Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

The first Knight funded Drupal project to release its open-source code, Managing News, launched last week. You can read about it here: Media Innovation with Drupal.

This week, on the fifth day of being publicly available, the project has been downloaded more than 1,000 times.

Here are 50 examples of what people are doing with it.

* rowingnews.org.uk * pulse.buzzr.us United Nations World Food Programme * climap.net * news.freejacksonvillenews.com * news.1qk.com * mn.newslogs.com * managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk * catholicnewslive.com * noticies.consultes.cat * mn.forest.linnovate.net * www.cafepresse.ch * mn.mwu.dk * news.kultur-online.net * beta.metaboone.com * news.twodogsdigital.com * mnews.webandfinearts.com * augmentions5.omega8.us * http://planete.magento.fr * news.nguyentiensi.com * zensci.com * earthfeeds.com * managingnews.peopleatwork.fr * news.positivechoices.com * managingnews.rhizom.nl * news.krongnang.com * news.fen.net * news.freejacksonvillenews.com * managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk * skateboarding.com * earthfeeds.com * jaunum.iem.lv * news.soniccat.com * news.investic.net * pg.galaxy.esn.org * www.wotcher.co.uk * rowing.magnity.co.uk * www.freshfail.com * gamemakerstream.com * news.sotak.cz * menanews.org * managingnews.aegir.erdfisch.de

How are you using it? Please let us know or send us your ideas on how it could be used to inform local communities.

By Meredith Hector, program director for Bradenton

Residents of Manatee and Sarasota counties feel the painful effects of the recession daily. It won't surprise many to know that according to the Brookings Institution's Metro Monitor, of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country, Bradenton-Sarasota is the second-worst-performing in terms of employment, wages, economic output, home prices, and foreclosures (neighboring Tampa is the third worst).

While the current economic situation is bleak, many believe it is cyclical and will stabilize. But what about the region's ongoing workforce challenges? This area faces a dual dilemma - businesses with long-term shortages of skilled workers and low-skilled individuals who lack the necessary training to secure jobs with family-sustaining wages.

A new collaborative of public and private funders has emerged over the past year to confront those challenges head on. The Manatee Sarasota Workforce Funders Collaborative, or MSWFC as it is currently known, is an entrepreneurial alliance composed of businesses, city and county governments, educational institutions, foundations and community organizations that will strengthen and accelerate regional workforce development. It is pooling nearly $2.5 million of local, state and national funds. Those monies will be a source of flexible capital, in the form of targeted grants, for innovative projects that:

• Provide basic skills courses and occupational training to workers in health-care, manufacturing, technology and transportation careers;
• Develop employer-based career pathways and
• Help partner organizations implement career-coaching programs.

MSWFC aims to:

• Support the movement of at least 300 people into promising, career-oriented jobs
• Support at least 10 area employers in their efforts to train and advance employees into mid-skill-level jobs
• Serve as a regional knowledge resource - conducting research and impact assessments and publishing findings that inform regional workforce strategies
• Stimulate greater regional planning and cooperation

MSWFC is not simply a job placement program. This is an opportunity to move low-wage individuals into careers with a living wage. It is a long-term, industry-specific intervention strategy. The role of this collaborative is to serve as a workforce intermediary - organizing key stakeholders and local resources to help workers gain the skills they need and to give employers access to the skilled labor they need. There is evidence from an existing funders collaborative in Boston (the SkillWorks partnership) that program participants there earn an average $4 an hour more than their pre-enrollment wages.

 

For more details about the collaborative, please check out these resources:

• MSFWC_Primer-10-24.ppt- PowerPoint
• National Fund for Workforce Solutions - PDF
• MSWFC Planning Retreat - PDF
• Service Providers Meeting Session Notes - PDF

 

Cross-posted from the Knight News Challenge Blog and the Sunlight Labs Blog

The reason why we extended the Knight News Challenge deadline is because we want to invite and partner with organizations that share our mission, values and goals, and that have networks of software developers and entrepreneurs. Our first partner is the Sunlight Foundation and its Sunlight Labs.

You're part of a community doing amazing work on some hugely important issues of government transparency, especially at the state and national level. We're partnering with the Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs in hopes of engaging you in a complementary challenge: bringing your great ideas to cities and other local communities.

The Knight News Challenge is an annual $5-million contest to fund the best ideas for reinventing local news. The contest deadline for 2010 was originally set for October 15, but we extended it to December 15 in large part because we saw an opportunity to partner with more folks like you all. The Knight News Challenge projects meet three criteria: 1) use digital, open-source technology to 2) distribute news and information in the public interest to 3) to a local, geographic community.

In past years, we've already funded projects that are terrific complements to the work done by Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Labs. For example, take a look at one of our 2009 winners, DocumentCloud (which recently announced a partnership with the Sunlight Foundation). DocumentCloud will allow some of the most robust investigative journalism outfits in the country - organizations like the New York Times, ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the ACLU, and Talking Points Memo - to share, publicize, collaborate on, and crowdsource the documents they're uncovering every day in Freedom of Information Act battles. Or check out the Transparency Initiative we funded in 2008, creating a microformat - hNews - to mark up news stories with metadata about sourcing, geo-location, and more.

Becoming a Knight News Challenge grantee would put you in the company of some of the leading innovators at the intersection of technology and information - folks like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, and Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the Django programming framework and originator of one of the first Google Maps mashups, which evolved into his 2007 Knight News Challenge award.

We've got the money and the mission. You've got the ideas we'd like to fund. If you're interested, check out our website (the FAQ is a great place to start), and feel free to send any questions to newschallenge@knightfoundation.org.