The Knight Foundation has launched a new competition to fund innovation in cities. All you need to enter is a concept.
From now through November 14, the Knight Foundation is accepting ideas for the Knight Cities Challenge, a competition that will award grants from a purse of $5 million to proposals for improving life in cities. It's a competition along the lines of the Knight News Challenge or the Knight Arts Challenge, with the goal of spurring civic innovation at the block, neighborhood, or city level—in one or several of 26 different Knight communities.
"Proposal" is almost too strong a word for the first stage of the Knight Cities Challenge: Ideas don't need to come with a budget, or even necessarily a city in mind. In fact, the Knight Foundation is soliciting only short answers to two questions—as well as a summary of the idea that takes the form of a 140-character tweet.
No map, no code, no mockup, no model: The application is so simple that it almost sounds daunting. That's why CityLab spoke with Carol Coletta, Knight Foundation vice president for community and national initiatives, to get a better sense of what exactly the Knight Foundation means to accomplish.
What’s the thread that connects the 26 different Knight communities?
The Knight communities are places where the Knight Foundation makes investments. They are the communities where Jim and Jack Knight had newspapers. This is their legacy that we steward.
Say that an architecture firm submits an idea. They’re thinking about Columbia, South Carolina, but it might also work for Boulder, Colorado. Is that something you’re trying to do in the first round, to help make those connections?
We are indeed, and I hope that happens. We’re evaluating ideas in the first round without regard to place. In other words, if someone submits an idea and says, "We have this idea and we’re not sure where we want to do it"—if that makes it to the finalist round, we will then run a pairing process, where we have people in each of the Knight communities actually listen to the pitches and say, "That’s an idea we think would fit in Detroit." "That’s an idea we think would fit in Charlotte. We can pair them up with an organization in our city." It may be that there is no one ready to take up the idea in a Knight city, in which case they would not go forward in the challenge. But—we fund in many ways other than this challenge grant. It’s a good way to get an idea in front of Knight, even if you don’t work in a Knight city.
Winners are required to release their software as open source code and their content under a Creative Commons license. Are you expecting lots of software elements?
The requirements there are things that we’ve learned from the Knight News Challenge and the Knight Arts Challenge. Obviously, Knight works a lot in journalism and media innovation, in the digital space. We have lots of people in the Knight network who work in that world, and we’re delighted to get proposals from them. But I think by no means will that constitute the majority of proposals we get. In no way are we limiting our proposals to digital tools, but we hope we get them and others.
Given that this project is open to anyone, how do you put together a jury that’s capable of sorting through the range of ideas you may receive?
It’s not unusual for a Knight News Challenge or a Knight Arts Challenge to get 700, 800, 900 entries. We’re used to sorting through a large number of entries. What we find—and it’s one of the reasons we’re asking applicants to summarize their ideas in a tweet—what people really have a hard time doing is summarizing their ideas.