Twelve Fresh Ideas for Transforming the Places We Live With Open Data

This year, the Knight News Challenge has been soliciting project proposals that would open up and leverage government data anywhere at the national, state and local levels (in the U.S. and abroad). As of last week, 886 projects are vying for a share of the $5 million in funding, all in response to this question: "How can we make the places we live more awesome through data and technology?"

Amid all of the submissions are some familiar innovations we've already encountered at Atlantic Cities, formerly as nascent ideas now competing for a chance to scale up: our favorite guerrillawayfinding campaign from Raleigh, North Carolina; Code for America's playful StreetMix web app; the San Francisco-based Urban Prototyping Festival; and a community-driventransportation planning project based on the kind of data analytics we wrote about here.

But that's barely scratching the surface of all the proposals that Knight has corralled. We've put together a list of 12 ideas from the competition that are new to us and that we think would be worth developing (and we've included the applicants' description of their programs). Through Friday, you can comment on (or "applaud") any of the submissions as applicants continue to refine their proposals. On the 29th, Knight plans to announce a set of semifinalists, who will be invited to complete more detailed proposals. The final winners (there's no predetermined number of them) will then be announced in June. 

Read the full list at The Atlantic Cities.