Problem & solution: a year ago I initiated Sponge, a media innovation lab for eastern Europe located in Bucharest and online. It should become the missing R&D for journalism. But it turned into a collaborative experimentation Lab between independent groups and communities of investigative journalists, coders, designers, activists and legal experts, involving also local universities and students. We are building a hub for innovation occurring at the nexus of transparency and accountability, technology and media. We create an ecosystem fostering relevant and verifiable information and open data.

Study case: with a 3 thousand USD grant from Mozilla Foundation we organized last October the Open Media Challenge in Bucharest, 3 months long contest on open data and collaboration. Using an open process, we had 20 proposals from Bielarus, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Romania. Out of that, during a weekend hackathon, 10 were developed and 8 delivered a working app or tool (see http://thesponge.eu/Entry_list/). As one member of the jury said, “the Open Media Challenge is a posterbook example how to do a hackathon: good organization, highly motivated participants and awesome ideas/projects that actually delivered”.

Strategy: based on an experimental approach (trial and error) we are turning Sponge into a replicable model for smaller or larger interdisciplinary communities working on open data. Our test bed is the post-communist space, with similar background and so many real world problems that can be solved in a collaborative way also using technology. Our strong points are huge IT and activism knowledge, as well as expertise on journalism and opening data and information; our test bed is great also because of so many differences in language, technical and media literacy, religion and types of government.