I've spent part of the morning--and will spend some more time--updating my lifestream data to reflect what I'm up to right now. So Louis Gray asked, what am I up to?  So, here's where my attention is going to be these days:

Co-founder, People's Software Company
People's Software Company is creating a new community platform that will make it as easy to start a community site as it is to start a blog today. Even better, our tools will make community sites lively and sustainable even for small groups. It's the magic of crowds -- for smaller crowds.

I'll be writing about our start-up experiences here and on the soon to be launched PSCO blog, will share more about our products, roadmap, business model and what problems we've solving/what's different as it moves from concepts to execution.

And of course, as a TechStars 2008 company, we're getting a great incubator experience.

Evangelist, Knight News Challenge, 2008-09
The Knight News Challenge just awarded over $5.5 million dollars to  16 software development projects from across the globe that support online discourse, community dialogue and engagement, and news as an empowering information tool.

I was a reviewer in 2007-08, and I will work with the strong team at Knight to run the 2008-09 awards. Applications will open in September, and we want to have a broad diversity of great projects...more on plans to spread the word and support prospective applicants in the next few months,

BlogHer CE
I've been writing for BlogHer since the early days, and value a chance to be part of this community. Sometime, it's a stretch, time-wise, but I want these connections to deepen and continue, so I keep fitting it in, somehow.

What's off the list?
Consulting, advising, general trouble-making will have to be on hold for the foreseeable future. 
Those 22 working hours in every day just aren't going to be enough, so this is going to be working smart, prioritizing, and GTD, all the way. And it will be tough, I know that--but I am excited about our plans and the value these projects can deliver to people.

The Knight Foundation just announced the 16 winners of the 2008 News Challenge, which give out $5.5 million dollars to fund a set of projects that support tools for online media and citizen journalism, community discourse and empowerment, and grassroots mobile media.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, received one of the awards for a standards project run by the Media Standards Trust and the UK-based Web Science Research Initiative that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content.

These awards were meaningful to me for a few reasons:

• I was a judge for 2008
• Local community, citizen journalism, platform tools, and community-focused mobile are of vital interest to me
• The conversation between people building tools, aka developers, and people creating content, aka journalists,bloggers, consumers needs to accelerate so that people over 25 start to understand that content and form can't truly be seperated online (like, the medium actually IS the message.)

The press release says:

• the number of applicants for Knight News Challenge increased 82 percent in its second year, to 3,000
• the percentage of foreign applicants increased to 40 percent from 15 percent in 2007.
• the contest was advertised in 10 languages.
• there was a new "Young Creators'" category to reward the ideas of those who are 25 and younger--and six of this year's winners are "Young Creators"

The new cycle for funding applications opens in September and goes into the fall; I'm going to be helping Knight with the next cycle and will be posting some ideas about  making the application process work even better and building on what's come before.( There will be chances to get everyone's input who wants to contribute.)





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