John Davidow, Executive Producer

John Davidow was named WBUR’s executive editor of new media in July of 2009, where he has overseen the growth of the award-winning wbur.org. John joined WBUR as news director/managing editor in 2003 after spending more than two decades as a journalist in Boston. John’s work has been recognized with national and regional awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Associated Press and UPI. He has also been the recipient of a number of regional Emmy Awards. Davidow graduated from Tufts University with a bachelor’s in economics.

Joe Spurr, Director

Joe Spurr is a multimedia journalist and a web developer. Before coming to WBUR, he was the staff web developer for San Diego’s NPR station, which he helped completely overhaul in 2009. He pioneered the station’s adoption of Twitter and Google “My Maps” which culminated during the 2007 California wildfires, built layered, interactive maps to help track the drug-related murder surge in Tijuana, and produced in a roving, three-person skeleton crew from the DNC and RNC in 2008. Joe is a Boston native, a graduate of Northeastern University, and a former freelance reporter at The Boston Globe.

Knight Foundation

OpenCourt is generously funded by a grant from the John J. and James L. Knight Foundation. The project is a recipient of a Knight News Challenge Award received in June, 2010. The Knight News Challenge awards as much as $5 million a year for innovative ideas that develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news, conversations and information distribution and visualization.

Knight Foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news and social media experiments.

For the 2010 contest, twelve winners were awarded close to $3 million.

Special Thanks

Very special thanks to the folks at Berkman’s Cyberlaw Clinic and the Citizen Media Law Project.