The twitters were ablaze at Future of Civic Media conference at MIT this week. I was in attendance as a beneficiary of one of the Knight News Challenge grants, Rich Gordon‘s brilliant idea to create a new class of programmer/journalists by sending hackers to j-school. Woot!

After 14 years of reading Wired, visiting the Media Lab was fanboy heaven, but the many brilliant folks I met were the truly inspiring part: writers, teachers, film makers, tech-minded journos, media freaks and geeks, innovators and inventors, all focused on making the future work better.

If there’s a belief I’ve taken away from these amazing people, it’s that journalism may be an institution barely alive, but we can rebuild it. We have the technology. More importantly, we have the people. Together we can make it better than it was before. Stronger, faster, and more democratic.

Also, in perfect MIT tradition, beer and geeks got together and conceived a beautiful idea: government needs a bug tracker. Much more on that soon.