Are You a Full Information Citizen? You Could Be.

We are thrilled to announce Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition, run by Ashoka Changemakers® with the support of Google. Citizen Media is an ambitious new effort to catalyze full information citizenship around the globe.

A few words on what that means: Full information citizenship is central to Ashoka’s vision of an “Everyone a Changemaker” world. All people must be able to engage freely and powerfully with information to advance their own lives and society. This is as true and as profound for remote Peruvian villagers and displaced persons in Sri Lanka as it is for Web-savvy American teens.  In a rapidly changing world, news and knowledge is the basis of action – the currency that gives one standing; reveals the horizon of what may be possible in a world where everyone is a change maker; and determines how we interact with others.

Citizen Media will turbocharge the emergence and growth of fresh solutions, collaborative activities, and intelligence that will drive new strategies for advancing full information citizenship. We hope the competition will allow a new cadre of visionary innovators to reimagine the way people get and use information. (In fact, we hope to elect at least four new Ashoka Fellows who emerge directly from the pool of entrants.)

Citizen Media represents the result of three years of work from Ashoka Fellows and Ashoka’s News and Knowledge project — and the beginning of something even bigger. Over the next five years, Ashoka will accelerate and broaden the scope of our search for innovation, fueling media projects that drive engagement at all levels of society. We will create a dynamic community of hundreds of information entrepreneurs whose innovations cut across media, strategy, and field – news, education, science, finance, energy, and more. We will leverage resources and strategies from Ashoka’s global network of networks to advance information citizenship for hundreds of millions of people.

Want to get involved? Visit the competition page for more information on how you can enter, nominate someone’s project, and vote for the winners!

by Keith Hammonds, director of Ashoka's News & Knowledge Program