The Knight Foundation News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal

(Quick Update 10/11/09 – see Zachary Seeward’s post about how the Knight Foundation is considering changing the terms of grants in the future, as well as Patrick Thornton’s piece on how the Foundation is assembling a team to continue working on the code base produced by the Everyblock team).

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, among many other philanthropic initiatives in culture, community, and journalism generally, has been running the Knight News Challenge since 2007. Its basically a grant competition, in which various digital journalism initiatives compete for a pool of grants amounting to $25 million total over five years.

One aspect which makes the Knight News Challenge unique – other than the size of the grant pool – is that the winning grantees are required to:

1. Use digital, open-source technology.
2. Distribute news in the public interest.
3. Test your project in a local community.

It looks like a fantastic strategy: encourage innovation, provide funding without forcing the grantees into short-term, must-build-immediate-ROI type thinking, and share the results with the broader community through open source.

Knight - Photo by Ruth L., cc-by-nd license

Two recent successful projects from Knight Foundation grantees – EveryBlock and Village Soup (which I’ve written about before in this blog), however, suggest there might be some gaps in the Foundation’s overall plan.

The core of the issue is this question: once the Knight Foundation funding is expended, what happens to the open source project the grant process mandates?

Do the creators truly create, engage with, and sustain an open source community around the code they release, contributing to and supporting the open source version, or do they “take it private”, leaving the open source seed to either take root and grow (or wither) on its own?

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Open Source Microblogging

Many folks have been looking for an “Open Source Twitter” for about as long as Twitter itself has been popular.

Here’s a shortlist of those projects I’m aware of – please do let me know in the comments if there are others I’ve missed.

• Sweetter 2.0 – an “open source and fun microbloging service . . . being develop[ed] by SUGUS (group of GNU users from the University of Seville).” Go here for code. Based on TurboGears, a python-based web application framework. Affero GPL (AGPL)
• Jisko – Affero GPL (AGPL) licensed framework for microblogging, PHP 5 and MySQL. I had to use Google Translation to try to read the wiki, as I no hablo espanol.
• Yonkly – written in ASP.NET by Emad Ibrahim. Code hasn’t yet been fully released but you can get an early version here. (License is not yet specified though it is described as “open source.”)
• Twoorl – a GPL (3) implementation of a microblogging service in Erlang using ErlyWeb. Started (and entirely written?) by Yariv Sadan
• Prologue – not really a microblogging platform per se, but a Wordpress Theme which could be used as a microblogging platform. (Note that the Prologue post itself kills Firefox 3 for me – caveat browser). Prologue is available under the GPL, as is Wordpress itself.
• Laconica, which is the software which powers Identi.ca. Also Affero GPL (AGPL). This is perhaps the most robust, and is based on the Open Micro Blogging protocol. It also embeds creative commons licensing on the content people publish, which I think is great but others may have issues with.

Am I missing other open source twitter approaches?

Has anyone created a Movable Type theme which does microblogging?