Today 18 reviewers are gathering in Miami to help us review the semifinalists in the Knight News Challenge on Open Gov. All 40 ideas to improve the way that citizens and government interact are available on the News Challenge site.

By the end of the day, with the help of these journalists, engineers and entrepreneurs, we expect to have a group of finalists that we’ll examine more deeply over the next few weeks.

Our next public announcement will be that of the winners, on June 24 at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass.

Please note if you are one of those finalists, you can expect to hear from us by next week. If you’re not a finalist, you can expect to receive a declination e-mail from us by early May. We may also follow up with several projects individually if we feel it is better suited to another funding option at Knight, like our Prototype Fund.

We’d like to thank the following people who have taken two days to join us:

• Stacy Donohue/Omidyar Network
• Aziz Gilani/DFJ Mercury
• Sean Gourley/Quid
• Jim Gray/Mayor of Lexington, Ky. (Note: Gray will recuse himself from conversations involving his proposal)
• Kit Hadley/St. Paul Public Library
• Hilary Hoeber/IDEO
• Ginny Hunt/Google.org
• Waldo Jaquith/The State Decoded
• Emi Kolawole/The Washington Post
• Seamus Kraft/Open Gov Foundation
• Matt Lira
• Emily McGinty/Duke University
• Andrew McLaughlin/betaworks
• Dan O’Neil/Smart Chicago Collaborative
• Laura Ramos/Gannett
• Emily Ramshaw/The Texas Tribune
• Peter Spear
• Martin Tisne/Omidyar Network

We closed the News Challenge on Open Gov on March 19 with 886 applications.

By Elizabeth R. Miller, communications associate at Knight Foundation