Earlier this week, William English "Brit" Kirwan, co-chair of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, was awarded the 2010 TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence. Kirwan is Chancellor of the University System of Maryland.

"Chancellor Kirwan brings a collaborative and cooperative leadership style to higher education welcoming all viewpoints," said Stephanie Bell-Rose, Managing Director and Head of the TIAA-CREF Institute. "This coupled with his forward thinking makes him one of the nation's most dynamic and effective higher education leaders and we are so pleased to honor him today."

Knight Foundation would like to congratulate Kirwan on this very prestigious honor. You can read more about Kirwan on the Knight Commission website. More information about the award is available here.

I'm here in New York City for the 6th Annual Games for Change Festival. This festival brings together nonprofits, game designers, academics, journalists and foundations who believe in the power and potential of using digital games for social change.  

Last night Knight Foundation and Games for Change  honored the best News Games of the field at the Knight News Game Awards.

The winner of the award was Play the News by Impact Games.

September 12th -- A Toy World received a lifetime achievement award.

Budget Maze and Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City received honorable mentions.

Congratulations to the winners!

Please join us at Knight in welcoming a new colleague and congratulating two of our own for a lifetime achievement award and a new elected position.

Welcome to Dennis Scholl, the new Miami Program Director for Knight.

From the press release,

Scholl will work with local leaders to identify opportunities for investing in innovative ideas and programs. His efforts will include leading the Knight Arts Challenge, a $40 million initiative to unite South Florida through the arts.

An art collector for more than 30 years, Scholl has lead local and national philanthropic efforts in the visual arts. He served as founding chair of the Guggenheim Photography Committee, of the Tate Modern American Acquisitions Committee and of the Miami Art Museum Collectors Council. He has also served on the boards of the Aspen Art Museum, the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and the alternative art space Locust Projects, of which he was chair.

Congratulations to Damian Thorman, National Program Director for Knight Foundation on his election as Vice Chair of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

Congratulations to Susan Patterson, Charlotte Program Director for Knight Foundation, on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Hornets Nest Girl Scout Council's 4th annual Women of Distinction Award Luncheon. Here she is with her mother, who was her first Girl Scout leader.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Last week Development Seed released new open-source code in preparation for part of their Knight funded mapping project. This piece of software allows anyone to switch between mapping providers without writing any code.

Development Seed received a $195,000 grant to add a mapping tool to Drupal. With it, people will be able to geo-tag stories and see their location on a map. The developers are also creating a news monitor that allows people to aggregate multiple local news sources based on topic or issue to the open and free Drupal platform.

Knight Foundation’s grant to Development Seed is one of a package of six grants that made up the Knight Drupal Initiative, a contest that tapped into a massive network of computer programmers to get their recommendations for speeding media innovation. In separate posts I will talk about each of the grants.

The Drupal community is a group of more than 350,000 members, mostly computer programmers who write free software together, collaboratively, on the web and the individuals and organizations that use the software to publish content online. You can learn more about Drupal at: www.Drupal.org.

A video on how this new piece of software works is available on Planet Drupal TV.

Do you have innovative ideas on how to use this mapping tool to improve the way you receive, share and understand news about your community?

Last night, Knight Foundation sponsored the Shorty Awards (#shorty), which recognized notable users of the popular micro-blogging service Twitter at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, New York. (Knight press release)

Some of the highlights in the video below:

Congratulations to the winners.

How do you do think Twitter and other micro-content services could be used for innovative projects delivering news and information?

You can leave a comment below or tweet @knightfdn.

From today's press release:

Leaders of the Washington, DC Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc., announced today that former President Bill Clinton will receive the Foundation’s “Humanitarian Award” and serve as the keynote speaker at a January 8, 2009 Miami Dream Dinner to raise funds for Memorial to be built on the National Mall. The dinner will take place at Fontainebleau Hotel and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which donated $1 million to the Memorial Foundation, will serve as the lead dinner sponsor.

...

President Clinton played a key role in the Memorial’s inception and has remained an active supporter. On July 16, 1998, Clinton signed a Joint Congressional Resolution authorizing the building of a memorial and on November 13, 2006 he participated in the Ceremonial Groundbreaking. He has served on the Memorial Foundation’s President’s Council for several years.

An expected 22 million people a year will visit the tribute to King’s transformational impact on the country, and the world.

How would you commemorate King?

On Wednesday, J-Lab (the Institute for Interactive Journalism) announced the winner of this year's Knight-Batten Innovation Award: Wired.com's Wikiscanner coverage "which helped readers investigate and expose ego-editing and corporate whitewashing of Wikipedia entries."

PolitiFact.com, with its "Truth-o-Meter" for 2008 presidential campaign statements, and Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information, a site to report incidents of political violence from mobile devices, email, and the Web, won Special Distinction Awards.

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Yesterday, Patricia Martin of the Culture Scout Blog posted about teens and the Knight Future of the First Amendment survey and research.

"It seems that when First Amendment rights are made relevant through self-expressive technologies, kids grasp it. It makes the case for why information privacy needs to become part of the First Amendment freedoms."

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At the 2008 Online News Association Conference (follow the conference Twitter updates) that continues until Saturday, sessions and pre-conference workshops on media included a workshop on news games; Kurt Greenbaum of STL Social Media Guy blogged about how journalists are embracing news games. The Knight News Challenge winner Gotham Gazette is mentioned.

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And Heidi Williamson, who helps promote the Knight News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest to fund innovative digital news delivery), has posted a new Seesmic video "What are the obstacles for innovation?" More than two dozen video responses have been posted, and you can join the discussion with your response here.

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?

Are you using new technologies on public issues?

The application deadline for the Knight-Batten award (given by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism) is next Wednesday, June 11th.

There is a $10,000 grand prize, up to $5,000 in special distinction awards (including a wild card award), a $1,000 citizen media award.

The Knight-Batten awards are given for: online news experiences, news games, mobile news ideas, citizen media, creative use of cell phones, Webcams, vlogging, podcasting, social networks, computer kiosks, new applications of software, content management systems and other advances in interactive or participatory journalism.

Last year's winners included techPresident.com, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR.org) crisis guides, the Reuters Second Life Virtual News bureau, and the Washington Post's citizen narration series On Being.

From the J-Lab site:

Honored are pioneering approaches to journalism that:

* Encourage new forms of information sharing.
* Spur non-traditional interactions that have an impact on community.
* Enable new and better two-way conversations between audiences and news providers.
* Foster new ways of imparting useful information.
* Create new definitions of news.

Entries from all news producers are eligible. Encouraged are both top-down and bottom-up innovations, those driven by news creators and those driven by news consumers.

The online application is here. Winners will be announced in the summer of 2008.

E-mail news {at} j-lab {dot} org with questions.