The 2007 and 2008 winners of the News Challenge (the Knight contest to fund projects about the future of local news delivery) are gathered this week at MIT to hear about each other’s work, including the many projects at MIT.

Last night, there were twenty or so demonstrations of current work from MIT students. Below, video from Benjamin Mako Hill on Selectricity and Christina of the extrACT project.

This afternoon there were multiple options for locative gaming in Cambridge, a game workshop at MIT, and sessions around issues like finding technical developers for projects.

To follow along, MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser is liveblogging the conference.

More conference blog posts are on Idea Lab, the group blog for all News Challenge winners that began last year and is updated with entries daily.

Persephone Miel also liveblogged today’s sessions here.

You can also join the Facebook group, look for images on Flickr (a popular online photo-sharing site) and Twitter (a microblogging site) with the tag #futurecivic (for Twitter #futurecivic tagging, try Summize). The Flickr pool of photos is here.

And, there’s the conference wiki, site, and the back channel from last night’s panel session.

This week, Trabian Shorters, V.P. of Communities at Knight Foundation, and I attended the NetSquared conference in San Jose, California. (Knight Foundation was a conference sponsor.)

In its third year, the NetSquared conference tightly programs two days of sessions on how to use social media tools like Flickr, the popular photo-sharing service, along with the real draw: twenty-one project presentations competing to be voted into the top three, with award money and the prestige of “winning” NetSquared.

The twenty-one projects are organized into broadly thematic panels (mapping, aggregation tools), and trends this year included specific asks to extend existing sites and databases with geolocative details, mobile interfaces, and formatted public data.

Most impressively, between sessions and in the hallways, conversation exploded. Presenting to an audience of their peers, the panelists fielded smart questions and excitedly announced finding technical help, calling out other conference attendees and thanking them. After panels, longer and more technical conversations often continued into the hack room, which became the Second Life Mixed Reality event on the second day.

This is a video I took between sessions and between conversations:

Bravo to the NetSquared team for creating a brief incubation of sorts where all projects could hone their ideas and grow from the interested and invested community gathered.

For more, see the conference agenda, blog entries, Twitter account.