Earlier this year, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership’s, set out to place five technologists in partner newsrooms through a selection process that included an open-call design challenge.  Selecting the final five was a joint process with our five news partners for 2011/12: Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, and Zeit Online. We proudly introduce:

From left to right: Cole, Nichola, Dan, Laurian & Mark

Mark Boas | Al Jazeera
Mark makes, teaches, writes about and promotes new and open web technologies. Co-founder of Happyworm, a tiny entrepreneurial web agency and makers of the jPlayer media framework, Mark enjoys pushing the limits of the browser with HTML5 and JavaScript. Though a generalist at heart, Mark spends much of his time playing with web based media and real-time communications. A lover of all things audio, his passion often drives his work and is currently enjoying the challenge of taking audio ‘somewhere new’ with his Hyperaudio experiments.

Cole Gillespe | Zeit Online
Cole Gillespie is a JavaScript developer originating from deep within the North Carolina Appalachians. In recent years he has spent his time in Raleigh, North Carolina, working with various companies including Project Mastermind, National Geographic, CNN and IBM. He spends most of his free time playing music, hacking open source projects or trolling in IRC trying to keep up with the web’s rapid evolution.

Laurian Grindloc | BBC
Laurian followed his interest in the semantic web through a master in Computational Linguistics and several years of research into semantic navigation at Knowledge Media Institute (The Open University). For the past year, Laurian has been implementing applications using semantic web technologies at the technology innovation company Talis.

Nicola Hughes | Guardian
After academic excursions in the fields of Physics, Zoology, Anthropology and Journalism, Nicola started her media career at CNN in London. Whilst working as a Digital Media Producer, she started blogging and tweeting about data journalism (@DataMinerUK). She left CNN to join a data scraping start up, ScraperWiki, and to gain coding skills. She is now taking her skills, perspectives and start-up mojo into the newsroom for testing.

Dan Schultz | Boston Globe
Dan Schultz is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab studying in the Information Ecology group. At the Lab he is a Research Associate at the Center for Civic Media and has learned how to make almost anything. Before coming to MIT Dan received a B.S. in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about “Connecting People, Content, and Community.”

Through their tenure at the partner newsrooms in 2012, the fellows have been tasked with three things:

• To embed themselves within their partner newsrooms so that they become intimately familiar with the daily ebb and flow of some of the best newsrooms in the world
• To work in the open, in the spirit of Mozilla and the open-source community. That means blogging about their work and being active in communities outside their host newsroom as an advocate for open innovation.
• To release the code they create into the larger open-source and journalism communities. The goal is to benefit not only their host newsrooms but to make tools that benefit all of journalism and beyond.

Get more news, impressions, ideas from the Mozilla festival: Follow #mozfest on microblogs and the Mozilla Festival Blog.

We are excited to announce the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, a Mozilla Drumbeat project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Journalism Program.

For the next three years, we will have the opportunity to engage a huge community, bring people together for trainings and in-person events, and ultimately build software to address the challenges facing news organizations.

We’ll be working with some amazing news partners: the BBC, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, and Zeit Online, who are launching the partnership with us, and many more that we will invite to join the initiative.

More information on the partnership and ways to get involved can be found on the blogs of John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Mozilla project lead Nathaniel James‎ and Philip Smith.

Background on Mozilla and media in recent blog posts from Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla.

Mozilla is moving beyond software, looking for ways to bring open technologies and culture into new areas like art, media and education. We recently sponsored the Open Web Award as part of the Transmediale art festival in Berlin, Germany, combining digital art and the open web. With our new Mozilla Drumbeat initiative, we are engaging creators globally to shape the future of the web.

We were really excited to see more than 100 submissions for the Transmediale Open Web Award. The jury narrowed it down to three great contributions that all show potential, and could be seeds for incredibly exciting developments for art and the web in the coming years.

Jesse Scott (Graffiti Research Labs), center, accepts Open Web Award in Berlin on behalf of Evan Roth from Mark Surman and Henrik Moltke (Mozilla).

