Drupalcon 2008 kicked off this morning in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Shelby and I have been busily running around, meeting with friends we've made throughout the Drupal world and learning a lot of interesting things.
Today I'm sitting in the Knight Foundation panel (and, of course, I can't get the wireless network for some reason, so this will be a bit of a link-free post). I've been fascinated by Knight for a while now, because it is a great example of a non-profit organization seeding new experiments in the world of for-profit journalism.
Lisa Williams just finished speaking about her experience with H20Town, a wonderful Watertown, MA-based placeblog, and subsequently with Placeblogger.com, an aggregator for other placeblogs throughout the world. Her larger point, though, was that increasingly the problems of the world are those of aggregation and generalization - figuring out that a localized problem is in fact a more systemic and generalized. She said that that's a technology problem, not a journalism or politics problem.
Ben Melancon is now speaking; he's the developer of the related content module, which allows users to find internal connections between different URLs on any site. This module should work well in combination with Pivots. The angle on journalism is that he think that related content and pivots will allow people to draw more connections between editorial and news sections. (I'm personally a bit skeptical that newspaper sites will willingly deploy that kind of software, however.)
There's some discussion also of how the Knight Foundation's support of the Summer of Code will happen, and what kind of code will emerge. That's a different beast from the foundation's grant challenge, as it involves an organized program to pay college students to contribute code to Drupal, but it's certainly an interesting project.
On the whole, it sounds like Knight really wants journalism innovators to get together on the Drupal Knight group, put together a grant to embody their idea, and actually make it happen. Sounds pretty tempting! This kind of pro-innovation approach is what we want to emphasize at Lightbulb First, and I applaud Knight's leadership in this area.
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