Today, the Knight Foundation will announce this year's winners of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge, a program which funds innovative ideas that will have an impact on the future of news. Placeblogger's seed capital came from the News Challenge. Since then, we have worked with a lot of students, and news entrepreneurs attending the Knight Digital Media Bootcamp and participants in Knight's Community Information Challenge, as well as countless people who have emailed us to tell us about their new idea. We get a great deal of momentum and energy from these connections with fellow innovators, and so we'd like to announce today a way that we're planning on giving back.
I remember when we won the News Challenge. First I was happy, then I thought, "Oh, wait...now I really have to DO this." Placeblogger will be giving a free, live, web-based class each month that will teach the essentials of technical literacy for people who want to or are maintaining an online community. These are the technical skills that I either knew that helped us be successful, or things I wish I knew that I had to learn as we went along. Over the course of a year, we hope students will be able to learn the basics that will make them effective and confident about starting and running an online community.
The first session will happen July 15, 2010, and is open to anyone who wishes to participate. A week before the class, a lesson and exercise will be released, and on the day of the class, participants will have a review and be able to ask questions.
July's lesson will focus on modifying and extending your site by using modules and plugins, and will focus on Drupal and Wordpress.
If you'd like to participate, sign up at Placeblogger News Entrepreneur Circle.
If this is an area of interest for you, though, a couple of hours a month is useful but more would be better. If you don't know about it, check out the Knight Digital Media Center's bootcamps for news entrepreneurs, which are really top-notch.
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