The most common examples these days are environmentally focused non-profits investing in clean tech/energy companies rather than their portfolio having holdings in companies not congruent with their mission.

I’m very interested to see how this turns out and how much time, effort and money it takes to make EveryBlock and other projects easy to install. And then it will be interesting to see how many news orgs will install the software. I have a suspicion that some are so lost right now, that they wouldn’t even install something that came with an easy installer.

Kebbel has said that Knight is considering asking for up to the full amount of the grant back, but I have to wonder if that would cause some people to seek venture capital instead of working through the News Challenge? Adrian, do you have thoughts on that?

Ultimately, however, if Knight pulls this off correctly, it could help keep the News Challenge going for years to come.

Knight is taking this a step further, and will be continuing development of EveryBlock and other popular Knight-funded open source projects. Kebbel told me that the idea is to take this great open source code and making it easy for people to install. Most news organizations could not utilize EveryBlock because they don’t have the staff resources on hand to install the code, but Knight is hoping to lower the barriers to entry.

I was going from Brian’s tweets about it and missed his mea culpa tweet you reference. I apologize to you and your team. [Zach, if it's possible to strikethrough that in my earlier with retracted in caps, please do.]

I do think it’s curious Knight is mentioned in most of the articles in passing at the bottom (I took a cursory glance at about forty articles); you certainly thank Knight in your announcement. Sometimes it’s in the spirit rather than the letter.

Wouldn’t it have been great to mention the News Challenge at Gov 2.0 with all of those interesting developers working on local applications? My bias, and it’s a big one, is always toward more people finding out how to receive funding for their project, especially those that might not otherwise know about foundation support.

I thank you for the compliment, but I’m not a journalist. As I know many who hold you in the highest regard, I’m happy to have been wrong.

Here’s to hoping everyone can find and use this code as the grant intended–

As for the rest of you, this comment thread has seen some incredibly unpleasant innuendo.

More innuendo! And in a post were you have it straight from the horse’s mouth! That takes sack, dude.

>> When you cede the field to others in this way, this is what often happens.

Which is another way of saying, “engage with me on my terms, or have unfounded accusations made against you.” Victim blaming is always a classy line of argumentation.

http://journalismschool.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/the-nuances-of-the-everyblock-sale-to-msnbc/

which helped to jump start this conversation, and has since been taken up (and better addressed) on many other blogs.

A couple things are going on here. First and foremost, I get the sense that this has been a learning experience for everyone involved: the funding community, the journalism community, and the open-source community. For funders and journalists in particular, I feel like we’ve learned:

a) that the legalities of “open source” are way more complicated than many of us realized and

b) most importantly, perhaps, that there are *real live politics* operating in the programming / development world. This a good thing to learn about a social group that often portrays itself as apolitical and “technical” in nature, and able to “save” journalism through its expertise.

My initial concerns with the Everyblock sale had nothing to do with whether Adrian had held back code, and everything to do with the points that Knight themselves now seem to be raising; the fact that there’s an element of “venture-capital-ese” in the way that a public-interest foundation basically subsidized the development of a product that has made a few individuals a lot of money and has given a large corporation a now-proprietary product. These are fair — and complex– concerns, with no easy answers. The most important thing is that Knight seems to be listening to the conversation.

One final point: Adrian, its disappointing to me that the first I’ve seen you engage with any of the many blog posts in this topic is now, and under these circumstances. I understand your point about journalists needing to be watched by other journalists, but you’ve basically chosen to cede the field on this discussion to others, engage with “big media” in order to promote the sale, and not address any of the very valid concerns a number of people have raised about the implications of this sale. I myself tried to contact you for comment on all this, and you didn’t reply. At the least, you could have addressed this on your blog in a way that went beyond the fairly “press-release-esque” post you did announcing the sale. When you cede the field to others in this way, this is what often happens.

