My name is Jennifer Peterson and I'm really excited to host today's session with our wonderful panel and I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started.
And I'm going to welcome our presenters today, Chris Barr comes to us from the Knight Foundation where he is the director of media innovation.
Jason Griffey and Jenica Rogers join us from the Measure the Future project, one of last year's winners from the news challenge for libraries, and I'm going to go ahead and let Chris get us started and we'll move through our introduction with the Knight Foundation and then move on to Jason and Jenica.
Welcome to all three of you and thank you so much for being here.
>> Thank you so much, Jennifer.
And hello from Miami, 67 degrees down here.
Sorry to all the people in the snowy areas.
And thank you to OCLC and the WebJunction crew for making this possible, it's really a pleasure and an honor to connect to the library community to talk about the things that we're thinking about and we're trying to help with as far as moving the field forward into the 21st century.
I'm joined as well here by nina and rosemary of the Knight Foundation.
Nina is sort of the first line of contact when it comes to news challenge questions and those kinds of things.
So she'll be really more so than me probably you direct line of support as we launch this challenge.
But before we get into the challenges, I wanted to talk a little bit about who the Knight Foundation is and where the News Challenge comes from and why the heck is there a thing called the news challenge that's focused on libraries?
So, first of all, the Knight Foundation was founded by the brothers James and John Knight who founded Knight reader publishing, a large newspaper chain last century.
Out of that newspaper chain, they set up the foundation around a mission of informing and engaging communities around the country around this sort of belief that access to information is critical in order for our democracy to grow and thrive.
We started the news challenge probably about 10 years ago.
The idea being we wanted to get the news industry into the digital space and thinking about the new sort of information world that they were about to head into.
Since then, we've broadened our thinking around how people access the information that is important to their communities and how to deliver and create information in digital and modern environments.
So with that thinking, we've done quite a bit of work in libraries over the years.
Historically, we started from a place of looking at access.
We believe, of course, the libraries provide an important role for things by getting people in line and becoming participants in the digital economy and information space.
But also with the news challenges, we've been increasingly more interested in what are the things that libraries might try?
How can we stoke R and D and experimentation within the field and really find ideas that maybe aren't quite in the mainstream yet, right?
How can we be at the edges of where we might go to figure out what is possible for the future?
So essentially the news challenge as an innovation challenge.
The idea is we're looking for new and novel ideas.
We're open to experimentation and trying new things.
And you know, what that means for libraries is really interesting.
You know, some of the things that I suggest is to start thinking as a library what are the things that we would try, not what are the things we need to do today but what are the things we could try to help think about and get to what the next possible future might be?
And that's really in the spirit of the challenge.
It's meant to be ambitious, it's meant to challenge people to think outside the box and explore what possibilities there are.
We'll get deeper into ways that you might think about this as you think about what you might submit to the challenge but before we do that, I want to go through some of the logistics and hand it over to Nina to run down the timeline and the need-to-knows for those that are thinking about submitting.
>> Good afternoon, this is Nina.
As Chris mentioned, I primarily will be the first point of contact for you regarding any sort of questions that you may have from kind of a mechanical standpoint to more substantive topical point of view if you want to run anything by me.
To go through some logistics, this time around we're going to be asking applicants to submit ideas that answer the question how might libraries serve 21st century information needs?
If you have an idea that is within this kind of large, broad feel, applications for the challenge itself will be open from February 24th through March 21st.
So on the 24th of February, applications can start being submitted at 8:00 a.m., eastern time, and the challenge itself closes on March 21st at 5:00 p.m. eastern time.
We encourage everyone to, you know, even if their idea isn't necessarily all the way fleshed out to apply as early on in that kind of timed band as they can primarily to encourage dialogue and comments for other applicants and people that are working in the field or may be interested in your topic and your idea.
You can edit the idea any time so even if you are on newschallenge.org, even if you're drafting an idea, you can publish the idea and make it live on the platform itself but still, you know, talk to people, make comments, answer questions, and make edits and changes to your application all the way up through our review phase.
