During the opening remarks of America's Digital Inclusion Summit, Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen announced a new contest to develop web apps that would access government and community data and services. The Apps for Inclusion Challenge is a joint-effort by the FCC and Knight Foundation to tap the power of broadband and increase transparency in American government.

"Knight is teaming up with the FCC to create the Knight/FCC Apps for Inclusion Challenge. The concept is straightforward: Both Knight and FCC believe in transparent government and universal digital access as democrative ideals. To prove it, we'll be offering cash prizes to the software developers who can invent the best technological solutions to create easier online access to government services and information," said Ibargüen.

Details of the contest will be announced soon. Read the official press release here.

So far, the Challenge has awarded $7.3 million for 45 ideas in communities large and small. The projects include funding public interest online news sites; creating online hubs to engage communities around specific issues and examining a region's changing media landscape in order to help fill the voids, among many others. Click here to read about past KCIC winners.

Live chats will take place at noon EDT Feb. 16 and 22 at www.informationneeds.org to help answer questions about the challenge. Visit the site sign up for a reminder.

To help educate leaders of community and place-based foundations about media trends and information needs, Knight will host the third Media Learning Seminar March 1 and 2 in Miami. To find out more about the seminar and to register, click here.

Secretary Clinton mentioned the launch of a competition to improve information exchanges:

"... There are companies, individuals, and institutions working on ideas and applications that could already advance our diplomatic and development objectives. The State Department will be launching an innovation competition to give this work an immediate boost. We’ll be asking Americans to send us their best ideas for applications and technologies that help break down language barriers, overcome illiteracy, connect people to the services and information they need. Microsoft, for example, has already developed a prototype for a digital doctor that could help provide medical care in isolated rural communities. We want to see more ideas like that. And we’ll work with the winners of the competition and provide grants to help build their ideas to scale."

You can watch video of the speech at C-SPAN. A full transcript of the speech is available at the U.S. Department of State.

So we decided to take a closer look at the contests globally, to see if we could adapt any lessons to improve the News Challenge.  We reviewed all 29 contests, including the Stockholm Challenge, NetSquared  N2Y4 Challenge, We Media Pitch It and Sunlight Lab Apps for America contests, and explored their judging criteria, outreach and marketing plans, application and selection processes. Along the way, we also interviewed former News Challenge judges and entrepreneurs for their insights too.

Today, we want to share the resulting study, conducted by Arabella Advisors, with the greater community. We hope anyone running or hoping to launch a contest – or innovators searching for funding – will find it as useful as we did.

You can access the PDF of this study here.

- Mayur Patel, Gary Kebbel and Jose Zamora

Note: This post is cross-posted at the News Challenge blog.

Clips available for 1H2O users (remixers) also include footage from South Korean, Nigerian, and Mexican TV news. Link TV will also award prizes to the best remixers of the 1H2O footage. Check out the quick remix example below:

Know the News allows users to cut and paste video clips from international broadcast media outlets to make their own mini-documentaries. The clips show different perspectives on one topic, and come from such outlets as CNN, MSNBC, and Al Jazeera.

The remixes are meant to resemble Global Pulse programs. Global Pulse, a 4-minute program shown on Link TV (available to digital cable viewers), shows how different nations see the same news in different ways.

The University of Miami’s Knight Center for International Media, the Independent Television Service, and News Trust teamed up with Link TV on the project.

In 2008, UM’s Sanjeev Chatterjee and Ali Habashi produced the documentary One Water about international droughts and conflict. The One Water project now includes curriculum development and an environmental journalism web site, which is hosting an online video competition about water issues until August 15^th.

Students and fellows at M.I.T.’s Center for Future Civic Media are also working on interactive programs that highlight environmental news, including vanishing forests (Brad Simpson's "Chop Watch") and CO2 emissions (Leo Bonanni and Matthew Hockenberry's "Source Map"). C4FCM Co-Director Chris Csikszentmihalyi’s project extrACT informs and engages citizens living in rural U.S. communities where natural gas drilling takes place.

Last week Development Seed released new open-source code in preparation for part of their Knight funded mapping project. This piece of software allows anyone to switch between mapping providers without writing any code.

Development Seed received a $195,000 grant to add a mapping tool to Drupal. With it, people will be able to geo-tag stories and see their location on a map. The developers are also creating a news monitor that allows people to aggregate multiple local news sources based on topic or issue to the open and free Drupal platform.

Knight Foundation’s grant to Development Seed is one of a package of six grants that made up the Knight Drupal Initiative, a contest that tapped into a massive network of computer programmers to get their recommendations for speeding media innovation. In separate posts I will talk about each of the grants.

