OHIO nurtures student ideas during annual innovation contests

Some 38,000 Somalis fleeing unrest in their nation have found a new home in Columbus, Ohio, making it the second-largest such community in the United States. But amid the lawns and trees of the Midwest, they’ve found a different kind of desert than the literal one that also decimates their country: a media desert lacking a source of community news and information.

Four Ohio University students—all from outside the U.S.— won the University’s internal Scripps Innovation Challenge Pitch Day in March and then the broader Scripps International Innovators Cup in April for their solution to the problem.

Team Ubuntu (ubuntu means “human kindness” in Nguni Bantu, a language spoken in Southern Africa) came up with NewsRain, a website and mobile app that empower Columbus’s Somali refugees to report their own stories.

“We wanted to create a venture whose value went beyond its innovative edge, and this challenge gave us the necessary platform to imbue our idea with social and cultural sensitivity,” said team captain Ayleen Cabas Mijares, a Venezuelan student who received her master’s degree in journalism in June.

She and co-captain Kingsley Antwi-Boasiako, a journalism graduate student from Ghana, researched media deserts and the best approaches to serve the community. Goitom Negash, an African studies graduate student from Ethiopia, contacted Somali leaders in Columbus to coordinate recruitment of volunteer journalists. Ghanian Samuel Antwi, a doctoral student in instructional technology, along with Daniel Osei, MITS ’16, created the website and are developing a mobile app.

Team Ubuntu topped six other competitors at the fourth annual Pitch Day, winning $10,000 and the right to compete in the second annual Scripps International Cup, also sponsored by OHIO. There, they bested six university teams from across the U.S. before a panel of judges from the high-tech and digital media industries, earning an additional $5,000.

“Our goal is to elevate the work of student-innovators to the level of our student-athletes,” said Michelle Ferrier, associate dean for innovation, research/creative activity and graduate studies at OHIO’s Scripps College of Communication. “This international showcase brings that much-needed visibility to student innovation.”

At Pitch Day, second place of $5,000 and the People’s Choice Award went to the Honey Badgers, who combined investigative journalism with big data in a website called ConnectWatch, which would allow reporters to dig into three databases—public expenditures, business registrations and leadership, and state campaign contributions—to connect the dots between campaign contributions and public spending.

Team captain Will Drabold and teammates Sam Howard and Danielle Keeton-Olsen—who each earned journalism degrees through the Honors Tutorial College in the spring—share an interest in political reporting. Keeton-Olsen brought in Abdalah El-Barrad, a junior math and economics major, who invited his friend Logan Leland, a junior majoring in computer science.

“Abdalah and Logan could actually do a prototype,” Drabold said. “It wasn’t just three journalism students going, ‘Well, we could link that and that and that.’”

In fact, with the journalism students out in the real world, El-Barrad and Leland remain at work on the project.

“I’ve started collecting data from other states,” Leland said, “and my computer science advisor wants to work with me on making it better.”

Politics also was behind the winner of the $5,000 Diversity Prize, awarded for strategies that reach out to underserved or underrepresented audiences. In the Innovation Challenge, captain Miguel Gomez and teammates Tanvir Iqbal and McKenzie Powell, all three spring graduates, and junior business major Alex Stewart pitched Minerva, a free web and mobile app that offers market-based rewards for political engagement. (The app is named for the Roman goddess of wisdom, Iqbal said; he got the idea for the name after seeing a mosaic of the goddess at the Library of Congress.)

In Minerva’s central feature, “Volunteer,” users log political engagement activities—translating at voting places, helping people register to vote, educating new citizens about voting—to earn a reward from a business sponsor: a free latte at Starbucks or a discount at Dick’s Sporting Goods. In the “Community” section, users look up activities by culture (say, Latino or Muslim) to see how key issues are handled in different areas of the country. The “United Game” prepares users for the U.S. citizenship test.

Gomez, son of a naturalized American citizen, was inspired by his mother’s first trip to the voting polls.

“She was really excited because she finally got to vote,” said Gomez. “But she wasn’t really fluent in English and she had trouble getting in touch with organizations to help her to vote. I could see that the only way she got to vote was because she had help, and that was a problem, and realized that there was a solution.”

Gomez earned a bachelor’s degree in physics. Powell received bachelor’s degrees in journalism and global studies. Iqbal earned a master’s degree in civil engineering. They hope to reconvene to take Minerva from pitch to reality.

“I’m pretty sure we’re going to be talking about this again,” Iqbal said. “We put a lot into this, not only for winning the competition.”

— Corinne Colbert, BSJ ’87, MA ’93, is a freelance writer based in Athens .

Feature photo: (left to right) Scripps Innovation Challenge judges Battino L. Batts Jr., director of the Journalism Fund for the Scripps Howard Foundation at E.W. Scripps Company; MJ Franklin, social producer at Mashable; Leah Petrovich, BSJ ’13, project manager at Branding Brand; and Mizell Stewart III, news executive for Gannett’s USA TODAY Network, review notes before deciding the winner on March 14. Photo by Margaret Sabec, MA ’17