Forwarded from the Knight Foundation:

Things have really been chugging along here at the Knight News Challenge 2008, with lots of innovative new outreach coinciding with this year’s contest’s official start. The worldwide contest reopened September 2nd, 2008, with another $5 million in funding available for digital media experiments to innovate news and communication before applications close on November 1st.

We’re writing you this year because we’d like to encourage you to submit an idea again this year, and we have new tools and resources to help you succeed.

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!

Winning entries must have three elements:

Use or create digital, open-source technology as the code base
Serve the public interest
Benefit one or more specific geographic communities
Entries must be open-source and share the software and knowledge created.

New in 2008: The News Challenge Garage

To support applications this year, 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. To date, over 40 applications are already incubating in the Drupal-based Garage site. A diverse group of developers, online journalists, nonprofit evangelists, video bloggers and social media experts are on hand to coach at http://garage.newschallenge.org. 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. For a 'floatable' video introducing the Garage in a variety of languages, visit DotSub to find out more.

Want to get more involved?

Apply at www.newschallenge.org !

   

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