Eight projects from the Knight Open Gov news challenge will divide the money, including the Oyez Project, which gets $600,000 to expand its collection of summaries and transcripts from Supreme Court cases to include information from federal appellate courts.
Oyez Project from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.
Another winner, OpenPlans, aims to make it easy for cities and towns to provide information about planning projects.
Plan In A Box from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.
Knight is also dispersing cash — up to $50,000 — to six projects through its Knight Prototype Fund; they include the Open Source Election Results Reporting Service, which hopes to make it easier for jurisdictions to publish election data.
Last week Knight announced it would make grants through that same fund to media organizations with ideas for storytelling and tools that make storytelling easier. The grantees included a project at American Public Media to “determine whether it is possible to provide full-text search of audio files using open source software to automate the creation of text transcriptions” and another by Raleigh Public Record that aims to “converts PDF image files of forms, such as the IRS 990 or campaign finance reports, into structured data,” such as one could access in a spreadsheet.
The Knight Foundation granted $4 million to the Sunlight Foundation last week, and it also named its first editorial director, former Washington Post journalist Michael D. Bolden its editorial director.