So the review phase will be from March 22nd through April  13th and this is kind of the first pass that we take at reviewing applications, so a team of initial readers and some folks here at Knight Foundation will review the ideas and help select a group of semifinalists.
During the semifinalist refinement from April 14th through April 22nd, we will be notifying the semifinalists as well as those who have not been selected as a semifinalist and ask them to provide some more information because primarily, the application process this time around, we're very interested in your ideas.
We don't want, you know, you all to bother with submitting budgets and kind of more detailed grant application ideas.
We're really interested in kind of seeing generally you know, what makes your idea interesting, how have you come to understand the audience that you're intending to serve, and why your team in particular is positioned to be successful.
So during that semifinalist refinement phase we'll be asking for a few additional questions.
The review phase, the second review phase will be from April 25th to May 4th and this is the time where we'll review semifinalist materials and internally work with a group of finalists and eventually select winners.
So it's just kind of a general overview of the timeline and again, this is all visible on newschallenge.org and the timeline itself is there to find.
>> So that's the sort of general application process.
I want to talk a little bit about who should apply, who is this for and how should you be thinking about it?
Our approach with the news challenge has always been one that is open to everyone.
We're not limited by sort of organizational structure or those sorts of things.
We're open to anyone with a good idea.
So that means we're interested in people who are within libraries, outside of libraries, for-profits, nonprofits, individual hackers with a great idea.
To us it's really about exploring the ideas and as it moves through the process, looking at the feasibility and what we need to learn and test in order to bring an idea to life.
So getting back a little bit to this question of hey, this is a thing called the news challenge but it's on libraries and what's the tie-in?
For us, at Knight Foundation we're really interested in how do people become informed in communities?
And the more and more that we did our work, we just find that libraries provide an important service, an important resource for communities to become informed.
They provide an important place for people to be engaged around ideas within our communities.
And this sort of nexus between information and engagement is really crucial to thinking about how we have a successful democracy in communities going forward in the 21st century.
So for us, it is absolutely related to the mission and mandate that comes to us from the journalism world and from this interest in making sure that communities are informed, that we think libraries are important actors within the building of future inform societies.
Historically, the news challenge has been one that's been about tool development, about technology development, about making new things and one of the things I wanted to talk about is that piece, right?
Do we need to build new technology?
Do we need to be coders and hackers?
And the answer is certainly not, right?
We expect libraries are doing the things that libraries are best at, but that libraries are also understanding the new information spaces that they exist within and are able to respond to new consumer behaviors around the way people create, distribute and consume information in the 21st century and can be part of that conversation and can create services that are really tied to the ways that people consume information and then also the specific needs within communities and groups that they serve.
We're very interested, not just in making neat, interesting, cool stuff, but also being really attentive to what are the needs that we are serving as we do this?
So we're often looking at not just what is the bright idea but how do I understand the audience and the community that I'm trying to serve and how am I making sure that the offering that I'm creating is aligned with those needs and leverages the skills and abilities that are within our organization?
I think there's a really good opportunity through this challenge for libraries to think about partnerships and think about how innovation within and outside of their walls happens.
It's certainly, a case where libraries maybe don't have all of the skills that they want to put to work for them in house and can find some interesting ways to work with other organizations and people within the community to make new things.
From my perspective, I also see, you know, innovation being a thing that requires a diversity of perspectives and knowledge in order to happen, right?
So thinking about how do we bring the expertise and knowledge within our libraries, how do we put that in contact with other viewpoints that can create and spark new ideas, that might not happen if we rely only on the expertise within our walls?
So those are some things that I would think about.
Some very, very basic tips on how to form your application.
One of the things I remind people is that we often get over 1,000 entries, which means that our reviewers are reading quite a few applications and in my experience, after you read about 10 in a batch, your brain starts to go a little fuzzy and when you encounter those applications that are full of jargon and technical language, it makes it really difficult to assess.
So clarity is the key.