The charge that the scrapers were not released is false. If you check the code, you’ll see that EB includes a scraping framework, and that agency/data-specific information to instruct the scraping framework is part of each *app*’s details. Just because the scrapers were not done the way that most ppl – myself included – expected them does not mean that code was not released. Yours is a false accusation without support and should be withdrawn.

The government scrapers were indeed released, in the “everyblock” package. Download it. Read through it. Scrape your government’s Web site. :-)

You may have been led astray by misinformation spread by people who didn’t actually look at the code thoroughly. One of these people, Brian Boyer, has since corrected himself: http://twitter.com/brianboyer/status/4154636491

Also, I’m not sure why you’re saying I “did not reference Knight during the announcement.” I assume you’re referring to our acquisition announcement, right? If so, read the second paragraph — http://blog.everyblock.com/2009/aug/17/acquisition/ . I also made a point of bringing up the Knight grant in the many interviews I did at that time, because I was, and continue to be, very grateful to Knight for the opportunity.

I’m reminded here of the adage that every journalist ought to be covered by journalists at some point. When you’re on the other side of the reporter’s notepad, you get to see with terrifying clarity how inaccurate journalists can be.

The Everyblock team did not release the government scrapers–the part that was most interesting in the code. [See Kristen's follow-up comment below retracting this. —Zach]

The goal of the News Challenge is to, at the end of the grant, release the work so others can build on it. It’s one thing to hold back a few new features, another not to release the innovative part of the work (i.e. the reason it received funding).

I thought it odd Adrian did not reference Knight during the announcement, a glaring omission in an economic moment when everyone is looking for funding.

The sad part is that Adrian and the Everyblock team’s poor form in the acquisition now potentially punishes new applicants to the process. Knight is unusual (in the philanthropic world) in its openness to funding for-profit ventures.

I know from my time working as Knight’s Community Manager that this grant was very exciting for the organization; good that this was one grant in many of News Challenge winners, many of whom deserve more attention than they’ve received so far.

Anyway. . .

How does looking at code tell you whether some code was omitted? Is every line of code written while under contract part of the project?

You are right. There is a contract and maybe these things are covered. Maybe not. I’m trying to expose potential issues that might not be covered.

For example, had they used Gnu Affero license, then all subsequent projects might indeed need to be open source as well. But the standard Gnu license allows for modification as long as the code is not redistributed. (like most)

You did make it clear – after you raised the prospect of cheating in the first place (without a shred of evidence).

I’d argue that looking at the code – or better, actually using it create an app – would be useful in determining whether the idea you floated has any weight, and not meaningless. But James is right; the secret sauce also lies in the people and acquisition of data.

There’s also a contact involved here, and I imagine that any prospective buyer of a property would want to know whether there were any outstanding legal issues (such as non-fulfillment of said contract) before making an acquisition.

And I am a developer of news applications myself and if you think extracting data from unstructured forms making structured data out of it is easy, then I think you ought to contact Tim Berners Lee nd the rest of the Semantic Web community that is working on that. ; )

Of course presenting it in an attractive way is easy. It takes talent, for sure, but it is a less time consuming process.

So what I’d wager, even if I didn’t know Adrian (who’s the sort of guy who honors his obligations and does the right thing), is that what you see is what you get. The code release was the EveryBlock codebase, and there was no “secret sauce” *in code form* that was withheld.

I’d bet on that because, having worked on smaller projects involving this sort of data, I know what the real secret is: getting the data in the first place. Lots of agencies are awfully shy about letting you get at their data for any sort of public, accessible use. Maybe they think they could make money off it, maybe they’re afraid of not having spin control, maybe it’s just normal stupid politics and bureaucratic impenetrability, but *that* is always the big obstacle.

You can whip up useful, attractive presentations on top of the data in a few days or weeks, but spend months or years wrangling over the right to get the data in the first place, and that’s where EveryBlock really succeeded. There’s no bit of code which will get your city to agree to provide real-time or near-real-time feeds of data; it’s purely a social, political and legal thing.

And asking and looking at the code is meaningless. Excuse me, did you cheat? No, okay thanks, we’ll take your word for it.