Inaugural Meetup for Atlanta Group: Knight News Challenge Info Session
For Hacks/Hackers Atlanta‘s inaugural event and ONA Atlanta‘s second event, come learn about the Knight News Challenge, a grant competition for open-source news and information projects in geographic communities that gives away up to $5 million a year and has helped launch startups like Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock and David Cohn’sSpot.us. In last year’s awards, the News Challenge received over 2,300 applications and gave out 12 grants totaling $2.74 million. Anyone can apply — domestic, international, individuals, companies, for-profit, non-profit. This also doubles as a social/networking event, with doors opening at 6:00 p.m. and casual presentation/info session starting at 6:45ish p.m.
Where: RíRa Midtown (1080 Peachtree St NE, Atlanta, GA 30309)
When: Monday November 22, 6:00 p.m.
Panel: Jennifer 8. Lee, Ian Bogost and Patton Hughes
Register here: http://www.meetup.com/Hacks-Hackers-Atlanta/calendar/15378590/
Come ask about past projects, common mistakes, and what trends the Knight News Challenge has seen. Jennifer 8. Lee, a reviewer and consultant with the Knight News Challenge, is coming down from New York for this event and will answer questions about the competition, which launched Oct. 25 with a deadline of December 1. She will also discuss the technicalities of the contest — including the open-source requirements, timelines and different funding mechanisms. Other Knight News Challenge grantees will be on hand to answer questions, share tips on why they won and talk about how their projects are going: Ian Bogost, videogame researcher and Digital Media professor at Georgia Tech who won a grant just this past year for “The Cartoonist,” a project that will develop a free tool that creates interactive, cartoon-like current event games (“the equivalent of editorial cartoons”) and G. Patton Hughes, publisher of Paulding.com who won a blogging grant in 2007 detailing how a hyperlocal news and social media site can thrive as an advertising-funded entity.
If you haven’t worked on your application yet, or even if you hadn’t thought of applying until now, don’t worry: the initial application process takes only about 20 minutes and was designed to keep you from wasting a lot of time if the Knight Foundation isn’t interested (only once Knight thinks your idea shows promise, will they ask you to write a full proposal). So there’s no excuse not to apply in the next two weeks, even if you only have a germ of an idea!
This event is free on Knight, plus free appetizers will be served! There will be a cash/credit card bar. Parking above Rí Rá is free for the first two hours if you get your ticket validated.
Bio boilerplate: Jennifer 8. Lee is a journalist who is focused on investments in the frontiers of news and information in communities. She helps organize Hacks/Hackers NYC and spearheaded the crowdsourced journo-tech glossary, which has been translated into Arabic and French. She worked for nine years as a reporter for the New York Times and is the author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” a book on Chinese food in America which led her to speak Mandarin on The Colbert Report. NPR has called her a “conceptual scoop artist,” in part because her story that popularized the concept of the “man date.”