It certainly wins the day as far as presenting your ideas to folks who might not be library field experts, they might be experts from the journalism world or from communities or from another background who are going to be reading your application.
To keep it as brief as possible and also think about how you might make it visual.
So I come from an art and design background so I'm a visual thinker and when I see applications that are able to express some of their ideas in a visual manner, sometimes, that does wonders for me to understand how a particular project is going to come together.
So we have the opportunity within our platform to add images and add videos and I certainly encourage folks to do that.
A couple of other things about the platform that we've put together and the way this challenge works but I think it's a little different than traditional grant making.
So all the ideas that get submitted to the challenge come in through an open application process.
And what I mean by that is the ideas are submitted and they're available for everyone to read and comment on and be part of.
And this is one of the things I think is really fun about the news challenge because what we're doing is saying hey, who's got a really great idea to think about how libraries are going to serve people in the future and let's put all those ideas in one place, right?
Certainly, you know, from our perspective, it's about funding some of those great ideas but also, we've found in the past that it's really a wonderful way for people who are interested in the field to start to dig through that pool of ideas themselves and mine it for things that they might borrow.
Oftentimes, we've seen collaborations come out of the comments sections and people saying hey, I didn't know you were doing this thing over there.
We're doing a similar thing over here.
Rates get together and share some ideas.
So even if you're not submitting an idea, I would highly encourage you to participate in the comments sections and even just to sort of mine the application pool for a sense of what people are thinking about within the library world.
Another note, I keep using the term library world and I want to be certain that I'm using a very expansive view of what the library world is because certainly this isn't just for people in libraries.
We think there's an opportunity here for family who are allies of libraries, people who are thinking in library-like ways to help us reimagine how people get their information needs served in the future.
So we want to be open to all of those sorts of folks, as well.
I would also note that you're not limited to one idea.
You can have five, 10 brilliant ideas and submit them all if you would like.
So submit early, submit often is what we like to say.
And anything else I should cover?
Well, maybe we'll try to leave some time for the questions here.
I have to note that this subtitle thing is really cool and it makes me want to say really hard to spell words.
Really makes me want to say supercalifragilistic expialidocious.
>> Erik, you get extra points today.
>> Thanks, Erik.
>> So yeah, we have a slide up here and this is just the basic sort of structure of the application and like Nina said, we try to make it as simple to submit as possible.
So we know some of these ideas are going to be fresh, they're going to be really new.
They might not even be completely ironed out and going through this process of applying is one way that you might be thinking through the idea, right?
So you might be thinking it through in a sort of live way.
So the basics of it are what do you want to make, right?
Who is it for and how do you understand their needs and that this is potentially a thing that's going to serve them?
And who are you?
How are you the folks that are going to make this thing happen?
Who's on the team?
Are there partnerships, those sorts of things.
And it's very basic in the first round and as we get deeper into the challenge and semifinalist and finalist phases, that's where we start to ask for more detailed information and start to do more due diligence through the process.
So I don't want to talk too long because we also have some Knight news challenge winners from the past projects.
We've got Jason Griffey and Jenica Rogers.
And I want to hand it over to them, two folks that have been through the process successfully to talk about what they're thinking about and how this has impacted their projects.
>> I'm going to actually jump in really quick, Chris, and we'll just pause for a couple of questions here.
I encourage folks to post questions that they might have specifically for you all and certainly can continue to post those, but we've got a question here.
Is there any advantage in collaborating with other organizations on the initial submission of an idea, or do the submission reviewers facilitate collaborations after everything has been submitted?
>> Sure.
So there's no advantage to collaborating.
You know, if it's advantageous to you, I think that's wonderful, right?
If it's about doing something interesting that you couldn't do alone, then certainly collaborations are great.
We do not facilitate collaborations.
In our experience, you know, we've seen in the past opportunities where hey, this person is thinking about this, this other person is thinking about the same thing, can we make them work together?
