Appleton Challenge: Submit Civic Hack Idea To Knight Prototype Fund By May 15

Your Challenge: Submit a civic hack grant proposal to the Knight Prototype Fund by MAY 15!

You could be awarded a $35,000 grant to create your civic hack...

"Submitting an idea is easy; just answer five questions through our online form."

The April 30, 2015 post, "20 projects explore new uses of data, media and tech with support of Knight Prototype Fund," from the Knight Foundation says:

"Nearly three years ago we started funding prototypes as a way to make small bets on exploratory work that promises to create new pathways for information that is essential for communities. We’ve focused on providing funding for broad experimentation at this early stage, designing a program that asks small teams to iteratively test their assumptions and share what they’ve learned. We now fund groups of prototype projects each quarter. In addition to $35,000, teams receive training in human-centered design and support from a data science team at Impact Lab to structure their learning objectives. At the end of six months, they meet to share what they’ve learned and the outcomes of their projects.
The deadline for the next round of Prototype Fund grants is May 15. 

Submitting an idea is easy; just answer five questions through our online form."

The Knight Foundation assisted one of the earliest modern civic hackers, Adrian Holovaty, with a visionary grant. As discussed in my earlier post, "Examples of Civic Hacks," after Holovaty created chicagocrime.org, the Knight Foundation awarded him a $1.1 million grant to develop his personal hack into EveryBlock, which Holovaty called chicagocrime.org on steroids. So the Knight Foundation has a strong history of supporting civic hackers -- and they're continuing that support of civic hacking in many ways, including the Knight Prototype Fund. It would be awesome if the Knight Prototype Fund supported a civic hack that originates in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA!

In a post from mid-April, 2015, "Building a better democracy with civic tech," John Bracken of the Knight Foundation talks about the evolution of civic hacking in the US.

"...I was part of a panel on funding civic tech...In preparing for the panel I sketched out the notes below about how we approach civic tech at Knight Foundation...we’re particularly interested in how the American experiment with democracy can be perfected through new digital tools and behaviors. We believe the Internet opens up opportunities to improve the ways in which citizens can work with their government, and vice versa...we supply small, early-stage funding, and support the testing of ideas, through the Knight Prototype Fund...In addition to seeding new ideas and experiments, we seek to help support the transformation of civic institutions in the digital age...Recently, we’ve noticed that the startup projects that are succeeding tend to be those that are able to empathize and collaborate with existing incumbents in the field, such as vendors,

government workers and elected officials...How might we be riskier, faster, more impatient about leveraging these new digital tools and approaches to build a better republic? We in philanthropy are in a privileged position to think longer term, and to take bigger gambles that can positively impact society. I think we can do more."

What civic hack will you submit to the Knight Prototype Fund to enable the Knight Foundation to "do more" in northeast Wisconsin???

For more info about the Knight Prototype Fund, click here.

Click here to submit a Knight Prototype Fund by MAY 15.

*****