At the Ashoka-Lemelson Tech4Society event in Hyderabad, India, I hosted a session on “The Information Explosion.” The basic premise was – I’m quoting myself here – that “inventors once thrived in a world of information balkanization. Those who had access to the best information, won: If you had a technology no one else knew about, or exclusive market intelligence, you enjoyed an advantage. In an increasingly open-source world, that sort of advantage is disappearing. So what’s the new paradigm for invention? (And not least, how do we pay for it?)”

What followed was a remarkable discussion – remarkable because it so closely tracked the anguished breast-beating that the news community has engaged in for the last several years. The dissolution of historical barriers to content production and distribution, and of the historical economics of information, is having exactly the same effects in the world of technological invention. Arguably, more efficient flows of information have enhanced social problem-solving, and better information has created more efficient marketplaces — more informed buyers and sellers, fewer pricing dislocations. Just as arguably, when information is so freely available, there’s the potential for everyone to be an inventor.

Or perhaps not – but at the very least, as new information technologies dramatically decentralize expertise, inventors are playing different roles and relying on a new suite of skills:

• Inventors are collaborators operating in an expansive and complex ecosystem of innovation. Just like journalists, they are becoming coordinators and curators rather than sole producers. They develop innovations in partnership with customers, suppliers, and other technologists. They support and collaborate with other inventor-entrepreneurs to improve products, offer complementary services, etc. Information is continuously shared within this ecosystem, making it better adapted to respond to rapidly changing customer needs. “A key word is curatorship,” said Daniel Ben-Horin, founder of TechSoup Global. “There is a new role that we are all exploring together, how do you add value to the crowd's value in a way that is not just noise.”
• They are listeners. Inventor-entrepreneurs practice empathy, establishing deep connection to end users. Rather than coming up with ideas in isolation, they constantly listen and respond to the marketplace. “We made this mistake in the beginning,” said Fellow Svati Bhogle. “We said, we have a technology, where can we put it? We thought we knew everything. We didn’t ask.”
• They operate in a cycle of continuous invention and iteration. The value of any one invention begins dropping the instant it is introduced; because flows of information are efficient, new ideas quickly are copied and adapted by others. In fact, there is a very explicit role for a new class of entrepreneurs who customize innovations for local needs. “We want to be copied,” said Anita Moura. “We want competitors” who will help to expand the marketplace. The inventors’ real value, then, lies in his/her ability to continuously and rapidly come up with the next new thing.

Mayur Patel, Knight Foundation’s director of strategic assessment and impact at Knight Foundation, framed this new role inventors quite nicely. In 2007, he observed, Google co-sponsored a competition called “Innovate or Die” to encourage new pedal-powered technologies. The winning team proposed building a solution to provide rural communities with access to clean water. But the contest didn’t end there: Within days, the Google community had piled on with thousands of suggestions to improve the invention. Which is to suggest, Patel said, that the unit of invention is shifting from the individual to the community. Ownership and control of innovation is shifting to contribution. And people derive social value not from what they earn but from what they share.

That is to say, information on its own has been devalued. Where we used to believe that information was power, we now understand that real power emanates from information plus context plus community. An inventor creates value by effectively navigating and capitalizing on that dynamic – by knowing when and how to connect, borrow, and refine, leveraging the expertise of others in the network. In this world, value comes from having more and better people to listen to, and to know how to harvest and recombine the ideas that emerge.

Which points to a world, as Patel put it, where “everything is beta” – where innovations are introduced and just as quickly ripped off, adapted, and scaled by a confederation of entrepreneurs, and where the inventor’s unique value derives from watching what happens and coming up with something better as rapidly as possible. The economic value of any one innovation will diminish, bringing its inventor instead some amount of reputational and ethical dividends.

Of course, as one participant complained, “reputational dividends won’t buy milk. Why should anyone build inventions if they become free?” He was kind of missing the point, I thought. Inventors can make money, just as journalists and publishers can in an open-source, Internet-enabled information marketplace. But they’ll do so in very different ways, working with very different skills, creating a new sort of value. Can inventors adapt? Can all of us?

