Selasa, 29 Januari 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Now recording: Knight funds an app for collecting oral histories

Posted: 28 Jan 2013 09:18 AM PST

Most friends and family have oral histories — they just don’t realize it. That time as a kid your uncle ate so many waffles he cried? Or the time your best friends had to break into their apartment so they could move out? But what’s the best way to capture those stories — break out the recorder on your phone? Shoot a video? Write it all down?

Knight News Challenge winner TKOH wants to create a solution for oral storytelling that would work for kids, grandparents, audiophiles — or, yes, journalists. As envisioned, it would be a lightweight app for mobile devices that makes the setup and recording of stories simpler. TKOH, a design studio based in New York, plans to use its $330,000 award from Knight Foundation to build out its prototype of the app and begin testing it in rural communities in New Mexico.

“It’s a need we all have,” Kacie Kinzer, of TKOH, tells me. “There’s someone we know, a friend, a family member, who has incredible stories that must be kept in some way.

Kinzer, an interactive artist and designer, said she created an early predecessor to the app a few years ago to capture some of the stories from her relatives at family gatherings. Kinzer said she and cofounders Tom Gerhardt and Caroline Oh wanted to expand on the idea to make an app that would be intuitive enough for anyone to pick up and start using, whether old or young.

Journalists are probably familiar with the bounty of apps for audio or video recording on smartphones and tablets. Kinzer said they want the app to a tool journalists could use, but they want the app to appeal to a wider audience outside of professional storytellers. “We want to be an open platform people can use that would be best for them,” she said.

The app, tentatively called Thread, would be a kind of all-in one app, pairing audio and video, giving the user a choice of how they want to record a story. Once the story is captured, the file would be archived in a non-proprietary format and made available on the web. With the money from Knight, the team at TKOH will complete the prototype of the app and build a web platform that would act as a repository for stories and enable sharing on other networks, Kinzer told me.

This summer, TKOH plans to hold three pilot tests in various cities, beginning with ranchers in rural New Mexico. Kinzer said the pilot will be critical to finding out how people interact with the app and issues arise from using it in various settings. More broadly, Kinzer said the growth of the app depends on people spending time with the app to tell the stories of those around them. “We want to get in as many hands as possible,” she said.

Textizen wants to make civic engagement as easy as texting with a (really wonky) friend

Posted: 28 Jan 2013 08:37 AM PST

Wherever you live, it’s likely your local government makes big decisions without you. Should the city sell the old fire station to a condo developer? Where should the light-rail stops be located? In any given month, city councils, planning boards, and other committees make decisions that impact a community, and often with minimal input from residents. (Be honest: Did you want to take time to attend that committee meeting Tuesday night after a long day of work?)

Textizen, one of the winners of the mobile round of the Knight News Challenge, wants to give a boost to civic engagement through a suite of technology tools that allow residents to give feedback on community issues. Using its $350,000 award from Knight Foundation, Textizen will expand and begin working with cities around the country.

Textizen is a hybrid of the physical and the digital that gives people in a community real-world prompts to answer questions about important issues in their city. But instead of asking people to mail in a survey, responses are handled through mobile devices.

So let’s say your local planning department is trying to figure out what to do with a problem intersection. Using Textizen, the planning department could craft a series of short survey questions using a web interface. Flyers throughout town would direct residents to a number to text responses to the survey. Using Textizen’s web dashboard, the city would also be able to track and graph responses.

Web surveys aren’t new technology, but Textizen takes an interesting mobile-centric twist by turning the survey into a kind of chat. After texting their initial response, users are sent a new question, and the survey begins to resemble the kind of texting back-and-forth you might have with a friend who is really into public policy.

“Textizen allows you to build a survey that sounds like a conversation and less like red tape,” said Michelle Lee, CEO of Textizen. Lee said the software is designed to help cities and towns gain new kinds of engagement from residents. In order for a Textizen campaign to work, she said, you have to capture people’s attention and ask focused, rather than general, questions. Places like bus stops, parks, or community centers are the ideal location because they provide a ready audience. From there, municipalities have to be creative in the ways they appeal to people, Lee said.

Textizen got its start as a Code for America project based in Philadelphia, working with city planners on surveys for various neighborhoods. Lee said one the reasons officials in Philadelphia were eager to work with Textizen is because of the uneven Internet access throughout the city. In parts of the city, many don’t have Internet access at home, but mobile access is fairly high, she said. In that way, Textizen was the perfect tool to get feedback from areas officials have had difficulty reaching.

Lee said the pervasive nature of mobile technology is at the heart of Textizen. The number of cellphones in the U.S. is unlikely to shrink any time soon, so giving the mobile device a bigger role in civic engagement is a bet on the future. One key component of that, Lee said, is the use of SMS. Building the system around texting rather than a smartphone app — even as some news organizations step back from texting — gives Textizen access to the widest audience possible.

“Even though the SMS platform is rooted in reaching across the digital divide, SMS is still a first-class technology in the digital world,” she said.

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