As of now, there are nineteen days left to apply for the Knight News Challenge, the yearly $5MM contest to find innovative ideas about delivering information to specific geographic communities.

To find out more about how to apply and win funding for your idea, join me, Kristen Taylor, this Thursday at one of two meetups in Austin:

This Thursday, 3:30pm at the University of Texas at Austin (Burson Conference Room at the College of Communication building–Room 4.128 in the CMA Building) Map

This Thursday, 7-8pm at Pluck (200 Academy Drive, plenty of parking) Map

Here’s the Facebook invite and the Upcoming invite.

I’ll also be at the Austin Maker Faire on Saturday and Sunday (details).

Any questions, please let us know in the comments below. And if you would like to work through your idea before you apply, please go to the News Challenge Garage and request a mentor (remember that you still need to apply through the main News Challenge site here).

This Thursday at 7pm, join Knight Foundation Online Community Manager Kristen Taylor and the Berkman Blog group at Harvard to discuss your great ideas for the News Challenge. (Map)

We’ll focus on your questions and talk about the News Challenge Garage incubator; if you have questions about the meetup, let us know in the comments. Please check the Facebook invite for details.

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And, thanks to everyone in Vancouver for a great meetup led by Susan Mernit at Rain City Studios last night.

Great pictures from the event by Tris Hussey are on Flickr here, and there is a new collaborative Barcamp wiki area.

We look forward to seeing what the Vancouver community comes up with, and to meeting up in Boston this Thursday–

On Tuesday night, Netsquared DC chairs Matt Stempeck (pictured below, far right) and Gabriela Schneider rallied over forty people to a News Challenge (the $5 million yearly contest on innovative digital news delivery ideas) meetup at Google’s D.C. headquarters.

Local developers and interested community organizers asked thoughtful questions about the News Challenge contest and the News Challenge Garage, the new incubator site to work through News Challenge ideas before applying. Knight looks forward to seeing the News Challenge entries from this area.

The full schedule of upcoming meetups is listed at the bottom of the News Challenge home page.

You can join Susan Mernit and Heidi Miller at next week’s meetups:

- Oct 6: Vancouver: 7:00pm - 9:00pm; Rain City Studios, 420-1 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC (Details).

- Oct. 7: Seattle: 7:00pm - 8:30pm, Location TBD. (Details.)

Look for more information soon about the upcoming Atlanta and Austin News Challenge meetups–

Last night was the fourth of the Knight News Challenge North American meetups, this one in Chicago, hosted by Columbia College’s Barbara Iverson. (If you didn’t know, the Knight News Challenge is in the third year of a program that gives away $5MM a year to digital innovations.)

With about 30 curious innovators attending last night, The Knight Foundation’s Kristen Taylor led the BarCamp-style workshop, clarifying the Knight News Challenge mission, requirements and finally taking questions on the application process.

Past KNC project winner ChiTownDailyNews, represented by Community Manager Frank Edwards, showed up and shared an update on how that project is progressing–now ChiTownDailyNews has expanded to 75 reporters representing 45 Chicago neighborhoods and hosts workshops on video, radio and photo journalism in an ever-expanding training program.

Also, Brian Boyer, who was recently awarded a Knight scholarship as part of a program to train software developers to become journalists, shared his experiences as a developer pursuing a Master’s degree in journalism at Medill.

And there were a lot of questions! The group was highly engaged and ready to shape their own applications. A few of the questions that came up, with the answers:

How do you define “news,” and how timely does it need to be?

Kristen pointed folks to the list of past winners for examples of what could be considered “news,” including projects like Dan Pacheco’s Printcasting and Alexander Zolotarev’s Sochi Olympics Project; she also pointed out that if you’re submitting a mobile application, the definition of “timeliness” might be different than, say, for a blogging idea.

How does activity in the Garage affect the application process or outcome?

The judges don’t specifically consider activity in the Garage as criteria for winning the Knight News Challenge; you don’t get points for page views.

Is participating in the Garage mandatory?

No, in fact, keep in mind that while the Garage is for incubating your application, remember that you must eventually apply directly from the News Challenge site. However, the benefits of participating in the Garage are still the same: you can sign up to have a mentor help you shape your application, you can get feedback from the community and other applicants, and you can network to fill any talent voids in your application through the job list.

Why can we only use 300 words?

In general, we’ve discovered that if you can’t clearly explain your vision in 300 words, you probably need to spend some time honing it down. A clear elevator speech is the first step to a viable idea.

