The Knight News Challenge has re-opened for the third year, and is awarding $5M in funding for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news and information exchange. Winning entries must have three elements: 1) use of a digital media; 2) delivery of  news or information on a shared basis to 3) a geographically defined community.

As the press release says, the contest is open to community-minded innovators worldwide, from software designers to journalists to citizens and students of any age. Entries must be open-source and share the software and knowledge created.

To help encourage prospective applicants to come up with ideas, we're holding a series of meet ups in the US and Canada--with the first one scheduled for New York on September 9th, 2008 from 7-9 PM at CUNY School of Journalism in Midtown.  For more info and or to RSVP go to the link at Facebook--In an hour or so, we will take 20 minutes to go over the program, then work with applicants to brainstorm ideas, show them how to get them into the Garage/incubator, and apply.

We are planning meet ups in Sept and Oct for Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Boston, Austin, TX, Denver/Boulder, Chicago, Los Angels, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Vancouver. If you are interested, email taylor@knightfoundation.org or mernit@ the same for more info. We will post a complete list on the newschallenge site.