The winner – Graffiti Markup Language – enables the capture of graffiti motion data and turns it into something that can be shared and manipulated indefinitely. One can imagine not only great and exciting graffiti art but all kinds of motion expression. Just like the web itself potential of GML is totally open ended. Like LEGO, anyone can built whatever they want with it. For Mozilla, GML also has great educational value because it explains open data and standards in a surprising and fresh way to new people. We congratulate Evan Roth and the GML community on winning the award. Jesse Scott from Graffiti Research Labs in Berlin accepted on behalf on Evan Roth.

We also want to award a distinction to the other two finalists, Booki and Thimbl. Like GML, they represent exciting opportunities for creative expression on the web.

The world’s largest football tournament will kick off this week with plenty of opportunity to celebrate. Ever worn a team jersey, painted team colors on your face in support or waved a flag from your car after a victory? There is another way to express your team spirit, and it doesn’t involve paint or fabric – just your Firefox Web browser!

Firefox is the most customizable browser in the world. With Firefox Cup Personas (easy-to-use backgrounds that let you personalize the look of Firefox) you can customize your browser and show your team spirit.

Being in front of your computer doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the action, you can participate with the Firefox Cup . By wearing one of these 32 Personas to support your team, you’ll take part in the global Firefox Cup competition. On the Firefox Cup website, you can easily see how many “fans” each team has (i.e., how many people are wearing each team Persona on their Firefox). The team with the most fans will win the Firefox Cup!

We’ll announce round winners on the following dates:

• June 16th: Round 1
• June 23rd: Round 2
• June 30th: Round 3
• July 7th: Round 4
• July 14th: Overall country winner announced!

You can also stay on top of scores and news within your Firefox browser with the FootieFox add-on. No matter where you are in the world or your time zone, you can catch all the action and support your team with the Firefox Cup!

The winning country will be showcased on Mozilla’s sites and more, so be sure to cast your vote by wearing your favorite country’s Persona today.

For more information, see:

• Firefox Cup
• Personas
• FootieFox

This week, Mozilla launches the Open To Choice campaign. Aimed at raising awareness among web users in Europe on the importance of making an informed choice when selecting the software and services used to access the Internet. The campaign launches at a time when almost 200 million Europeans in 32 countries will be asked to make an active choice about which Web browser will act on their behalf to broker their online experiences.

Open To Choice begins with an open letter written by Mozilla CEO John Lilly, and Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker, addressing the European Commission and Microsoft’s landmark Browser Choice screen settlement as “… an important milestone towards helping more people take control of their online lives”. Explaining the critical importance of the browser today, the open letter calls for greater understanding, and education on why choice not only matters, but also that of an informed choice.

Watch John Lilly, Mozilla CEO talk about the open letter, and why browser choice is so important.

Over the coming weeks Opentochoice.org will go on to provide further information about browser basics, and become a hub for conversations on the importance of Web choice.

Please read the open letter and join the conversation at http://www.opentochoice.org.

Mitchell with Lisa Burda, granddaughter of Aenne, at award ceremony. DLD conference, Munich 2010.

Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, was awarded the Aenne Burda Award at the international Digital Life Design Conference in Munich, Germany. Mitchell is the fifth recipient of the award that honors successful, creative female entrepreneurs that are visionaries of the digital world. She received the award for alternative and transparent developments in software.

To quote from the press release issued by DLD-Conference: “Mitchell is a pioneer in the internet industry. The Mozilla Foundation calls for transparency and self-determination in the digital world and develops open-source software that allows everyone to contribute. With the popular browser Firefox Mozilla was able to take a significant amount of market share from the market leader.”

Mitchell Baker comments on receiving the award: “I am honored for the recognition, both personally and on behalf of the many thousands of Mozilla community members who contribute to Mozilla every day to bring innovation and self-determination to Internet life.  I am proud to receive this award and proud that hundreds of millions of people today trust Mozilla to make their digital world better.”

The award commemorates visionary entrepreneur Aenne Burda. The German business woman was a role-model for many of the post-war generation. Starting with a small publishing house, Aenne Burda created the world’s largest fashion publishing house.

Previous recipients of the award are Marissa Mayer of Google, Caterina Fake, Flickr-founder, Martha Stewart, TV-host and entrepreneur, as well as investor and internet pioneer Esther Dyson who presented the award to Mitchell together with Lisa Burda, granddaughter of Aenne.

Please join us in congratulating Mitchell for this award!