America's Digital Inclusion Summit has concluded. Video from the Summit will be posted later. In the meantime, you can view tweets about the event by following #BBplan.

In opening remarks at today's America's Digital Inclusion Summit, Knight Foundation's President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said:

"The FCC believes, as we at Knight Foundation do, that you cannot have a healthy American democracy with only 60% of Americans having access to modern means of commercial, civil and social communication. And that's the actual figure we live with today. That means that almost 40% of Americans are on the other side of the digital divide."

There is an increasing need for access to information via broadband. According to Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Internet has now surpassed newspapers as a primary way that American get news making it the third most popular news platform. Something must be done to narrow the digital divide.

To that end, the FCC is previewing it's recommendations for the National Broadband Plan today at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C., in preparation for delivery of the plan to Congress on March 17. The plan aims to have broadband in the homes of 90% of Americans by 2020.

Julius Genachowski, FCC Chairman, said:

"In order to ensure long term American competitiveness and prosperity, we must not leave one-third of the nation behind. The National Broadband Plan provides a vision for federal, state, and local leadership and partnerships with private and non-profit communities that will bridge the digital divide and transform America into a nation where broadband expands opportunities for all."

We'll post more about America's Digital Inclusion Summit as it happens.

Earlier this week, Knight Foundation hosted the Media Learning Seminar to help inform community foundations about the information needs of communities in a democracy. As traditional local news sources and investigative reporting decline, citizens are increasingly involved in the co-creation of new information sources, including online news startups, localized Twitter feeds from political candidates and community leaders, and blogs.

Knight Foundation realizes that the community information ecosystem is not limited to news and information itself, but also access to news and information and the ability to engage with it. Community foundations have the opportunity to play an important role in this evolving landscape.

As the application period for the third Community Information Challenge is closing (the deadline to apply is March 8), Knight Foundation has released a study, Reports From the Field: Place-Based Foundations and the Knight Community Information Challenge, about how place-based foundations are incorporating community information needs into their work.

Michael Marsicano, CEO of the Foundation for the Carolinas, says:

"You cannot conduct meaningful civic work without good information. Engaging citizens without data bears little fruit. Engaging citizens with poor data compromises all future community leadership activities."

What have we learned in the first two years of the Knight Community Information Challenge?

• Foundations are committing significant financial resources to address information needs through and beyond KCIC.
• To be effective, place-based foundations are building capacity to  manage their projects.
• Foundations are increasingly engaging in multiple community leadership activities to increase the impact of their KCIC projects.
• Foundations are engaging in informations initiatives in addition to their KCIC projects.
• Foundations are attracting considerable outside support from funders and sponsors.
• Foundations are also aligning the necessary partnerships and expertise to address their own capacity gaps.
• Through their project experience, foundations are learning more about other projects in their communities and the overall information ecosystem.
• Although for more grantees it is still too early to see evidence that residents are changing their attitudes and behaviors, foundations are putting in place evaluation activities to collect data.

Reports from the field: Place-Based Foundations and the Knight Community Information Challenge provides further insight into these findings, as well as presenting challenges that grantees are facing, what Knight Foundation is learning from the challenge, and a guide on how to address information needs in your community.

Click here to download the PDF of the study.

SochiReporter, a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, was presented in 240 McDonald’s restaurants throughout Russia.

The fast-food chain placed hundreds of thousands of leaflets on every food tray of every patron over the course of 14 days.

The leaflets, which included SochiReporter’s logo and URL, informed customers of SochiReporter’s support of McDonald’s World Children’s Day, and also thanked its other media partners.

The partnership brought 35 percent more visitors to SochiReporter.com and 30 percent more content uploads by citizen journalists.

SochiReporter launched in October 2009, allowing the people of Sochi, the Russian resort city hosting the 2014 Olympics, to use the latest online tools to discuss and influence the impact of the Games.

--Marly Falcon, contributing blogger of Knight Foundation

Steven Waldman, senior advisor to FCC Chariman Julius Genachowski, talked with Broadcasting & Cable's John Eggerton last week about his view on the future of media and the government's role in it.

Waldman is charged with creating a report on the current state of the media and the information needs of communities.  The report will include recommendations for FCC and government policies.

Journalism is one part of it, but it is broader than that. We have been using the phrase "information needs of communities," which is borrowed from the Knight Commission [which produced a report on the future of journalism]. The reason we did that is because when you are looking at the future of media now, you need to look not only at traditional journalistic enterprises, but things like whether the government is providing information in ways that make it easier for journalists doing accountability journalism or make it easier for citizens to hold institutions accountable. That is why we are using lingo that is a little bit broader than just local news.

Waldman is quick to point out that the FCC will not be offering a bailout for either traditional or new media, but that it has a responsibility to figure out what the government should do to preserve the public-service and democratic functions that the media provides.

