I served as a Reader for the Knight News Challenge Open Gov Round. It was a great experience that helped me sharpen the focus of my work in the civic innovation sector of the technology industry.
Some of my writing was reffed in the preview blog post:
News Challenge on open gov launches Feb. 12
One of our goals for the News Challenge is to involve more people in the use of technology to solve community problems. “Dozens of developers looking at each other in conference rooms over pizza is never going to lead to making lives better… without the active involvement of real residents expressing real needs and advocating for software that makes sense to them,” wrote Daniel O’Neil of the Smart Chicago Collaborative recently. We hope to help extend the spirit of open gov beyond those conference rooms, and to catalyze partnerships between hackers, civic innovators, governments, journalists and others. As a social investor, we feel the time is right to help advance the field.
Here’s a pic from Round 2 judging:
The winners are all deeply deserving. Here’s a snip from the announcement blog post, Announcing the winners of Knight News Challenge: Open Gov
The News Challenge wouldn’t be possible without the involvement of many people outside Knight Foundation. I want to thank all who contributed ideas and comments to the site especially the eight people (Chase Davis, Hannah Eaves, Elise Hu, Erin Kissane,Jessica Lord, Daniel O’Neil, Dan Schultz and Kio Stark) who served as readers and helped us curate conversations on the site, the 18 who came to Miami on April 15-16 to help us review the final 40 entries, and to Seamus Kraft, Daniel O’Neil, Aron Pilhofer, Laura Ramos, Juliana Rotich, Peter Spear and Tom Steinberg for taking the time to participate with us in final round interviews.