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?
