Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Kara:
My main objective with Drupal En Español is to make a "DLRC" that is
specifically geared towards Spanish-speaking communities with the
overarching goal of increasing civic engagement by making Drupal accessible.
We can start as local or as big as we want. I would love it to be the
Guatemala or Venezuelan communities because those are communities Ytaelena
and I are well-connected to and can create bridges really quickly. Ideally
we would pick four communities: Guatemalan and Venezuelan communities in the
State and one in each "host" country. That way there is an anchor of support
in the States and a whole lot of dialogue.

The worldwide contest reopened on September 2nd with
another $5 million in funding available for digital media experiments to
innovate news and communication before applications close on November 1st.

**You Invent It. We Fund It!**

The contest is open to community-minded innovators worldwide, from
software designers to journalists to citizens and students of any age.
Do you have a big idea for informing and inspiring a geographic
community using social media, Web 2.0 tools or OpenID? How about
exchanging information via video, photos or text messaging? A way to
integrate game theory with web browsing to support local community
engagement? Come on, push the edge ­ we¹re seeking true innovation!

Winning entries must have three elements:

1) use of a digital media
2) delivery of news or information on a shared basis to
3) a geographically defined community

Entries must be open-source and share the software and knowledge created.

**New in 2008: The News Challenge Garage**

To support applications this year, Knight has created a new incubator
the News Challenge Garage
http://garage.newschallenge.org/
where prospective applicants can receive peer reviews and mentoring
from screeners and awardees from previous years. To date, over 40
applications are already incubating in the Drupal-based Garage site. A
diverse group of developers, online journalists, nonprofit evangelists,
video bloggers and social media experts are on hand to coach at
garage.newschallenge.org

The 50 mentors are available to coach and guide everyone who enters a
project in the Garage. They include Vidoop's Chris Messina
htttp://blog.vidoop.com
Spot.us David Cohn
Contentious editor Amy Gahran
Placeblogger's Lisa Williams
http://www.placeblogger.com
Beth Kanter
http://www.bethkanter.org
J.D. Lasica
http://www.jdlasica.com
and many other digital media specialists. For a postable video
introducing the Garage in a variety of languages, visit DotSub to find
out more
http://dotsub.com/view/f65bf045-8978-4043-b895-89faa1f7bfad

**Want to get more involved?**

**Apply!

(1) Drupal en Espanol (You, me, Yta)
(2) Central American social media training institute (Yta and myself)
(3) Citizen journalism niche site for Guatemalans utilizing mobile
technology. (Erik and Kara)
(4) Startup Summer Camp for Journos and Technologists (and youth!)
(Wayne Sutton, me and you?)

So do you want to take the lead on the Drupal en Espanol? That would REALLY
help.

We should apply to the Knight News Challenge (KNC) first. It's more money
available, I think, and targeted toward journalism and local community.

http://www.newschallenge.org/

Proposals must involve:
1) use of a digital media
2) delivery of news or information on a shared basis to
3) a geographically defined community

With a proposal test ground here, that happens to be a Drupal site:
http://garage.newschallenge.org/

(2) The Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI) started in part because they had lots
of Drupal proposals to the News Challenge and weren't sure how to evaluate
them. KDI has no closing deadline (yet), just a rolling process of
volunteers involved with Drupal evaluating proposals and sending approved
ones on to Knight.

Here are its goals:

* To enable more people to enter the digital conversation by lowering the technical barriers to entry.
* To provide powerful tools for digital publication, free and open to all.
* To encourage people to improve their communities by supporting the free exchange of information and ideas.

http://groups.drupal.org/knight-drupal-initiative

(3) Because it doesn't have a firm deadline it's a perfect fallback if we get rejected by KNC.

The dual communities idea, stateside / Latin America, is really good.

Knight will be interested in replicable projects (so that part of the
proposal will be software that anyone can use is good, and that it can grow
to tons of communities is great). They will also want, ideally, a plan for
financial sustainability without them, though we can ask for multiyear
funding.

And we need to define a bit more the democracy-enhancing goodness being able
to use Drupal / other existing tools / tools we improve and make available,
and how our training will achieve that.

[The somewhat-related proposal, by 12-year-old Drupal master Dmitri Gaskin, to the open, rolling admission Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI):

http://groups.drupal.org/node/14760

If we can plug *local, geographic* community into our proposal for training journalists in Drupal (and possibly other things, and providing ongoing resources), we have a better shot at the Knight News Challenge (KNC) than the above proposal has even for KDI.]

Kara:
Drupal para el Mundo proposal: creating a Drupal training for journalists in Latin America.

Let's do it!