Jeffrey Coates has joined Knight Foundation as the new program associate for Strategic Initiatives.

Coming from New Orleans, Coates has helped community groups form sustainable plans for recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Most recently, he was director of development / data for the Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership. He also founded the nonprofit organization RALLY (Recovery Action Learning Laboratory) to fill the critical unmet need of monitoring and evaluating post-disaster programs.

Coates’ earlier experiences in international disaster recovery with an emphasis on public health have contributed to his deep appreciation for community engagement and understanding of systemic change. Coates also brings to Knight his experiences volunteering in Guyana with the Peace Corps and interning with the government of Sri Lanka.

Knight’s Strategic Initiatives Program supports innovative leaders and entrepreneurial organizations working across disciplines to promote informed and engaged communities.

Mayur Patel, who joined Knight Foundation in 2009, has been promoted to assistant to the foundation’s president, Alberto Ibargüen. He will also continue as director of strategic assessment and impact.

In his new role, Patel will help develop the foundation’s strategy for fostering informed and engaged communities. His promotion also stems from Knight’s increased emphasis on evaluation as a tool for learning and planning.

From today’s release: “Over the last year and a half, Knight Foundation has undergone a deep review of our mission and goals, seeking to remain true to our donors’ intent and focused on their twin passions of journalism and communities,” Ibargüen said. “At every step along the way, Mayur displayed insight and understanding of our mission and of our leadership opportunity in a changing and increasingly digital society. His tenacity, diplomacy and creativity helped craft our ultimate focus on informed and engaged communities, earning him this greater role in the general management of Knight Foundation.”

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?

On the heels of the recent stir over the Associated Press filing DMCA notices on the community site Drudge Retort, a timely article in the Washington Post quotes Knight News Challenge winner Geoff Dougherty of Chi-TownDailyNews.org on his vision for the site and professional training models for online journalists.

The article details how bloggers can protect themselves from lawsuits for defamation and libel; Dougherty provides online training for Chi-Town Daily News writers, which will become increasingly important as the author pool and audience share for the Chicago news site grows.

"I see us in five years as the go-to source for Chicago news," said Dougherty. "It's a big goal."

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Editor Brad Petit of the Convergence Newsletter at the University of South Carolina recently interviewed Marc Fest, V.P. of Communications at Knight Foundation, about the new online community manager role at Knight Foundation.

Fest describes how an online community manager differs from an editor below:

TCN: How does the online community manager differ from other Web-centric positions? How does it differ from we might traditionally call “editors”?

Fest: Online community manager is much more about interacting and communicating with an online community, whereas a traditional position as a webmaster or an editor is more about editing text or maintaining a Web site and running a content-management system. This is very much about interacting with people, it’s about conversation, it’s about two-way interaction and bringing people together and connecting with people.

Read the entire interview here.

Editor's note: Marc Fest is V.P. of Communications at Knight Foundation. Below, he frames a recent speech by CEO and president Alberto Ibargüen that outlines Knight Foundation's current media innovation strategy.

Our media innovation strategy shapes various Knight projects that address the information needs of communities in a democracy.

Knight's CEO and president Alberto Ibargüen recently explained the strategy, and initiatives and projects that flow from it, in a speech at the Boston Foundation. You can read it here.