Panel Discussion on the Knight Drupal Initiative

The Knight Drupal Initiative is a partnership between the Knight Foundation and the Drupal Community to provide funding for grant proposals that explore digital publishing to transform their respective communities.

At DrupalCon DC 2009, almost half a million USD were awarded to the following projects:

• Documentation sprints for better docs and to grow the team: Create concise, up-to-date instructions for Drupal software packages so that tech novices can use the tools; (Winner: Programmer Addison Berry/ add1sun)
• Local Publishing Platform and Regional Aggregation Hub: Create a free publishing system to make it easier for several geographic communities to share local news with each other; (Winner: Oregon-based funnymonkey.com (billfitzgerald)
• Facebook Application for Personal or Community Online Newspaper: Allow 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; (Winner: Software developer Dave Cohen)
• Instant Syndicating Standards: 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; (Winner: Instant Syndicating Standards, a Brazilian non-profit)
• Distributed Micro-Blogging: Add a micro-blogging function to Drupal that will allow users to transmit brief text updates on their Web sites (Winner: Web developer Rob Loach)
• Expanding Context_UI, Spaces, Messaging and Notifications, FeedAPI and Maps and Open Sourcing 8trees and Managing News: 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; (Development Seed, a Washington D.C. firm)

We plan to give a quick overview of these projects.