Silicon Valley One - Fall 2008 - (Page 20)

By Alberto Ibargüen What If? Seeding innovative thinking to meet the information needs of our communities t Knight Foundation, we believe information is a critical community need at the center of any serious effort at transformational social change. This notion goes back to Aristotle, who suggested that any polis should be small enough that all citizens could gather in a central square and hear a public speaker. A community, and the ideal unit of government, was only as large as the sphere of shared information. In that sharing of information, community is built. As democracy in America grew, Aristotle’s sphere could still be defined by a newspaper’s circulation area or the local radio or television station’s reach. Jack and Jim Knight realized that information was a core community need. Their company’s newspapers delivered to their communities, including San José, information that helped people decide what Jack Knight called “their own true interests.” They delivered the news in geographically defined areas roughly the same as the governmental, social and economic units in which we lived. Think how antiquated that sounds today. Google, Facebook, any newspaper with a website or any individual with Internet access can be heard in every town square all over the world! We are more globally connected than ever. But our government and our civic life remain organized around geographically defined communities. Officials who decide environmental and education policy, war and peace, who fix the potholes and support the police, all are still chosen from cities and towns. There’s a tension between the way we share information in the digital age and our civic life. And there’s a deficit of complete information about community life in physical space. At Knight Foundation, we believe technology can strengthen community information. Rather than lament the demise of traditional media, we’ve undertaken a collection of media innovation initiatives exceeding $100 million. They’re described at www.knightfoundation.com and include: Knight Community Information Challenge, matching community foundations’ efforts to meet information needs; Knight News Challenge, a competition for media innovators using digital platforms to deliver news and information to geographically defined communities; World Wide Web Foundation, supporting Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee in his effort to keep the Web free and universal; Knight Center of Digital Excellence, an initiative offering pro bono consultation to communities with the goal of universal digital access; Carnegie-Knight Initiative, seeking to renew journalism education; and Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, at the Aspen Institute, identifying public policy initiatives to encourage markets to meet community information needs. We don’t pretend to know all the answers. But we believe broad experimentation will produce solutions to meet the information needs of communities in our democracy so that they can decide their own true interests. And we firmly believe there is a major role in this for community foundations. one A JEFFERY ALLAN SALTER/REdux picTuRES c 20 o n e Alberto Ibargüen is president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. innovation through philanthropy http://www.knightfoundation.com

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Silicon Valley One - Fall 2008 Contents From Emmett D. Carson The New Face of Need Five-star Philanthropy Ready to Learn Board School Civic Citizens Built to Last siliconvalleycf.org What If?

Silicon Valley One - Fall 2008

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