Congrats to Knight News Challenge 2011 Winner @HigherAwesome & @AwesomeFound ($244,000 for increasing awesome!)

Project: The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce
Winner: The Awesome Foundation, Boston, Mass.
Award: $244,000
Project lead: Tim Hwang
Website: www.awesomefoundation.org
Twitter: @higherawesome

To experiment with a new funding model for local journalism, The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce will bring together 10 to 15 community leaders and media innovators in Detroit and two other cities to provide $1,000 microgrants to innovative journalism and civic media projects. By encouraging pilot projects, prototypes, events and social entrepreneurial ventures, the News Taskforce will encourage a wide swathe of the community to experiment with creative solutions to their information needs.

[The Awesome Foundation got its start here in Cambridge; among its founders are a bunch of Harvard and MIT people with affiliations with the Berkman Center, ROFLcon, NPR Digital Services, and more. First winner of an Awesome Foundation grant: a project to build a giant hammock.]

via niemanlab.org

There's much awesome to be done!

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon... (interrupted by applause) we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

via en.wikisource.org

Here's video from President Kennedy's famous speech.