Flickr image from rockyradio

From the 6.28 press release:

Proving once again that it indeed deserves the title “world renowned,” the Akron Art Museum, designed by the Viennese firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, was chosen as one of three finalists for the highly prestigious Lubetkin Prize from the Royal Insitute of British Architects (RIBA) in London. After winning one of RIBA’s 2008 International Awards, following a visit by a jury of architects and lay judge, the Akron Art Museum was honored further by being chosen as one of only three worldwide finalists for the Lubetkin Prize.

…

“It is an incredible honor for all of us in Akron who worked on the museum’s John S. and James L. Knight Building to have it singled out by the world’s leading architectural organization as one of the three most important new buildings outside Europe,” said Mitchell Kahan, director and chief executive officer of the Akron Art Museum. “When I think of all the great structures unveiled last year around the globe, from Asia and Africa to North and South America, this recognition underlines the success of our goal to create an innovative design of worldwide significance.”

Find more images (and interesting manipulated photography) of the Akron Art Museum’s Knight Building on Flickr.

Have you visited the Akron Art Museum? What is your favorite museum building?

Knight News Challenge winner Everyblock, “a new way to find local news and public information,” has launched two new city sites: Charlotte and Philadelphia.

The Everyblock team has added a data type for new library items in Charlotte, and more details on the new sites are in the Everyblock blog post announcement.

Charlotte and Philadelphia join Chicago, New York, and San Francisco in the Everyblock city roster.

Congratulations to the Everyblock team–

Nathaniel Whittemore of the Do Good Well blog on the new Knight Community Information Challenge:

“…the implication for the Knight grant might be that smart community foundations find ways to help their communities tap into existing citizen-led or socially concerned news networks and become human filters and hubs for the information most relevant for their daily lives.”

The rest of the post offers distinctions between communities, networks, depth, and breadth.

Do you think community foundations should tap into existing networks or develop new ones?

Last Friday and Saturday, the members of the worldwide Global Voices community gathered in Budapest for the panels, conversations, and merriment of Global Voices Summit 2008.

Knight Foundation sponsored the 2008 Summit and funds the Rising Voices project within Global Voices.

Led by Director of Outreach David Sasaki, Rising Voices widens the already extensive reach of Global Voices, (which “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore,”) by finding, funding, and resourcing new communities and projects in underrepresented areas.

This video, shown Saturday morning at the Summit, shows projects from the first year of Rising Voices:

Six new health-related projects were announced on Saturday in conjunction with the Open Society Institute’s Health Media Initiative; details about these new projects are here.

For more on this year’s summit of leading thinkers, expatriate bloggers, and advocates, visit the archive of streamed video, the archive of liveblogged entries, and the tagged Flickr photos.

And find out why Global Voices founders Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca Mackinnon are “blown away” and “almost brought to tears” by the work Rising Voices projects are doing (as well as what “street theatre” is called in an area where there aren’t many streets).

Editor’s note: Bud Meyer is senior communications director and board secretary of Knight Foundation. He asks below what you, our readers, want from a Knight newsletter.

Head’s up, folks.

We’re sending out Knight News – our revamped electronic newsletter – this week, and we want to know what you think. It will make a monthly appearance and goes out to some 6,000 recipients.

We intend to offer a mix of stories and multimedia features. If you have ideas for future stories, send ‘em my way: meyer at knightfoundation dot org.

KnightBlog readers know there’s an opportunity to check in frequently there to see what we’re up to. The newsletter links to the blog with some new features, including a 5 Questions interview by Lee Oglesby, communications intern, with News Challenge/Young Creator David Cohn about his novel approach to funding investigative journalism.

Knight News is also different because it responds to our readers. We surveyed a sample of newsletter readers and asked them what they wanted to see. They said: News about upcoming funding opportunities. So you’ll see Opportunities in the upper right corner detailing things in the pipeline.

We’re seeking comments, too, to make sure we’re connecting to readers and they to us.

No need to wait, though. What do you think?

Editor’s note: Paula Ellis is Knight Foundation’s vice president of strategic initiatives. She is currently traveling in Singapore. Below is a dispatch she sent in last night.

Singapore, one of the world’s most admired economies and a leader in Asia, has identified digital media as an emerging economic sector that could propel its continued growth. I met Friday with Sng Cheng Hong Dennis and Ngiam Shing Shian of the Media Development Authority. They oversee the Interactive and Digital Media Program. Like most Singaporeans I have met, they are imaginative about the future and pragmatic about the now.

Just imagine this. Early in my visit, I toured the Singapore Botanic Gardens to see if the varieties of orchids and ginger were similar to those back home in Miami. The walk was lovely, but it would have been so much nicer if I could have shared it with my husband. Today, I could call him while walking or send streaming video once home. What if, the cloth of my garments was woven with fiber that allowed me to transmit the sights, sounds and smells of my stroll through the lush gardens? What if, I could touch the bark of a tree and it would send back home a piece of the experience?

