Cronkite Professor Speaks at Conference on Open Data Movements

Retha Hill, director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will conduct a workshop Thursday at a conference in Mexico City on international open data movements. Hill is a presenter at the 2012 Ciudad Móvil DF Conference, an effort to promote open government through technology and mobile applications. The conference, which is designed for government officials in Mexico, will explore how to make government information public and freely available to all citizens without copyright restrictions, patents or other mechanisms of control. Hill’s workshop will focus on the benefits of giving programmers access to government data and will feature tools such as AZ Elected, a mobile app developed in the New Media Innovation Lab to help Arizonans locate elected officials based on the user’s geographic location. As director of the New Media Innovation Lab, Hill works with students from multiple disciplines, including journalism and computer engineering, to research and develop new digital media products for media companies. She joined the Cronkite faculty in 2007 after nearly eight years at BET, where she was vice president for content for BET Interactive, the online unit of Black Entertainment Television and the most visited Internet site specializing in African-American content. Before joining BET, Hill was executive producer for special projects at washingtonpost.com. The Ciudad Móvil DF Conference is curated by Future Tense, a partnership among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation and Slate Magazine. Co-sponsors include Aventura Capital Partners, Mexico City’s E-Government Commission and Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología. About Future Tense Future Tense is a partnership among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation and Slate Magazine to explore emerging technologies and their transformative effects on society and public policy. Central to the partnership is a series of events in Washington, D.C., that take in-depth, provocative looks at issues that, while little understood today, will dramatically reshape the policy debates of the coming decade.