Help NOWCastSA make community magic

Short version: Want to help NOWCastSA win the $250,000 we need to make some community action magic called FactTalk?  Head over to our proposal right now and leave your comments, then share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and anywhere else it can be seen. Your buzz can make it happen!

Longer version: NOWCastSA recently submitted a proposal to the Knight News Challenge asking for funding for FactTalk, a platform that blends words, graphics, and numbers to enable conversation and action planning around data.

So if you're concerned about teen pregnancy or childhood obesity, FactTalk will help you make smarter decisions on what to do about that by connecting you in a group with others who care, letting you post stories, videos and data. You can get notifications about postings and events, plan events and share information.

We want to help you create interactive “influence maps” that summarize the situation, let you look at historical information and explore relationships with other indicators so we can see trends over time and geography.

For instance: How has the teen pregnancy rate changed over time in San Antonio? Is there any relationship between that data and other indicators such as the availability of after-school programs? Is there a geographic distribution of teen pregnancy that provides any clues about causes?

In FactTalk, you could create the maps and share them to help your neighbors make better informed conversations and take action that would make a difference.

No existing platform is designed explicitly to encourage conversations and directly support organizing local action, and no one else has created interactive influence maps to organize data to inform action.

We do some of these things now through our NOWCastSA coverage, but we'd like to do better by integrating our work with that of our CI:NOW partners.  The folks at NOWData are already working to demistify and aggregate raw data, and over at NOWTech they are teaching people how to use information technology: If funded, FactTalk will tie these programs together like never before and take us all to the next level of democratizing data and facilitating civic conversation.

Want to help us win the $250,000 we need to make FactTalk reality?  Head over to our proposal and leave your comments, then share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and anywhere else it can be seen.  If we can get people talking about FactTalk now, we'll be more likely to receive a grant that will allow us to put these plans into action.

The Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information. Winners receive a share of $5 million in funding and support from Knight’s network of influential peers and advisors to help advance their ideas. Throughout 2012, innovators from all industries and countries are invited to participate in three challenge rounds, each with focused topics on emerging trends.

Challenge 2 - on DATA - will be open May 31 - June 21. We’re looking for new ways of collecting, understanding, visualizing and helping the public use the large amounts of information generated each day. Winners will be announced in late September.

Note: NOWCastSA was created with a Knight Community Information Challenge Grant awarded to the San Antonio Area Foundation in 2009, with matching funds given by SAAF and CI:NOW.