In the yearly News Challenge contest, Knight Foundation awards up to $5 million to innovators with ideas about implementing new local news delivery mechanisms.

To help applicants before they apply, the News Challenge Garage launches (in beta) today as a place for applicants to tinker with their ideas, assisted by past winners and expert mentors. Here’s a video where I explain the Garage:

We’ve used a video-sharing service called DotSub above so that the video can be subtitled in many different languages–the News Challenge is an international contest and open to everyone.

You can help us get the word out by going to this video on the DotSub site here and subtitling it in another language (thanks in advance for your help).

The video is also here on Flickr, another video-sharing service.

The Garage site was built in Drupal, an open source content management platform by pingVision in Boulder, Colorado.

Questions about the Garage? Leave a comment below or on the Garage blog (here’s the feed for Garage updates, and this is the new project feed). Come join us at garage.newschallenge.org!

(And, if you’re into the feed aggregator service FriendFeed, you can join the News Challenge FriendFeed room too.)