The Knight News Challenge recently extended its online submission deadline to December 15th to attract a broader applicant pool, particularly targeting software developers and entrepreneurs. The fourth annual Knight News Challenge (www.newschallenge.org), sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, awards up to $5 million a year for innovative uses of digital technology aimed at helping to transform news and information sharing. The competition is currently accepting applications and previous winners have included several members of the Drupal community.

The Challenge seeks ideas that will change how community news and information gets distributed. The competition asks applicants to submit their ideas for use of open source digital technology to distribute news and information in the public interest in a defined geographic community. Past winners from the Drupal community include:

• Radio Engage (Radio Drupal). Using Drupal, this winner created a turnkey web site for radio news organizations.
• Benjamin Melançon of Agaric Design Collective and a Google Summer of Code student won for the development of a "Related Items" module for Drupal.
• Lisa Williams won for Placeblogger, which was developed using Drupal's built in aggregation ability.
• Tony Shawcross won for The Open Media Project to develop and implement open-source tools designed to free the staff of public access stations and community technology centers from many repetitive tasks.

In addition to these Knight News Challenge winners, the Knight Drupal Initiative awarded over $485,000 to six Drupal projects that that make it easier for people to join the digital conversation by lowering barriers to online publishing. Those winners included:

• Addison Berry (Documentation Team lead), to create concise, up-to-date instructions for Drupal software packages so that tech novices can use the tools.
• funnymonkey.com, to create a free publishing system to make it easier for several geographic communities to share local news with each other.
• Dave Cohen, to create a system that allows anyone anywhere to easily create an online news site in Drupal whose content can be published on Facebook to reach extended social networks.
• Instant Syndicating Standards, to 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, to add a micro-blogging function to Drupal that will allow users to transmit brief text updates on their Web sites.
• Development Seed, to 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 news stories so they can be displayed on a map.

While Knight News Challenge-winning ideas are diverse, they have a common element: they gather and disperse information in a particular geographic area or community. The Foundation requires all submissions to meet that requirement. The competition has no requirements on participants' age or location and invites teams to enter as well. Applicants are invited to apply either in the "open" category, in which the public will be able to review, rate and comment on their idea, or the "closed" category, in which only Knight staff and a panel of digital media experts will review their proposal.

This year's extended deadline of December 15th offers members of the Drupal community even more opportunities to continue their long history of winning Knight News Challenge awards. If you have a great idea that could help change the way communities share news and information, go to www.newschallenge.org and submit your News Challenge entry today!