create billboards with questions about government that citizens can answer via text.
The other winners were Rootio, Digital Democracy: Remote Access, WeFarm, Abayima, Witness, and Thread. The competition, which began in 2007, is sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Knight Foundation Media and Innovation Vice President Michael Maness announced each of the award winners after first addressing the event attendees.
“Increasingly, what we want to try to do is accelerate these ideas and make the experimentation start to happen faster,” Maness said. “It’s moving from the funding concept to financing, facilitating and futurizing.”
The goal of News Challenge is to establish a systemic innovation network by promoting media innovation and intersections between different groups of people such as journalists and computer scientists, Maness said.
The 2012 News Challenge competition featured three category rounds, an increase from one round in previous years. The winners of the first two rounds, networks and data, were announced in 2012.
News Challenge winners are typically announced at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Christopher Callahan, dean of the Walter Cronkite School and vice provost for the Downtown campus. However, a conversation between Crow and Alberto Ibargüen, President and CEO of the Knight Foundation, brought the third round’s awards ceremony to the Cronkite School.
“These two institutions have an awful lot in common,” Callahan said. “The Knight Foundation, they really are the world leader in pushing digital innovation in media and ASU, of course, is a leader in pushing innovation in higher education.”
The locations of the 2013 News Challenge events have not yet been decided, but Callahan said that the Cronkite School would love to host the event again.
Many Cronkite School students enter projects in the News Challenge competition. Director of the Cronkite School’s New Media Innovation Lab Retha Hill and one of her students won $90,000 in 2010. A two-student team also won a grant for $95,000 in 2009 for their project CityCircles, which built community around light rail stops, Smith said.
The biggest windfall the News Challenge brought to the Cronkite School was to launch the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship in 2007. That grant was for approximately $500,000, Smith said.
Contact the reporter at kimberly.koerth@asu.edu