I’m back from Hyderabad, India, where nearly 100 inventor-entrepreneurs from around the world gathered for Ashoka’s first Tech4Society conference. It was a typically humbling Ashoka crowd – every conversation with one of these Fellows revealed a daunting social problem  attacked with brilliant and often very courageous innovation.

It was also clear that behind every technological innovation, there typically is an impressive information system at play. Indeed, for many of these Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows, the underlying information system is at least as critical to the success of their work as their overlying technology.

So, Andres Martinez Fernandez designs and tests technologies like video microscopes and long-distance stethoscopes that increase the efficiency of rural health centers in Colombia, Peru, and Nicaragua – but those inventions depend on a proprietary communications platform that wirelessly connects those remote health centers to each other, allowing the continuous exchange of data and expertise.

Albina Ruiz has developed a community-based enterprise in Peru engaged in the collection, storage, recycling, composting, and reuse of solid waste. With the aid of a revolving loan fund, she stimulates new microenterprises engaged in the collection and processing of garbage and trash, at once cleaning up and creating employment throughout Lima and over 20 other cities. But the effectiveness of those strategies rely on a broad array of public information and education programs, typically focused on women's organizations and school-aged youth – and sometimes incorporating theater as the means to get the message out.

In Ghana, Bright Simons uses mobile phones and SMS messaging to improve patients’ safety by providing them an efficient, costless way to verify the source and quality of prescription drugs. Consumers text a code embossed on a product’s body to a national, fourdigit number, and get a realtime response authenticating the product – or indicating that it’s counterfeit.

And in Tanzania, Joseph Sekiku helps smallscale producers understand how markets work, and how they can move beyond subsistence by adopting new approaches to postharvest production, marketing, and distribution. He introduces methods that improve yield and helps farmers connect to each other and to new markets. He’s figured out that, in his mountainous, very isolated corner of the world, lack of information poses the biggest barrier to his success – and his constituents’. So he has founded his own, tiny community radio station that brings farming education – but also news and entertainment – to villages that no other media can reach.

All of which is to confirm the observation of Fernando Flores, the Chilean entrepreneur/politician/philosopher (right, he’s done a lot), who keynoted the first morning of Tech4Society: “The central problem of the planet for the next century is communication.” That is, social problems don’t get solved unless people understand what the problems are in the first place. Solutions aren’t spread and scaled until demand is created – which depends on the possibility of efficient flows of information (or, you know, marketing, as a few people call it). So, better information systems are foundational to more effective social entrepreneurship in all realms.

This insight is at the heart of Ashoka’s News & Knowledge program. We understand that News & Knowledge entrepreneurs create impact by informing, engaging, and connecting people as changemaking citizens – people who understand the social problems around them and can participate in invention and distribution of solutions. They also have communications skills that should be a part of every social entrepreneur’s toolkit. So we’re working to leverage their expertise, to connect them with their peers across the Ashoka network, to better integrate innovation and information strategies. Because in an Everyone a Changemaker world, everyone must be a communicator, too.

Next week in Washington, the Geotourism Summit, a partnership between National Geographic and Ashoka’s Changemakers unit, will celebrate the winners of the “Geotourism Challenge,” a global competition to unearth and support innovative ideas in tourism “that celebrate the distinct destinations of the world by honoring culture, cherishing history and enhancing the environment.”

One of the winners is a Spanish outfit called Wikiloc, whose innovation should be of more than passing interest to the news and knowledge world. Wikiloc happens to be concerned with tourism, yes (Wikiloc is short for “Wiki Location”) – but what it’s really about is upending traditional information models, democratizing the machinery of publishing, and getting more and better information to more people at lower cost. Sound familiar?

Wikiloc was started in 2006 by Jordi Ramot, a young software engineer who specializes professionally in Internet mapping and location-based services and who has a passion for outdoor sports and travel. He was looking for a way to easily share with friends notes about places he had enjoyed in his travels. So he designed a platform that allows anyone – backpacking teens, mountain bike clubs, local chambers of commerce – to describe and share their favorite hiking and biking trails on Google Maps. (Near where I live in New York, for example, folks have posted a kayaking route on the Hudson River, with photos of the views, and a hiking trail annotated with relevant markers.)

