Citizen Media: A True Story

We are honored to announce that our idea for promoting citizen journalism, Truebites, won the Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition! Thank you so much to everyone who voted and showed their support – we couldn’t have done it without you!

 

 THE IDEA:

Simply put, we’re seeking to develop a way in which everyone can play a role in creating a news story.  We want to piece together what he knows with what she knows with what they know and so on to create and validate the story.

Today, new technology tools have enabled what has come to be known as “citizen journalism”. Anybody with the will and access to a gadget and an internet connection, can now report what they see and share it with others.

We believe citizen journalism can be taken to a whole new level. Since a story is made of small bites of information than are somehow related, we believe that by tapping into the knowledge and opinions of individual people, we can bring together a much more truthful and meaningful story.  Our goal is to design of a system that would allow a distributed network of people to contribute to the creation of a story.

For a more detailed explanation of the original idea, you can read our blog here for English or here for Spanish.

For a closer look at our experience, check out this blog post by Boris Krygel of iLab Latin America.

 

 

THE WINNERS

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 and we are hopeful that we’ll have the chance to work together.

 

 

NEXT STEPS

Over 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.

Thank you so much for your support!