The Drupal community is a group of more than 350,000 members, mostly computer programmers who write free software together, collaboratively, on the web and the individuals and organizations that use the software to publish content online. You can learn more about Drupal at: www.Drupal.org.

A video on how this new piece of software works is available on Planet Drupal TV.

Do you have innovative ideas on how to use this mapping tool to improve the way you receive, share and understand news about your community?

The Knight News Challenge contest has allowed Knight Foundation to partner in digital media projects around the world. The contest provides a global view of new media trends and helps Knight Foundation discover some of the information needs communities have in the digital age.

In the second year of the Knight News Challenge Knight discovered two major trends:

1. The use of Drupal open-source software as the base for many projects that intended to bring digital journalism to local communities; and
2. The need for local online news sites.

Out of the Drupal trend, Knight created in partnership with a massive community of programmers, the Knight Drupal Initiative. This initiative led to the funding of six projects that aim to speed media innovation and lower the barriers to online publishing.

Out of the trend that demonstrated the need for local online news sites Knight hosted a digital journalism meeting. The meeting led to the funding of four online only community news sites. The Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, Chi-Town Daily News and the St. Louis Beacon. Last week the Voice of San Diego received recognition from Investigative Reporters and Editors for bringing citizens in their community the information they need to lead informed lives and hold their governments accountable.

Is there an online news site in your community? Do you think online news sites are the future of news and information? Please comment below.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Is there a Knight News Challenge Project in your community?

View Knight News Challenge Projects in a larger map

The Knight News Challenge projects are designed to be replicable in any community. If there isn't one in yours, please contact us to determine how we can help you bring one of these projects to your community.

The Knight News Challenge seeks to speed media innovation by funding projects that meet three criteria:

1. Use digital open-source technology
2. Distribute news and information
3. In determined geographic areas / local communities

Over the past two years Knight Foundation has funded more than 30 news experiments through the Knight News Challenge. Experiments that use technology in communications creatively to inform local communities.

The Knight News Challenge is a five-year, $25 million initiative that is open to anyone, anywhere in the world.

To learn more about the contest please visit: www.newschallenge.org
The next round of the contest will open this September.

Three hundred and four projects were reviewed. Discussion focused on the fact that four years ago, these local news projects were started by civic-minded people, often with no journalism experience, who thought their communities needed more information about community life, laws and problems. These early grantees often had no idea how to publish information on the web. But they were dedicated, so they taught themselves. Often, to great success. For example, The Forum, in Deerfield, N.H., noticed that after they started publishing in 2005, and became the only public source of local news, voter turnout rose, more people were challenging incumbents in elections and there were fewer uncontested political races.

Now, however, sites like voiceofsandiego.org, MinnPost.com, St. Louis Beacon, Chi-Town Daily News and the New Haven Independent are staffed with professionally trained journalists, so the quality bar has been raised significantly. Local news sites staffed by professional journalists are showing more and more users what kind of sophistication to expect on local news sites. Judges discussed the need to better inform New Voices winners about training modules at J-Learning, Knight Citizen News Network, Knight Digital Media Center and NewsU.

The New Voices program has reached a critical mass where the concern no longer is finding good applicants – there are plenty – but, instead, is the sustainability of the projects, and learning what models work best. Some of the key models in the program now are projects 1) affiliated with university journalism schools, 2) from concerned citizens, 3) associated with libraries, library associations or community non-profits, 4) working with community cable access television, 5) working with local radio stations and 6) that are niche sites.

Lessons learned so far are that 1) frequent content updates are vital, 2) projects built on the backs of students don’t work when the semester ends, 3) projects that outsource web development aren't sustainable because none of the principles knows how to fix things and 4) if the founder of the project for some reason has to stop working on it, that missing vision and drive often dooms the project.

Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab, will announce the new winners.

-- Gary Kebbel, Journalism Program Director

Thursday, September 25th, 6:30-9:30 p.m.
Columbia College, Room 219
33 E. Congress, Chicago, IL

Here's what the notice says:

The Knight News Challenge is in the third year of a program that gives away $5MM a year to digital innovations. 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!

Come to this meet up to find out how to apply, share ideas, and get a chance to talk to KNC evangelists to find out how to apply and improve your chances of winning funding for your great open source idea.

Check out www.newschallenge.org for more information or http://garage.newschallenge.org to start your application now.

Note: You need to RSVP to be able to attend, via Facebook, phone (847-942-6732) or email (miller@knightfdn.org).

This is a truly innovative program to push the edge of what digital democracy and discourse can look like and I hope to see online journalists, media folks, technologists, activists, educators and others I'm not naming here all apply.

(Cross posted to Susan Mernit' Blog)