Is there overlap between judges and mentors? Who are the judges and what is their background?
Mentors are past winners who have been through the process and are putting their winning ideas into motion. Mentors aren’t judges. There are about 15 Knight News Challenge screeners whose job is to take the approximately 3,000 applications to about 64, and those screeners are rock stars of digital innovtion and social media, like Andrew Hyde of StartupWeekend, Brian Oberkirch, Chris Messina, Mary Hodder, Debbie Mobile Jones and George Kelly. The judges are a smaller team that take the applications to the final round and make the final determination of winners, and they have similarly diverse backgrounds in digital innovation.

Thanks to all who attended and participated for making this a great interactive meetup!

Reminder: the deadline for application is November 1st, follow this link to apply now!

Today, the Knight News Challenge, a $5 million annual contest funding innovative digital ideas for local news delivery, begins officially accepting applications. You can apply here.

If you would like to work through your idea before applying and have expert mentors help, the News Challenge Garage is a new site dedicated to improving your idea before you apply. The Garage remains open until November 1, 2008, when contest submissions close.

To learn more and receive help in person from the News Challenge team, plan to attend one of the upcoming meetup events (entire schedule soon). Mark your calendar for September 9th at CUNY in NYC; details on the Upcoming invitation; please RSVP on the Facebook event page.

Still unsure whether to apply? Marika Lynch has profiled a few of the teams matched with mentors in the News Challenge Garage. Below, past winner Lisa Williams of Placeblogger.com

and contest hopeful Danielle Gaines:

Reason No. 1 to seek out a Knight News Challenge mentor, according to software developer Lisa Williams: they’ll actually know what you’re talking about.

Sounds simple. But in an at-times isolating profession like hers, only a finite number of people with a similar knowledge base can offer informed opinions, Williams said.

“It’s a way to take the heat off family and friends tired of you talking about online communities,” Williams, a 2007 Knight winner said, only half-joking. “I’m sure my family and friends are sick of me saying ‘hyperlocal.’”

Williams, who founded placeblogger.com, the largest live site of local weblogs, is one of 50 mentors offering insight on the News Challenge. She and placeblogger’s Tish Grier have been paired with applicant Danielle Gaines, who wants to create a platform for Native American kids to share their stories using video and other forms of media.

The two have just started to correspond about the project, but Williams and Grier have already given Gaines much to think about.

“It was like we were speaking the same language,” Gaines said. “We went for over an hour on our first call, and it was just like everything made sense. I felt like I was being guided, and these are the next steps I have to take.”

The best piece of advice Williams gave her was to write a short essay focusing on two words: why bother. Instead of talking about what makes her project unique, Williams told Gaines she should tailor her essay and then her application to explain why the project is so important that it should be funded.

“It is helping me to consider what the value is here,” Gaines said. “It’s going to help me tell a compelling story and hopefully persuade Knight Foundation to sponsor us.”

Good mentors were essential to Williams when she created placeblogger.com, which she launched before winning the Challenge with a lot of passion and $3,000 of “sell-all-your-posessions-on-eBay” money. The Knight grant allowed her to expand it exponentially, she said.

In the early days of a project, she often needed an outside ear to bend, she said.

“The pernicious thing is you are always comparing your project, and its flaws…to other people’s finished projects. That can be very demotivating,” Williams said. By talking to others, software creators are reminded that kinks are part of the creative process.

Williams urges everyone who feels strongly about their idea to apply – whether or not they consider themselves someone who would typically seek out foundation grant money.

“The Knight Foundation has both the scale and the sort of insight to actually change how people get information, particulary civic information, and news online in the next decade,” Williams. “If that sounds good to you and you want to be a part of that, you should apply.”

Questions? Let us know in the comments.

This week, leading thinkers in digital media will begin to mentor many of the thirty-five projects in the News Challenge Garage, a new incubator site for the News Challenge contest (a Knight media initiative that awards ~$5 million a year to innovative news delivery projects).

You can join the Garage by signing up here; you may also want to follow progress through the Garage news feed and the Garage new project feed.

You can ask questions about the Garage in the welcome blog entry comments, through the contact form, or on Seesmic, a video service where members post short videos and video responses.

Heidi Miller, who is heading up marketing for the News Challenge this year, has posted on Seesmic and others have joined the conversation with their video responses:

Knight News Challenge offers $5MM in fundingPitching bloggers, podcasters and vidcasters! If your audience includes citizen journalists, digital innovators or open source developers, the Knight News Challenge is a not-for-profit contest awarding $5M in funding. If you have a blog or podcast and think your readers/viewers would like to enter, email or comment to sign up to receive information on this year’s Challenge to share with your own audience.

Have a question about the Garage? Let us know.

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.)