“It turned out,” Ramot wrote in his Changemakers entry, “that my needs where shared by many other outdoor enthusiasts and travelers worldwide. Soon many people started to create and share their own trails in Wikiloc. That was the beginning of the community.” Today, that community includes 100,000 people around the world.

It’s a classic inversion of the traditional knowledge model in this realm. Instead of reading a book written by a travel expert on kayaking and hiking trips in the Hudson Valley, we get the collected wisdom of the travel community. Instead of sharing details of a great trail with one or two friends, we share with … everyone, or at least anyone who’s interested. It works because there’s social value attached to sharing what you know; as Ramot explains, people contribute to Wikiloc not necessarily because they’ll make money (though more on that later) but because “the things you share will be used and appreciated by other people, and you get this sense of recognition – you are giving something, making your place in that community.”

There are, of course, at least two problems with inversion. The first is familiar to anyone who surfs the Internet: Getting as much information as possible from as many people as possible is not necessarily more efficient than getting considerably less information from a more select group of folks whose judgment you trust. The hikes I find on Wikiloc may not appear in any published guidebook – and I may discover, at my own risk, that there’s good reason. The implicit question – How do I know who and what to trust – demands, demands, at the least, some sort of community rating system, which Ramot is working on.

The second challenge is familiar, as well: How do we pay for this? As of now, Wikiloc is free for all; it costs nothing to publish information nor to read it. Ramot gets by on a trickle of Google AdSense revenue and the benevolence of his volunteer team (and, now, with $5,000 from the Geotourism Challenge).

Ramot understands that he’s sittingon some untapped revenue. There are Wikiloc users who operate B&Bs and describe trails that run past their homes, hoping to attract guests. “I know that is happening, but I haven’t thought about how to make these people pay.” Well, but he has, actually: He imagines a future iteration called Wikiloc Community Maps that allows anyone to add content and to concurrently promote their services. The idea is that the content has unique value that is realized by a unique affiliation: If you want to hike this fantastic trail, then you should stay at my perfectly situated home!

It could work. But why, I wonder, wouldn’t Ramot simply charge people to join the Wikiloc community? Isn’t that where the real value lies – the ability to join a global village of like-minded travelers who are interested in sharing distinctive information that enhances their tourism? Wouldn’t a lot of people pay, what, $10 a year for that? (For one example of this model, visit Village Soup, a platform that integrates print and online for community news.)

I don’t know for sure. But that’s certainly one direction the news & knowledge realm is headed. Information itself isn’t necessarily valuable. But the way communities engage with information toward productive action -- that can have very distinctive value, both social and financial.

As news has flooded from a devastated Haiti in the last week, I've found myself especially engrossed by one seemingly unlikely source.

Melinda Miles is the co-founder of Konbit Pou Ayiti/KONPAY (Working Together for Haiti) a Haitian-American not-for-profit organization focused on building sustainable livelihoods for communities in southeast Haiti. I don't know Miles, but from her various online presences I see that she has worked in Haiti for ten years or so, working on a wide array of projects to support rape victims; at-risk children; artisans; and the environment. She is co-editor of a book called Let Haiti Live, an analysis of social and political development of Haiti and its connection to American policy. KONPAY is very well connected to other NGOs working in and for Haiti.

At 2:34 pm on January 12, on her Twitter page, Miles re-tweeted news from Troy Livesay, an American doing mission work in Port au Prince: "Just experienced a MAJOR earthquake here in Port au Prince - walls were falling down. - we are ALL fine - pray for thos..." Miles herself, it seems, was in Massachusetts, where KONPAY is co-located. 

Over the next week, Miles produced maybe 200 tweets (in addition to her blog posts on KONPAY's site). Initially, there was a predictable arc to them: reports of her attempts to reach friends and family on the island, and snatches of their news ("got thru to tigwav on voila - all brick buildings have collapsed, aftershocks continue every few minutes"); direct messages to others in her network ("@labender oh that is a relief, my family are right by the hotel. did you reach the hotel?); more retweets from people on the island ("RT @fredodupoux everybody is camping in the streets of port-au-prince sleeping under the stars to wake up from an awful nightmare.)

