Photo credit: Flickr user Kharied.

Knight is investing in Neighbor.ly, a crowdfunding platform that brings people together to support community projects. The following guest blog post is written by Jase Wilson, Neighbor.ly's founder.

It's tough work being a local government in the United States these days. Cuts in federal and state grants, stagnant tax bases and diminished borrowing continue to produce budget shortfalls. Scarce funding from traditional sources force communities to under fund, stall or abandon civic projects. That's bad for us all: Those projects improve quality of life for citizens, while creating value and jobs in the process, which in turn helps fund other government activities. The result has been a downward spiral for many of our nation's communities.

At Neighbor.ly, our mission is to help these communities continue to pay for these civic projects by leveraging the power of crowdfunding and other sources. Past funding opportunities have addressed different issues: community-wide wifi access, bike paths, even light rail to improve public transit. By allowing people to pick and support the projects they care about most, we hope to help people continue to improve their lives by improving their places.

Today we are moving a step closer to that goal because of a $175,000 grant from Knight Foundation. It’s fitting that we are announcing this while attending the Points of Light CivicX accelerator. As we plan the future of  Neighbor.ly, we are learning from some of the best and brightest minds in civic technology, working out the most effective ways to help fund civic projects. We're shoulder to shoulder with seven other extraordinary civic tech startups, all of which share our vision of doing well by doing good.

Above, the Sunlight Foundation app Sitegeist allows users to instantly access public data about the neighborhood they’re in.

Making government data available is crucial to government transparency. But that’s not enough. The data must be presented in ways that are useful to people –regular people, busy people, people who are not generally inclined to dig through government datasets for fun. The Sunlight Foundation, a seven-year-old open government organization based in Washington, D.C., is leading the way by turning dry government information into useful apps. For example, Sitegeist uses geolocation to deliver relevant information about a user’s surroundings using U.S. Census and other public resources. The app is a hit: It has been been downloaded more than 84,000 times in the six months since it launched and used about 115,000 times.

To build on that success, Knight Foundation is making a $4 million grant to Sunlight. With this funding, Sunlight will expand its data sets, create apps and products that engage the general public (not just policy wonks) and help make government at all levels more open and participatory.

The grant is a cornerstone of Knight Foundation’s focus on open government, which includes investments in a range of projects such as NYU GovLab, Code for America, Open Elections and Textizen among others. We will also be announcing the winners of the Knight News Challenge on Open Gov next week (June 24), at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference.

Above: In Detroit, a large-scale video projection in which an artist’s paintings are brought to life through animation features a nearly life-size whale. Photo credit: Dlectricity.

Wow, Detroit. You completely blew us away. After receiving a record-breaking 1,400 applications to this year's Knight Arts Challenge, we weren't sure what to expect. And then we started reading...

What we found was a community bursting with creative, innovative and distinctly DETROIT ideas. Many of the ideas came from individuals and small collectives (something we hope you’ll see reflected in the list of finalists).  Several investigated the use of space/place and art. Some looked to marry Detroit’s past and its future. All were thoughtfully reviewed and considered by our panel of local reviewers and Knight staff.

Today, we’re excited to share the 84 finalists in the Detroit Knight Arts Challenge. Take a look and let us know what you think.