And those kinds of arranged marriages from a funder's perspective don't typically work out that well and we like to have those things happen organically between people that have a shared interest and want to work together.
>> Yeah, and just to plug on the slide here that you see there is a way for folks to share comments on each other's submissions and I know in the past I've seen those connections being made through comments and as the questioner might know that that times is where those partnerships spawn early on in the process.
So definitely be sure to keep an eye on the different proposals or the ideas as they get posted in that early phase of the challenge.
There's another question.
Does the library world include public academic research and school libraries?
>> Yes, certainly, all of the above.
The thing that I would think about with research and academic libraries is how the project that you submit to the news challenge, how it has the widest public benefit as possible.
So is the thing that you're making only going to be accessible within sort of the the wall garden of the university?
, if so, it's something that we probably aren't going to weigh as highly as something within a public library that has a wide public community benefit.
So you know, I have -- those libraries I think have wonderful resources, they often have bigger technology staff and the ability to make things that public libraries can't.
So I think it's a fantastic opportunity to think about how those folks can contribute to the field in a way that benefits beyond just the research and academic communities that they're primarily focused on.
And I should mention that I worked in an academic research library, as well, so you know, that world is not unfamiliar to me.
>> Excellent.
And there were -- somebody posted saying special libraries and tribal libraries?
So great reminder of the scope but, as you mentioned, it's always important to have replicability across the broader spectrum.
So let's see --
>> I would add one thing, too, right?
And I did say this is open to everyone and I should have been more specific.
This is a U.S.-based challenge and for this challenge we decided to limit our funding to U.S.-based organizations.
>> Excellent.
And let's take a few more questions before we transition.
I know that Jason and Jenica will be answering some of those questions as we move forward but here's a good one.
What if the idea does not require a technological solution but instead, a solution that involves changes in the business or vendor relationships?
Is this type of idea appropriate?
>> Yeah, I mean, I'm not quite sure exactly what that's pointing towards but right, for us this is an innovation challenge, right?
I think the thing that we're thinking about is not necessarily -- in some cases it might be apps and widgets and building new technology but certainly, it's thinking through really clearly how are people's information behaviors changing and how do we support those behaviors going forward?
And as far as vendor and business relationships go, I'm not quite sure what that's pointing towards.
But if there's an innovation there, right, I think it's worth pointing out.
And certainly innovating on the business model of something oftentimes is as important as the technological model.
>> Excellent.
I'm going to just have you answer a few more.
One is does the idea need to be connected to a specific community?
>> No.
So we're open to things that are operating at the field level or that are being designed to be adopted and replicated multiple places, as much as experiments that are happening within specific communities with specific audiences.
>> Excellent.
And let's see.
There was a question about cost sharing.
If partners are funders, can Knight also help fund these types of projects under development?
That's a nice nitty-gritty one, right?
>> Is that looking at a situation where a foundation is already funding a project or I'm not quite sure what that means.
>> Yeah, we'll ask them to add a little bit more to that and perhaps you can even respond a little bit more in chat then.
It sounds like they're partially funded.
>> Okay sure.
I mean, we don't have an interest in being a sole funder, so if things are already off the ground and have some supports, that's okay.
One thing I should note actually is the sort of stages that we fund at, right?
So we sort of have two award levels that typically come out of the news challenge.
We have sort of large grant winners that the grants typically range from $100,000 to $500,000.
And those are for projects that might be a little further along.
They've tested some of the assumptions already, they might have made an initial beta or have some progress towards an idea or have a team with a track record that gives us enough confidence to invest that kind of funding.
And then we also have things that we fund at a prototype level and that's through our prototype fund where we fund a six month experiment with a 35k grant that's really designed not necessarily to build the whole project but to really drill in what are the things we need to learn and what can we make to learn those things really quickly through a prototyping exercise?
>> And do you all then sort of sense where those projects are?
I know that in the award process, you have the winners, and then those prototype projects.
Would it be helpful for you in the application for people to say, you know, that we're interested in the prototype piece if they know they're at that point in the process?
