Six new Drupal projects will make it easier for anyone to join the digital conversation by lowering the barriers to online publishing. These projects have received a portion of the $485,380 in funding provided by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI). The winners of the Knight Drupal Initiative were announced at the DrupalCon conference in Washington, DC.

These powerful tools will help people exchange information and ideas about their communities – which we hope will make them more engaged and vibrant places to live,

said Jose Zamora, Knight Foundation’s Journalism Program Associate.

The KDI award winners are as follows:

• Addison Berry (Documentation Team lead) will create concise, up-to-date instructions for Drupal software packages so that tech novices can use the tools.
• funnymonkey.com will create a free publishing system to make it easier for several geographic communities to share local news with each other.
• Dave Cohen will create a system that allows anyone, anywhere to easily create a Drupal online news site whose content can be published on Facebook in order to reach an extended social network.
• Instant Syndicating Standards will develop software that allows people to create and share a personalized stream of information within their social network, helping them to filter and recommend articles to others interested in the same issues.
• Rob Loach will add a micro-blogging function to Drupal that will allow users to transmit brief text updates on their Web sites.
• Development Seed will create a tool that will help residents better communicate and understand information about their community by allowing them to geo-tag – or add a geographical identification – to stories so they can be displayed on a map.

The Drupal community established the application process, vetted the projects and recommended the top choices to Knight Foundation. Five of the six applications were successfully vetted by the Drupal community and an additional application worked directly with Knight.

From June 2008 to November 2008 community members were encouraged to apply to the KDI using the following process:

1. Create a proposal on groups.drupal.org.
2. Solicit comments and votes from Drupal community members.
3. Monthly IRC meetings were held to discuss and vote on these proposals. Those which had 20 votes with a rating of 4.5 or better were automatically nominated for consideration by Knight Foundation.
4. Proposals that had not received sufficient votes were also discussed and had the opportunity to present their case in IRC to the KDI coordinators on two occassions (with the opportunity to improve the proposal between meetings).

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation invests in journalism excellence worldwide and in the vitality of U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950, the foundation has granted more than $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

The Drupal community wishes to thank the Knight Foundation for their generous support of these six projects.