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eNewsletter - October 2, 2008
A Contest for Innovative Community-Based Media Projects
This contest from the The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will award as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news and information exchange. The deadline for applications is Nov. 1, 2008.
With the slogan “You Invent It. We Fund It!” the contest is open to community-minded innovators worldwide, from software designers to journalists to citizens and students of any age. Do you have a big idea for informing and inspiring a geographic community using social media, Web 2.0 tools or OpenID? How about exchanging information via video, photos or text messaging? A way to integrate game theory with web browsing to support local community engagement? Come on, push the edge – we’re seeking true innovation!
To support applications, Knight has created a new incubator – the News Challenge Garage – where prospective applicants can receive peer reviews and mentoring from screeners and awardees from previous years. A diverse group of developers, online journalists, nonprofit evangelists, video bloggers and social media experts are on hand to coach. The 50 mentors are available to coach and guide everyone who enters a project in the Garage. They include Vidoop’s Chris Messina, Spot.us’ David Cohn, Contentious editor Amy Gahran, Placeblogger’s Lisa Williams, Beth Kanter, J.D. Lasica and many other digital media specialists.
The incubator's blog features stories about mentoring already under way.
Previous winning projects include:
- ChiTownDailyNews.org: Recruits and trains a network of 75 citizen journalists – one in each Chicago neighborhood.
- Everyblock.com: Allows citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.
- Spot.us: Pays for local investigative reporting by soliciting financial support from the public.
Winning entries must have three elements: 1) use of a digital media; 2) delivery of news or information on a shared basis to 3) a geographically defined community. Entries must be open-source and share the software and knowledge created.
An online entry form is available here. The web site will accept applications through Nov. 1, 2008. Winners should be announced by the spring of 2009.