Truebites wins Ashoka Changemakers’ competition

We are happy to announce that Truebites is one of the winners of the Ashoka Changemakers’ competition Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition, sponsored by Google. Truebites aims to create a platform that would allow everyone to participate in the curation, validation and creation of news stories, without a centralized entity deciding what gets published or not (read more here and here).

We wanted to thank everyone for their votes and support. There were almost 500 entries from all over the world and we were already proud to be selected as finalists by the impressive judges panel:

	Esther Wojcicki Vice Chair, Board of Directors, Creative Commons
	Isaac Lee President, News, Univision
	Jared Cohen Director of Google Ideas, Google
	John Lilly Partner, Greylock Partners
	Justin Arenstein Publisher and CEO, African Eye News Service (AENS) and HomeGrown Magazines
	Michael Maness Vice President/Journalism and Media Innovation, Knight Foundation
	Sanjana Hattotuwa Founding Editor, Groundviews

We would also like to extend our congratulations to the other 3 winners:

FreedomBox: An integrated package of security and privacy tools to protect voice and text communications.
CrowdVoice: A website for tracking and curating voices of protest.
5th pillar: A set of tools for empowering citizens to report corruption by SMS, phone or email.

It’s nice to see how well all these tools could be integrated and leverage each other. I hope we’ll have the chance to work together.

In the next few months, we will use the prize to build a free and open source prototype of Truebites and start involving the community to take this to the next level.

Thanks everyone again!