Earlier this year the White House and the Case Foundation organized a gathering of more than 200 professionals from government agencies, the private sector and nonprofit organizations to discuss the use of challenges and contests in grant-making.

If you missed the event ' the organizers released a 9-page report called Promoting Innovation:' Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking.' It provides the highlights of the event and the five do's and don'ts of using prizes, and was written by Brad Rourke, an engagement advisor in Maryland.

Knight Foundation's Jose Zamora attended the event ' he's pictured right with Tim McClimon from the American Express Foundation.' The Knight Foundation runs a number of contests and challenges  including the Knight Arts Challenge, the Knight Community Information Challenge and the Knight News Challenge.

'At Knight Foundation we are excited about being part of the national discussion on promoting innovation through contests and open grant-making,' said Zamora. 'We want to learn from the great work others are doing and share lessons and strategies learned to help anyone entering this field.'

The Knight News Challenge, now in its fourth year, awards as much as $5 million a year for innovative ideas that inform and engage communities.' The 2010 contest will open this fall - for more news stay tuned!

Check out today's Washington Post and msnbc.com: student reporters and investigative journalists have teamed up for two new stories on transportation safety in an unprecedented national reporting project.

Federal recommendations on avoiding plane crashes often go ignored, according to one article. Another reports that America's highways are more dangerous due to lax medical certification for commercial truckers.

The students reporters, part of the Knight-funded News21 program, came from 11 universities to Arizona State University this summer to work with editors and reporters from the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, as well as top university faculty.

The package of 23 stories may well be the largest investigative reporting project ever produced by college journalism students, Kristin Gilger, an associate dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and executive editor of News21 wrote on Knight Blog earlier this week. Read more.

One year ago, a blue-ribbon Knight Commission presented 15 recommendations for helping to ensure America's communities are informed about the issues that shape them.

As part of its report, the Knight Commission created an eight-point checklist of ingredients of a healthy information community ' including high-speed Internet access for all, the availability of government services and information online and sources of quality local journalism.

Until now, though, there hasn't been a way to measure these elements across communities. That's why Knight Foundation, in partnership with the Monitor Institute and with advisory support from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project,'is working to create a set of easy-to-use tools, so that communities can self-assess their local information flows and take steps to improve them.

The Community Information Scorecard is being pilot tested in three diverse Knight communities this fall: Philadelphia, San Jose and Macon.

The findings will be released in early 2011. In the meantime, we hope you'll visit www.infoproject.org to learn more about the project.

Knight Foundation, along with the Aspen Institute and others will gather tomorrow at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. to mark the one-year anniversary of the Knight Commission report. A new white paper detailing the policy reforms needed to achieve universal broadband access in the United States also will be unveiled.

Tune in to the live webcast of the event at 10 a.m. tomorrow at www.knightcomm.org, or on Twitter by following #knightcomm.