>> Yeah, I mean they could identify that they're currently at a prototype stage.
You know, it's something that we sort of pull out through the review process and try to figure out where people are at and where those kinds of opportunities are.
You know, and sometimes, we do things at a prototype level because, you know, we have questions that we need answered in order for our confidence in the project to go forward.
So you know, it's looking at this sort of balance of where someone's at and what questions might need answered in order to accelerate the project.
>> Okay.
One more question, I saw, I appreciate your clarification about U.S.-based projects but there was a question if it's a U.S.-based team that has long-standing collaboration with team members or organizations or, no, team members, individuals, not organizations in non-U.S. countries, is that something you would be interested in?
>> Yeah, that's perfectly fine.
>> Okay.
>> So there needs to be a U.S.-based organization to actually receive the grant funding.
>> Excellent.
And just one more clarification, I see around prototypes.
By prototypes, no, I don't believe that you mean just a physical tangible prototype.
You're talking about a project prototype, correct?
>> Oh, right.
So yeah, we think that you can prototype lots of things, right?
You can prototype a service, you can prototype software, you can prototype physical things.
So really it's the prototype fund is about what do we need to learn?
What do we need to make in order to learn it?
And hopefully what we need to make to learn it is early versions of what we eventually make down the road.
>> Fantastic.
All right.
Well, I saw a question come through about what your favorite project was and I'm going to refer to our next quests, an example of those, and also encourage you to explore the other 2015 winners, including on the call the San Jose public library who was a prototype winner, so I appreciate you speaking up, Erin.
Again if any of you are either winners or prototype winners or even folks who experienced the process last year, consider yourselves worthy of sharing your expertise here in chat and also please keep sharing your questions and let's move on over to Jason and Jenica.
Welcome.
>> Hi, everybody this is Jason.
You can probably tell by the voice that I'm not Jenica.
>> And this is Jenica, this is what I sound like.
>> Exactly.
So we're going to take a couple of minutes here, the questions are great and I would love to make sure that we have lots of time at the end for as many of those as we can, because I think a lot of the goodness of this webinar comes out of that.
But we were invited to be here to give kind of an overview of what it was like to be a part of the process and also to act as kind of librarians on the ground more or less and talk a little bit about the sorts of things that we see in libraries these days that look like forward-thinking future issues that might be solved by these.
 we get into the Measure 
>>> Were not numbers that were actionable, they were numbers that were retrospective and/or simply there for the purposes of comparativeness but they were not necessarily...
...
>>> To give actual hard statistics to libraries about the usage of their buildings, which was something that we have not in the past had hard numbers about.
I'll let Jenica talk for a couple of seconds here about the existing answers to what we found when we started looking.
>> So Jason said we didn't have good numbers about how we used our buildings and if you stop and think about our buildings, our buildings are actually one of the biggest investments that we have.
Aside from the value of our collections, which is hard to put a value on anyway because of the longitudinal timeline in which we purchase things, our buildings are the most expensive things we own and yet we have really terrible numbers for how they're used.
So I sent this screen shot to Jason when he was preparing this, because this was the kind of solution that we had available.
This is a vendor-provided solution and it actually is an attempt at making a system designed to count reference transactions count building transactions.
It was designed to count how many times you answer a reference question and about what and instead, we were trying to use it to count how many people are using my building in what areas and when.
And it worked, sort of.
But this was as good as we had been able to get to without actually walking around with a clipboard making hash marks and then entering all the data ourselves into a spreadsheet and then crunching it ourselves, which is not time effective.
So when Jason said hey, there must be a better way...
>> There must be a better way and there are a number of these.
There are some really, really slick examples, Suma from North Carolina state university is something that some of you may be familiar with, it's a really fantastic project but it still requires people walking around counting things.
And what Measure the Future ended up being, the initial pitch, the kind of elevator pitch, was Google analytics for the building.
What we were looking for was to try to give libraries the ability to understand what was going on inside their buildings in the same sort of way that Google analytics gives us the ability to understand what's going on on our website.