As communications stablized, loved ones and colleagues in the town of Jacmel were found, and Miles feed graduated to a running stream of from-the-ground accounts. "the ocean receded a half mile from the coast by jacmel"; "the hospital in Jacmel also seriously damaged and turning people away"; "RT @RAMhaiti in PAP Multi storied buildings are flattened..Cathedral, St Trinity, St Gerard, Sacre Coeur are destroyed or partly destroyed"; "OMG RT @Haitifeed: RT @yatalley: the road from Port-au-prince to jacmel is cut and there's no way to pass...even on a rhino or a motorcycle." "Gwenn Mangine reports motos can cross mountains between PAP and Jacmel; Jacmel airport being used as a refugee camp."

These reports seemed especially credible because they came directly from Miles' contacts in Haiti, and because Miles (I think) knows what she's doing. She wasn't randomly picking off any tweet that came her way; instead, she used her experience and expertise to filter the many, many anecdotal reports.

Miles quickly became a clearing house of intelligence for mainstream journalists. She appeared on WNYC radio's "The Brian Lehrer Show" and NPR's "Morning Edition." CNN messaged her. She traded tweets with Rainn Wilson, a star of The Office, who was doing his own celebrity-tweet-for-Haiti thing.

Then, on the afternoon of Jan. 14, Miles began organizing: "We need a big boat to transport medical volunteers and equipment into Jacmel, can anyone help?" And coordinating with other relief organizations: "@Fonkoze what is the situation with branch offices? is Fonkoze functioning on the ground for people to receive money?"

She scoured her network for strategic information: " does anyone know if St. Catherine's Hospital (CHOSCAL) Is still standing in Cite Soleil to set up possible triage? #Haitiquake" "@alanna_shaikh can you advise on best practices for dealing with bodies for ppl in PAP I am working with?" "does any one the precise footage of the runway in Jacmel? I need 4,000 feet!!" She shared with same: "@yomamabeads Lynn I am waiting for Joe to give me details about schools, churches and orphanages. Will share report once I have it!" And she offered help: "@PIH_org this is Melinda Miles, I've worked with PIH a lot and I have surgeons ready to go to Haiti, who should I call?"

All the while, Miles kept spinning out micro-reports from the ground. (Her own flight to Haiti got canceled, it seems.) "report from PAP is that NO AID in the streets yet, no police presence, very few UN are seen and aid is NOT being distributed from airport 7:11 AM Jan 16th". She editorialized: "Who is in charge of the response in Haiti? Where is the national strategy?" And yes, she started raising money, as KONPAY began to ramp up its own logistical effort to bring supplies into the country.

It's been gripping reading for me -- a window not just onto what's happening on the ground in this sad place, but a chronicle of a relief effort as it unfolds.

But it's more than that. For the folks in Miles' network (and her Twitter followers have grown by about 50% in the last few days, to 643), her feed represents the difference between random data points and coordinated intelligence. She is connecting people who matter, getting critical information to the right points, and providing expert on-the-fly analysis and perspective.

Miles is, in other words, acting like an editor. She's not a journalist, but her function in the last week has been to create value by sorting fact from rumor, synthesizing shreds of facts into compelling narratives, distributing relevant information to people who can use it. The best kind of journalism.

If Kara Andrade represents one face of the future of journalism, the "journalist-organizer," then Miles is another: the expert editor -- someone with the experience, perspective, and contacts to make sense of news in a crisis, to connect the relevant community (which may be all of us, ultimately) with intelligence. These folks seem especially valuable in moments of crisis like the one we're witnessing in Haiti, when there's a logistical gap between the news and traditional journalists' ability to report it. But really, expert editors can and should operate anywhere.

The question is, how do we find, equip and support more editors like Miles? How do we train people to make sense of our fast-changing world in useful ways? And how do we efficiently connect them to the communities that need them?

By the way, here's the most recent tweet from Miles, 8 minutes ago: "has arrived in Washington, DC to do a Congressional briefing on the situation in #Haiti, details to follow"

(Photo: Roberto Stephenson)

Just 13 days left to enter the WeMedia PitchIt! Challenge, hosted by Ashoka Changemakers.

