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).

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--

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!

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.

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.)