So what we were interested in doing was reporting, setting up sensors that we call scouts using web cams and the web cams are going to watch an area.
They're not going to record video or anything like that.
We're being incredibly sensitive about privacy and I can answer questions about the project itself offline via Twitter if you want.
We're being very sensitive about privacy issues, obviously, but we're using computer vision analysis to take a look at spaces in libraries and we're using the mothership, a little server application that will take the data from the cameras and effectively heat map the spaces in a library.
So the idea is to use objective measures, to use sensors to take a look at what's happening inside, for instance, your reading room right, to watch how people move around, to do rough counts so you have some idea of the busyness of the space but more importantly to give you the ability to understand what parts of your space are being used and what parts of your space are not being used so you can make decisions about space usage and then make changes to see if your space usage increases or decreases to allows you to test your spaces in the same sort of way that you can test digital goods.
So the initial set of things that we're trying to do are to provide again what we call attention measurement.
So the pitch is we're going to give you sensors that you can use to measure what people are paying attention to and then be able to alter your spaces in order to be able to increase the patron usage of the things you would like them to use.
Raw people counts because while we have gate counts and we know how many people go in and out of our buildings every day by and large, we don't have ideas about you know, how often certain parts of our building are used and the availability of the sort of data I think could really improve the way libraries are used.
All the data is going to be available, this is all -- one of the things that I love about working with the Knight Foundation is that they have a strong responsibility for openness and so everything that we produce as part of the project is going to be open source, it's all going to be available for people to use free of charge, and it's going to be out there for libraries and we're going to build tutorials that enable libraries to build these sensors themselves.
So once we develop it and get the sensors going and make sure that everything works and all of that, we're going to provide all of the instructions and all of the information necessary for libraries to be able to do that themselves.
So that was our pitch.
That was the sort of overall pitch.
As Chris noted, there was a video associated with it and I picked partners for the project very thoughtfully and carefully as part of the proposal, Jenica as the director of the library at Potsdam was one of the two libraries that I pardoned with, the other alpha partner for the project is the meridian public library in meridian, Idaho, and the director there, Gretchen Cassarati.
So I have both an academic and a public library partner.
I also identified a partner because we're dealing with sensors and hardware, I identified a company that I had worked with in the past with hardware and the development of sensors in libraries, spark fun electronics out near Boulder, Colorado, and spoke with them, talked with them about being a partner in the project for questions about, you know, the hardware and the integration of hardware into spaces.
So I had identified the sorts of partners that I thought I needed and the Knight evidently bit.
So Jenica, were you going to say something?
>> Just going to say that this is the moment when Jason identified his partners that I got involved in the project.
This was his brainchild, but the thing that I think is so interesting about all of this is that I don't see myself, in my relatively small academic library in rural New York, as being someone who wins a Knight Foundation challenge, right?
This isn't how I self-identify or how my institution self-identifies but I think the power of this kind of granting opportunity is that if you can find a partner or present an idea in such a way that it seems scalable or is scalable, anyone can do this, right?
My little library can have an impact in this kind of way.
>> Yep.
That was actually one of the choices I made early on in the development of the project was to intentionally choose certain kinds of libraries.
I knew I needed an academic and a public to kind of really test the idea and to make sure that it worked for at least the two big types of libraries.
But I intentionally did not choose, for instance, the New York public library and the, you know, university of Chicago or something.
So it was thoughtful in that I wanted to choose libraries of a size that if we could pull it off there, then, you know, it was a universalizable sort of project.
Tried to be thoughtful in the choosing.
So we come back to the new challenge, that was the old, and so there were a few tips I guess that I wanted to give as a part of our experience with the way the news challenge works.
I can say that I thought it was an extraordinary opportunity to be able to work through the stages in the way that they had them laid out.
The initial was to be fair, very rough.
It was not a well-formed idea even necessarily yet.