What's PitchIt!? We Media and Changemakers are looking for the most innovative ideas that promise to inspire a better world through media. The top finalists will pitch their ideas at We Media Miami, March 9-11, 2010. The best entry in each category — non-profit and business — will receive a $25,000 prize to help launch their new venture. (Check out the winners of last year's PitchIt! competition here.)

If you're a storyteller, a connector, an influencer, or just an idea person, you qualify to enter. All you need is the great idea. And you have until January 20.

Sanjana Hattotuwa is founder of GroundViews, a Sri Lankan website that provides both a secure channel for citizen reporting and a platform for critical debate amid one of the world’s most repressive environments for press and speech freedom.

We asked Sanjana and other Ashoka Fellows to offer predictions for 2010. Their collected responses will be excerpted soon in an Ashoka eBook — but Sanjana’s were compelling enough to merit full exposure here. He reflects on emerging technologies and a changed information user, but also on the historic role of journalists in documenting truth and challenging both convention and injustice. The result: an invigorating declaration of purpose.

What changes will 2010 bring?
The line between “new” and “traditional” media will continue to blur. Traditional media will use citizens in their reporting. Citizens will use the web, Internet and mobiles in their own reporting. Both will compete, and increasingly complement each other. Technologies such as natural language processing, semantic analysis, pattern matching and semiotics on the web will be used to make sense from a growing river of information, little of which will be impartial or accurate.  A slow news movement, involving contextualization, reflection and curation, will emerge as a countervailing thrust to the heady pace of instant news feeds.

We will lose friends and colleagues to violence in 2010. Some of us will be killed or imprisoned, or called terrorists and forced to leave the home and country we love first, and the most. All of us will use our own media to tell our stories, competing with the narratives of others. The best narratives we consume, remember, and compel us to act will be those that inspire us, showcase resilience, simple acts of defiance and courage and even of violence against injustice. Print journalists will learn that voice, photo, video and innovative visualizations of complex problems strengthen a story. All journalists will realize that to sustain empathy in protracted conflict, to communicate the horror of a pogrom or genocide, to influence progressive policy and strengthen aid, stories need to be personal, compelling and inspire hope.

Compelling stories will emerge from places without TV, radio, electricity, water, drainage, sanitation or permanent shelters but with mobile phones. Illiterate peoples will tell us their stories. We will inhabit a world where everyone — whether they are citizens or nomads, stateless, IDPs or refugees — will be addressable through a mobile number. We will witness more people than any time in history inter-connected through a web controlled by the parochialism of governments, terrorists and commercial interests. Ergo, though we will see increasing threats to the neutrality of the Internet as a medium, everyone on the web will contest this control. Yet social change-makers in all domains will find opportunities for change and hope through technologies unimaginable even a few years ago.

All journalists will encounter tools, platforms, services and new paradigms in media generation, dissemination and consumption that they will ignore to their own peril. 2010 will be a year we stop calling new media, new media. We will simply use a range of media through a host of devices, for little or no cost, to challenge impunity and strengthen democracy, human rights and human dignity. Most of us will fail in this task. A few will succeed, and inspire others to follow suit. This is our challenge as social change-makers in the coming year — to live in hope, and risk disappointment.

What will you make happen in 2010?
I will pit the media I generate and inspire against media both unprofessional and partisan. I will seek to demonstrate by example that progressive, citizen-centric media on the web can, even during violence and war, interrogate and highlight issues vital to democracy and peace. I may fail, but through such failures, I will learn vital lessons to share with others.

I will re-launch Groundviews. It will better reflect our diversity of voices and content and our growing interest in using photography, semantic visualizations and video to tell compelling stories.

I will hold traditional media accountable for their bias, partisanship and lapses in professional journalism. I will help traditional media leverage new technologies to strengthen their journalism. I will work with human rights and media freedom defenders to help them use new technologies to bear witness and at the same time, alert them to the many ways in which technology is used to monitor and curtail their work.

Most importantly, I will continue to work and live in Sri Lanka, a country coming out of war that is still very distant from a just and sustainable peace. My work will focus on the meaningful application of technology to strengthen democracy, justice and human rights. Through this work, and sober reflection on the challenges to peacebuilding post-war, I hope to inspire conversations, content and action that will help my country heal, remember, seek justice, forgive, hold accountable those who violate human rights and envision a peace more meaningful than the mere absence of war. 