You can read the entire Broadcast & Cable interview here. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy report is available at http://report.knightcomm.org/.

The FCC has launched a website for The Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age at http://reboot.fcc.gov/futureofmedia. Americans are encouraged to offer their comments and opinions on the site.

We are now accepting applications from community and place-based foundations for the Knight Community Information Challenge (KCIC), which funds news and information projects. The deadline to apply is March 8. Applications can be submitted at www.informationneeds.org.

So far, the Challenge has awarded $7.3 million for 45 ideas in communities large and small. The projects include funding public interest online news sites; creating online hubs to engage communities around specific issues and examining a region's changing media landscape in order to help fill the voids, among many others. Click here to read about past KCIC winners.

Live chats will take place at noon EDT Feb. 16 and 22 at www.informationneeds.org to help answer questions about the challenge. Visit the site sign up for a reminder.

To help educate leaders of community and place-based foundations about media trends and information needs, Knight will host the third Media Learning Seminar March 1 and 2 in Miami. To find out more about the seminar and to register, click here.

Two Knight Foundation grantees have made MIT Technology Review’s list of 10 technologies to watch.

Printcasting, a project of Participata, which is currently testing a service that allows amateur publishers to create newsletters and magazines, is supported by an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge.

The second Knight Foundation project on the list is the Ushahidi Engine, which is developing an open-source platform that allows amateur and professional journalists to respond rapidly to regional crises through mobile phone, e-mail or Web interface.

For the remaining eight technologies to watch, follow the link.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

Back when we launched the Knight News Challenge in 2006, using contests to spur innovation was a relatively new concept. But in just four years, the number of similar competitions in the media, information and communication field has doubled.

So we decided to take a closer look at the contests globally, to see if we could adapt any lessons to improve the News Challenge.  We reviewed all 29 contests, including the Stockholm Challenge, NetSquared  N2Y4 Challenge, We Media Pitch It and Sunlight Lab Apps for America contests, and explored their judging criteria, outreach and marketing plans, application and selection processes. Along the way, we also interviewed former News Challenge judges and entrepreneurs for their insights too.

Today, we want to share the resulting study, conducted by Arabella Advisors, with the greater community. We hope anyone running or hoping to launch a contest – or innovators searching for funding – will find it as useful as we did.

You can access the PDF of this study here.

- Mayur Patel, Gary Kebbel and Jose Zamora

Note: This post is cross-posted at the News Challenge blog.

Knight Foundation CEO and President Alberto Ibargüen has long said that information is a core community need, as vital to a society's health as jobs, roads and electricity. And in the wake of a crisis like the devastating earthquake in Haiti, a community's information infrastructure can fail just like its power grid and transportation network.

So Knight is giving $200,000 to an international media development group called Internews to keep the country's radio stations broadcasting during the disaster:

Knight Foundation officials said they fear broken communication systems could prevent aid from being distributed efficiently, and the grant is meant to help retain the country's battered information infrastructure.

Without that system in place, Internews officials warned, survivors might not know where to go for food, medicine, or how to find missing friends and family.

Internews plans to ship a 300-watt transmitter from Paris to Port-au-Prince, where it is expected to broadcast messages that can be picked up by radios up to 30 miles outside of the demolished city.

The Knight Foundation reported that Internews estimated at least 12 of the city's radio stations and one national broadcaster got back on the air Saturday.

For more information about the grant, read the story from the Miami Herald. Knight grantee Ushahidi has compiled a list of ways you can help survivors in Haiti.

When tragedy struck in Haiti last week, the folks at Ushahidi, a 2009 Knight News Challenge winner, leapt into action. By Tuesday evening, they were hard at work, collecting and mapping eyewitness reports from the area devastated by a catastrophic earthquake.

A story in today's Washington Post highlights their work:

The site is www.Ushahidi.com, and it allows users to submit eyewitness accounts or other relevant information for disaster zones via e-mail, text or Twitter -- and then visualize the frequency of these events on a map. By Friday, Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, had received nearly 33,000 unique visitors, and several hundred personal reports that mainstream news organizations might not hear about. [...]

Taken individually, these bits of data might not be terribly useful. The goal is that by aggregating the incidents in a visual format, people and organizations using the site will be able to see patterns of destruction, to determine where services should be concentrated. A red dot on the map, for example, signifies that looting is happening near a town called Pétionville; another shows that Hotel Villa Creole has become a site of medical triage.

On the Ushahidi blog, founder Ory Okolloh and director of strategic operations Patrick Meier have been sharing insights on the organzation's response to the crisis and how it will develop over the coming days. Okolloh writes:

Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.

Ushahidi is also aggregating resources for information about the crisis and how you can help. Look here for instructions on embedding Ushahidi's crisis map on your own site.