I knew kind of very distinctly what I wanted to do but it was not conceptualized well and working through the comments, working with them on the second round and further developing it really the process is really, really well done.
A couple of things that I would recommend maybe taking a look at, one is the recent Aspen reports about -- all of them are available at libraryvision.org, but the particular one that I thought was insightful about kind of innovation in libraries and innovation in the future of libraries is called libraries in the exponential age, the Knight Foundation with Chris and a few others and myself were part of the team that kind of discussed and put this -- part of the discussion process in putting this together and I thought this was a really excellent look at the current state of libraries and then kind of identifying areas where innovation might be necessary.
I think that as a tip, universalizability, it's not just for -- universalizability is something that's really valued as a part of the process.
The fact that I had both an academic and a public partner.
Academic libraries as Chris said often lack a lot of -- often have more resources than some of the smaller publics but there are a lot of really small academic libraries out there, too, that do not have the kind of personnel availability to do big projects.
So the fact that I had a project that was applicable to multiple library types and that was usable in a lot of different contexts I think added to the strength of the project.
I've spoken about this already, but the partners were very important.
That was I think a big deal in getting the project moving forward, especially past that first round.
The getting the project past that first round and into the second, into the kind of really nitty-gritty of developing it, having those partners going in I think really helped with the strength of the project.
And then this was a term, I wasn't exactly sure what term to put here, but the marketability, maybe not marketing, but marketability of the idea.
Slightly different than universalizability.
A lot of ideas might be applicable to multiple places but having an idea that's easy for people to understand and see the value in, right?
So if you can describe your project in a tweet and have people understand what it does and is about, that I think is a benefit I think in the same way that Chris mentioned having visual learners and having some visual aspect to the proposal so that people who understand ideas in that way have a better chance of grasping the thing that you're trying to tell them.
Having, you know, very thoughtful time discussing how to market the thing you are trying to develop as a project in a way that's understandable I think is a valuable thing.
>> Also in terms of marketing, thinking in advance about it is very helpful I think to both refining the proposal itself but also learning what you really need because when you start saying well, what we want is Google analytics for library buildings and how they're used and everybody in the project agrees with you, you suddenly understand something about what you're trying to accomplish.
And I think that that exercise is not just about sharing your message with everyone else but solidifying your own message for yourself which makes it a whole lot easier to move forward.
>> Yep.
Absolutely.
And then just a couple of trends that I had pulled out and identified before we can get to questions, I think we're leaving plenty of time for questions.
But just a couple of trends that are kind of in the air with libraries and that I think are particularly interesting in some way.
One of these is machine learning as applied to library problems.
This is kind of the big -- the big one here.
Machine learning is going to be a buzz word for the next several years in technology and artificial intelligence and things, big data, it's all wrapped up in the same -- it's all wrapped up in the same sort of technological underpinnings.
But the applicability of large data sets and intelligent agents to those large data sets is something that libraries have not really gotten into and from my perspective, I think we're going to get -- if we don't start paying attention to that, I think we're going to get left behind in something.
What it is I don't know yet but I think there's some opportunities here for libraries and as a trend in general in the world, as far as information understanding, I think it's definitely hit its inflection point.
Local memory, I put this down because this is a thing that libraries are really the only answer for, when you think about information access.
The information access to the local memories of a community.
The library, the local small public library, is really often the only answer.
So we have sort of -- we have -- we have a monopoly on this, nobody else has it nor wants it as far as I can tell.
And yet we don't do a fantastic job of collaborating and sharing and everything on those kinds of very hyperlocal sorts of information issues.
So I think as a unique place that libraries live, I would love to read about projects that have something to do with local memory and figuring out how libraries can be better kind of sharers of that, and then the last trend that I wanted to mention before we get to questions is open access and I don't just mean in the academic sense.
Academics use the words open access to mean availability of scholarly research without fees more or less.
But I think a broader look at the open and available access of information from a robust, you know, amount of sources, not just scholarly publishing in free and open ways is something I would love to see libraries be slightly more vitriolic about.
