Knight Foundation Funds Open Source Innovation
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a renowned, national foundation that seeks opportunities to support communities, journalism and new technologies for a better informed tomorrow. The foundation strives to provide citizens with the tools and information they need to contribute to a thriving democracy.
As a leader (and large funder) in the news industry, the Knight Foundation is transforming the way communities and journalists create and disseminate content. Each year the foundation grants millions of dollars to this initiative and while it prides itself on giving to a wide range of projects, there does seem to be an exciting underlying trend—open source.
Take this year’s Knight News Challenge winners for example, the majority are either founded in open source technologies or have crucial open content components. A few of the top winners include:
- DocumentCloud will be software, a Web site, and a set of open standards that will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web.
- MediaBugs aims to change this climate, by promoting transparency and providing recognition for those who admit and fix their mistakes. MediaBugs will create a public test web site in a U.S. city for people to report errors in any news report – online or off-line.
- Data Visualization will create a suite of easy-to-use tools for anyone to use on any standard set of data ranging from government databases to demographics and statistics.
To take it a step further, the foundation also funded Sunshine Week—a national campaign to raise public awareness and support for open government issues. So, as ReadWriteWeb reports, “The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage." As open-source practitioners and open data advocates, we are thrilled to see this trend.
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