What changes do you hope to see by the end of the coming decade?
Acknowledging that all peoples are no longer passive recipients and consumers of information. This is a paradigm shift from a decade ago, and largely undergirded by developments in telecommunications technologies. Though the spectre of cyber-wars is no longer limited to the domain of science fiction, new technologies widely available for free or little cost can and must be leveraged by social change-makers to bear witness and strengthen democracy. This is a challenge increasingly difficult, for these technologies will also be used widely for hate and harm. Yet what I hope to see at the end of the decade is that peoples, now able to tell their own stories even if they are illiterate, destitute, internally displaced or refugees, will name and shame perpetrators of violence as well as those who did nothing to stop it. Technology can be a great leveller, and we must ensure it is used to strengthen democracy, for increasingly the enjoyment of our fundamental human rights rests on it. I hope that by the end of the decade, this vital realisation will find expression in constitutions, policies and practices of governments, initiatives of civil society and the ethics of business and journalism.

If you want to understand what journalists could look like in the future, it’s worth talking with Kara Andrade. She does not come from any single, traditional mold; rather, her emerging career -- and I'm not sure she would call it that -- synthesizes multiple skill sets and perspectives in ways both appealing and important.

Kara began in social services after college: She worked in an assisted living facility, then did outreach for a rape crisis center, developed a street outreach plan targeting HIV-vulnerable homeless and drug users; and worked with an alcohol and drug advocacy program.

She went to journalism school, and turned herself into a writer-photographer. She has reported on New Orleans flood workers and emergency workers; technology trends, bioterrorism; and environmental conflict in Guatemala, among other issues. At the same time, she has developed Web content for the Maynard Institute, a non-profit that pushes for diversity in the media world; directed online strategy for Youth Radio; organized a series of training conferences for the Renaissance Journalism Center; and, most recently, headed fundraising and community organizing at Spot.Us, David Cohn’s effort to crowdfund investigative journalism.

Now, Kara has returned to her native Guatemala, where she is conducting research on emerging online journalism and creating a collaborative web site that allows Guatemalans to post information from their cell phones. It is a role that neatly connects her various professional strands: researcher, community organizer, journalist. And it feels right to her: “I want to be doing this all my life, where I’m an instrument of change. I want to be part of the process, not just a product. Want to help people get the information they need to navigate their lives.”

Which strikes me as a perfect articulation of an emerging class of journalist. These workers will connect people to information that’s urgent, relevant, and valuable. They will help people parse an increasingly daunting ocean of data, factoids, and voices, expertly guiding them to intelligence that helps them participate effectively in their communities, in the economy, in society. They will help communities organize around information, catalyzing solutions that speed change and impact.

This work will require traditional journalistic skills – the ability to find dig efficiently through data, to develop trusted sources, to ask the right questions, and to synthesize disparate information. It also will hinge on traditional journalistic values: accuracy, fairness, and independence, among others.

But these new journalists also will have the mindset of a community organizer. Rather than deciding what should be reported, and how, they will enable conversations. As Michael Skoler, currently a researcher at the University of Missouri, told us: “Journalists have assumed that they know the key issues that audiences need to know about. But that model is gone; it’s audiences/communities that will determine the issues. The new role of the reporter is more like that of a good talk show host:  someone who is knowledgeable about a topic, has wide range of contacts, injects some truth-telling into a conversation, and then has the resources to do follow-up reporting that will inform the next conversation. They’re ‘trusted hosts.’”

Journalists will be all about making connections, with and through information. They will help people, as Kara says, navigate their lives.  And Kara will help us navigate this emerging landscape. Look for her blog posts here in the new year.

Ashoka Senior Fellow Reza Deghati, a renowned Irani photographer whose group AINA has built vital independent media in Afghanistan, will be appear in a National Geographic Channel feature airing Dec. 22 (8 and 11 pm) and 29 (8 pm). The NG Series, "National Geographic's Most Incredible Photos," tells the story of Reza's portrait of Afghan rebel leader Ahmed shah Massoud, who was killed by Al Queda a few days before the 9/11 attacks. From the channel's listing: "Now, NGC takes you on assignment through war-torn Afghanistan as Reza returns to the scene of the famous photo and works to capture an image that could become a new national icon."