So I think that's an interesting opportunity.
I would love to read some projects.
I'm not -- I don't know if I'm going to be reading projects but I'll read them online.
I would love to see what people are doing in that realm.
And I think maybe -- are there some questions for Jenica and I or maybe back to the Knight Foundation for questions?
>> Excellent.
Thank you so much to both of you, both for all your work on this project and for bringing your experience of the process to the group here.
There was a question that Jenica did answer but I want to mention that someone asked were there planned white papers or articles on the beta libraries using Measure the Future and she mentioned that they're hoping to work on it and have something ready by ALA in June of 2016.
>> Yeah.
The alpha partners meridian and Jenica's library Potsdam.
Our particular timeline is by the end of this month, mid-March, sometime in the next four weeks or so, to have hardware ready for them to do the installs, and then we'll spend several months with the data, figure out you know, what works, what doesn't work, but the idea is again to kind of aim at June as a launch date for the project kind of more robustly.
There will be a lot coming in the next six months from Measure the Future.
>> You'll be busy right?
>> We're a little busy.
>> I want to give a plug for the folks that when you were talking about local memory, there were some comments that archives, historical societies and museum, certainly play into that, as well.
>> Absolutely.
>> All right.
And then let's see there was general -- please continue to post any questions that come to mind.
There was a question probably more for the Knight group, the Knight team.
Would an application be more competitive if we proposed to launch a prototype in multiple branches to demonstrate scalability?
>> Well, certainly I think we're interested in folks who are thinking about how do we start to build clear evidence for our work?
So having the plan of how you'll pilot and learn and iterate on your idea I think is a great idea.
>> Excellent.
Here's a good question.
Are there examples of prototype award winners whose prototypes did not succeed, that is how much room is there for failure of an innovative idea?
>> Yeah, well actually, that's part of our theory of the prototype fund.
We expect a high rate of failure.
We encourage experimentation and we understand that not all of these projects will work as advertised, right?
For us, you know, we're willing to take on that risk of failure at a prototype stage because we truly believe that going through the process of trying new things helps uncover the path for others.
If you hit a roadblock and can tell other people about that roadblock, we're going to have a higher probability of someone being able to solve or come up with new solutions to achieve the results we're looking for.
>> Excellent.
And Jason, you mentioned your experience with the prototype to the challenge winner process.
Do you want to talk a little bit more -- I don't know if you want to talk about your failures but if you want to talk about sort of the process of learning that applied to the final proposal?
>> Sure sure.
So the prototype, the prototype round that I was part of was in probably in 2013 I think.
Chris might remember.
The prototype grant is definitely a sprint.
It's a six month funding round.
So you get, you know smaller amount of funding for effectively a six month development, you know, sprint and depending upon your project, that might be, you know, six months can be a long time or a short time depending upon the project itself but in most cases I think people were running pretty hard for all six months.
And the news challenge luckily for us is a little more relaxed in the time frames that are around it.
Some, you know, are a year, 18 months, 24 months, some are probably a little bit longer.
But the time frame is much more project-dependent, which is one of the big differences between the two is that the prototype really is very much a six-month sprint, which is fantastic for failing fast.
>> Excellent.
Well, I know we're at the top of the hour and we'll wrap up now.
I know there were a few more questions, I encourage those of you that had those questions, I'll go back and make sure you have the contact information for the Knight folks, although I know that information also will be available on their -- on the challenge brief page.
Again, thank you so much to all of you for being here and a very special thanks to the Knight Foundation for bringing this challenge to the library community.
I think just the process of people thinking about it, participating as viewers as well as those submitting proposals benefit from the process of really pushing ourselves to think innovatively in the field so I want to thank all of you for bringing this opportunity to us and thank you again to Jason and Jenica for all of your great work.
And to all of you who joined who were challenge winners and prototype winners last year and we look forward to connecting with all the rest of you on the challenge site!
So thank you all for being here and have an excellent day.
>> Thanks everybody.
>> And good luck everyone.