The Knight News Challenge opens its new Garage

As some of you may have gathered from my recent Tweets, I've been working with the Knight News Challenge team with this year's Knight News Challenge. Our goal? To help improve the range, quality and diversity of this year's applicants for the 2008-09 News Challenge (which will give away roughly $5MM to support open source projects that move forward local discourse and sharing/discussion around news, community, social media, visualization.) If you want to find out more, take a look at last year's winners and their great (and now, well-funded) ideas and innovations.

This year, we've added something new to the Challenge: the Garage, a community where current and potential applications for funding can enter their ideas, share comments and peer review, and request mentor support to improve their application before they submit it. If you have an idea but aren't sure how to flesh it out, the Garage can help incubate it so you can put forth the best application possible.

To find out more, our Online Community Manager, Kristen Taylor, explains:

The Garage is open as of today; the KNC08 will start taking applications as of September 2nd, closing on November 1st. If you are a news addict, a citizen journalist, a social media person, an open source developer with a yen for social justice or even a previous applicant, come and check it out and look around!

To participate, join the FriendFeed room and follow us on Twitter.