What if? What if?

That doesn’t seem far off when visiting with Shing and Dennis. Shing is excited about the developments in language mediation and it is one of the several areas of focus for which they are bringing some of the best universities from around the world together in Singapore. If you’ve played Gambit, then you’ve benefited from their boundary-spanning approach to creative collaboration. Gambit was developed here with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are six other games here on path to be commercialized. And they’ve just announced a contest for games that can be played across platforms: on the computer, the game console and mobile phone. This grant program is intended to popularize games outside the current hardcore user market.

And who could go shopping in Second Life without their gold card from FirstMeta bank, invented here. As anyone who has scoured Orchard Road for bargains knows, Singapore is first in all things shopping. So it’s no wonder it was invented here first.

This is just a taste of what’s in the works here. Later this year, the digital media initiative, will move into new digs at the Innovation and Research Hub where Biopolis now pursues biomedical research. This new research cluster for infocomms, media and sciences will be known as Fusionopolis. These entrepreneurial, idea hubs are located in a planned community known locally as One North in Buona Vista. The education department is located nearby as is Wessex Estate, a residential community filled with parks, cafes and other amenities. Here Singapore is building a work, live and play community to attract creative, knowledge economy workers. I checked it out earlier in the week as part of the World Cities Summit for Liveable and Vibrant Cities.

Why call it One North? Singapore is one degree north of the equator.

What do you think of Singapore?

In a recent speech, Knight CEO and president Alberto Ibargüen announced a new media innovation strategy and four projects that are part of this strategy.

You can read the entire speech here; abbreviated descriptions of the four projects (they share similar names) are below.

Knight News Challenge (newschallenge.org)

The Knight News Challenge funds ideas that use digital media to deliver news and information to geographically defined communities.

This is a yearly contest about the future of local news delivery (and includes projects in a range of media areas such as mobile, video, and microfunding).

Knight Commission on Information Needs (knightcomm.org)

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, in partnership with the Aspen Institute, will propose public policy that will facilitate meeting those needs.

This is a new group with fifteen members that will make recommendations in 2009 about core community information needs.

Knight Center for Digital Excellence (knightcenter.info)

The Knight Center for Digital Excellence is a not-for-profit consultancy to help communities across the United States ensure digital access to every citizen.

This is sometimes called “universal access,” and the goal is to accelerate digital access projects across the U.S.

Knight Community Information Challenge (informationneeds.org)

Community Foundation initiatives to meet the information needs of their communities are matched by funds from Knight Foundation.

This is to help community foundations use media and technology to deliver information to their communities.

Questions? Leave a comment below.

Editor’s note: Lee Oglesby is interning in Knight Communications department this summer. Below, she shares her thoughts about the first amendment and her high school newspaper. Look for a few more posts from Lee in coming weeks.

This week I’ve been reading up on the Future of the First Amendment survey - a Knight-sponsored survey that reveals how little high school students know about the first amendment - and the High School Journalism Initiative, a program that hopes to fix this problem while encouraging students to love journalism.

I graduated from Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High (a public-magnet school in north Dade) a year ago and, frankly, I’m not surprised that kids my age don’t know about the Bill of Rights. Sure, they’ll use “free speech” as an excuse for just about anything. But actual knowledge is limited and few kids think it actually applies to them as students. If you told an average student from my high school that the rights of the First Amendment had been extended to secondary students in 1943, they’d be shocked.

With that said, first amendment awareness at Krop wasn’t all bad. The school newspaper, The Lightning Strike, is pretty good. Actually, it’s really good. Readership went up dramatically in the span of a few years and several of the students I knew who took the journalism classes will go on to be great journalists.

As I was writing this and browsing the newspaper’s online site, I spotted the Knight Foundation logo in the corner. Turns out my high school paper had some help from the High School Journalism Initiatives. Go figure.

What was your high school newspaper like?

On Monday, the first round table for the new Knight Center for Digital Excellence, was held in Miami. The new center was formed to accelerate digital access projects across the U.S.

The Miami round table group included representatives from local nonprofits, Knight Foundation staff, and members of new Knight Center team, which is staffed and operated by OneCommunity. (Details on the KCDE’s creation in the April press release.) Round table events in other cities will introduce the new center and its goals to those areas.

Lorenzo Lebrija, Knight Foundation program officer for Miami, shared how communities can start to be involved with the new center:

And lively questions from the audience followed a panel presentation:

Find out more about this media innovation initiative here, and look for more information on this blog in coming months.

What questions do you have about the new Knight Center? What needs do you think it should address first?

Youth digital culture scholar danah boyd is one of the fifteen members of the new Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

Today, she is at the Newseum for the Commission’s first meeting; below, she talks about her work and the information lifestyle she hopes to voice for the group:

Video by V.P. of Communications Marc Fest

You can watch the Commission’s live webcast until 5 pm ET today here.

What questions do you have for danah and the other members of the Commission?