It can get lonely cooped up in this blog. So this week, the "Tomorrow's News" team took its act to Twitter, hosting a real-time discussion at #SocEntChat on "The Future of News." (#SocEntChat is a  Twitter conversation, presented by Ashoka on the first Wednesday of each month, that invites current and aspiring social entrepreneurs, funders, media, and suppporters to share their ideas, discuss the state of the field, identify the latest innovations and pinpoint areas requiring more exploration.)

If you've participated in this sort of conversation on Twitter, you know that it can be random; exhilerating; scattered; intelligent; disjointed; and hilarious -- often, all at once. To the point, it can be an efficient way of surfacing smart ideas from a diverse, global network. Which is what this #SocEntChat turned out to be. Here's what we learned:

How will people get/use/share information a decade from now? What will be the biggest changes from today? First of all, they will in fact get, use, and share – as opposed to just reading/listening/watching.

• “Social media allows everyone to share news, opinions, trends everything. People can share their thoughts.”
• “Yes, big shift from passive -> active. Prosuming becomes ubiquitous.”

Many more people will be connected in many more ways:

• “Only part of the world's population is even connected to the internet now. there will be much more info shared in 10 years.” (Which was Jimmy Wales’ point here a few weeks back.)

There will be a huge need for intelligent sense-making of an increasing mass of disparate information:

• “Constant news updates bring more need than ever for writing that puts it all together.”
• “Natural language processing search will sift through mounds of data to bring you would you need/want!”
• “I think worth paying for news you need to get your work done. Segmented, sector-focused news.”
• “Will also need way to validate source RT Agree, filtering will become v. important. A real silver bullet.”

And we’ll see a shift in the value proposition for news. It won’t just be about providing timely information:

• “Value must be reframed. It's not info. It's trust, affiliation, meaning.”
• “Trust comes from expertise. More media is coming from individual companies. It's the custom model w/out the PR.”
• “Value could be in turning dull data to actionable insight”
• “I asked @TexasTribune founder that exact question when I interviewed him for my digital mag. "Ubiquity," he said.”

Therefore, the role of the journalist will change dramatically:

• “I think number of journos will go down. Number of EDITORS will go up. Editors = sources that sort news not just post all.”
• “We may see fewer news outlets able to fund journalism, so fewer sources. Of course, citizen reporting will b huge, 2.”
• “I definitely agree, I just don't see it replacing "traditional" reporting. I see them working together.”
• “Journalists can curate conversations, filter out bad info, synthesize disparate data. All that is valuable.”

How will we compensate those individuals and organizations that provide information of high quality? It will require a change in culture and mechanics:

• “We need a culture of paying for quality. Much like waiter tipping.”
• “News has 2 be unique and useful 2 be valuable. Now nwspaprs are soda when they should be wine.”
• “But a culture of paying has to be driven by underlying value. “Can we use an honor sys? Pay if u find value?”
• “How about readers pay what they think story was worth after reading.”

And a big part of that culture change is in building demand: improving civic, media, and news literacy in ways that allow people to use news and knowledge in meaningful ways:

• “ Can we teach people to care about the news, or does news just have to be relevant?”
• “Long way to go before msm content trusted enough to build citizenship in audience”
• “media built around citizenship processes can have role in leading citizenship literacy”
• “Improve civic literacy? Better service journalism. People read, want to act, don't know how. We have to show them.”

A meaty couple of hours, indeed. For full text of this #SocEntChat, go here.

World Wide Web, meet Iraq. Iraq, this is the Web. Google recently launched a fascinating two-pronged initiative in Baghdad, part of an apparent State Dept. strategy to deploy social media for democracy in Iraq. First, CEO Eric Schmidt announced a plan to digitize (at its own expense) the collections of the Iraq National Museum. The next day, the Iraqi government introduced its first Youtube channel. Read more at Ashoka's Peace Blog.