Berkman Luncheon Series - Gary Kebbel on “The Knight News Challenge and Digital Innovation"

This afternoon, Knight Foundation Program Officer Gary Kebbel gave a Berkman Luncheon Series talk on “The Knight News Challenge and Digital Innovation: Challenges Posed by Intellectual Property, International Giving, and Grant Administration.”

From Gary:

If you do it right, giving away $25 million for digital innovation isn’t as easy as it sounds.

The Knight News Challenge is a $25 million, five-year quest for innovations in digital news and information that help build and bind community in a specific geographic area. As the Challenge ends its second year, the contest was revised to meet new goals, such as making grants to individuals in foreign countries or focusing the wisdom of the crowd on weak applications so that they could be strengthened and resubmitted. Additionally, $500,000 was set aside for the ideas of people 25-years-old and younger. These changes create new problems of grant administration, intellectual property and having a minor win a monetary award.

Gary Kebbel is the journalism program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, Fla. In that role, he administers the Knight News Challenge, a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to create community in a given geographic area. At Knight Foundation, he also helped create the Knight Citizen News Network and the Knight Digital Media Center.

Berkman Executive Director John Palfrey blogged the lunch here, and Lisa Williams of Placeblogger gave her take here. Ethan Zuckerman, and David Weinberger also live blogged the discussion, and if you missed the luncheon talk, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman tomorrow.