Getting funding through the Knight Community Information Challenge: A guide for innovators from Knight Foundation. The challenge runs through July 1, 2013.

Many of us live in communities where a rather remarkable collision is taking place— talented civic leaders and technologists are working together to make government more open, responsive and efficient. Talented people have built dozens of innovative projects, from live transit tracking to neighborhood crime mapping to open spending data. But we need more. We need more people building new technology and improving existing code; more people pushing government to open public data; more civically-minded businesses built on open government. 

Earlier this year we opened the Knight News Challenge: Open Gov, looking for ideas that might improve the way citizens and governments interact. This week, Knight Foundation is launching a contest with a more local focus — the Knight Community Information Challenge. While the contest funds all types of news and information projects, the priority of this year’s contest is to fund projects that make “open government” more tangible and useful to people in a specific community—which makes this contest a unique opportunity for anyone wanting to build and test a new idea locally.

All Community Information Challenge projects are done in partnership with a local community foundation, whose funding we match. The community foundation applies to us with the project, so if you’re interested you’ll want to locate your local foundation. If you need help, contact Bahia Ramos at [email protected].

You can find out more in the SlideShare above or by joining us for a Q & A at 3 p.m. ET Friday May 3 – you can register here.  Applications are being accepted May 1 – June 1 at informationneeds.org.

Hope you’ll join us.

By Chris Sopher, Journalism Program Associate, Knight Foundation