Floating Sheep Proposals for the Knight News Challenge

One of the things to emerge from SheepCamp last weekend was a decision to submit to the Knight News Challenge, which is running a competition to "accelerate media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information."

The Floating Sheep Collective submitted a couple of proposals including:

• The DOLLY (Data On Local Life and You) Project – Bringing Local Geodata to the People which would set up a website to map geographic social media and official data to enable users to analyze their local communities.  We're building on the database that we've been using since December 2011 to process every geocoded tweet worldwide (~5 million per day) with the goal of making it much easier to use for the average person.

• Mapping Wikipedia: Understanding Uneven Geographies aims to create interactive visualisations of Wikipedia that promote participation from under-represented cultures, inform researchers and journalists, and fascinate a general audience. We are building on our existing prototype so that we can ultimately create an easy-to-use tool to visualise Wikipedia's biases and geographies.

• Wikichains: Encouraging Ethical Consumption through Open and Transparent Data intends to build a user-generated platform that allows people to better understand the histories and geographies of the things that they buy. We plan to employ Semantic Mediawiki technology and multi-platform mobile apps to build an open and free wiki allowing people to share information about any aspect of any commodity chain of any product. It will allow people to make more informed ethical and political decisions about how they spend their money. 

Please check them out and like/comment on them either here or at the Knight News blog.