8 Clever Ideas For Making Government Work Better With Data

How can we make the places we live more awesome through data?

That's the question the Knight Foundation posed to coders around the world back in March, when they launched the Knight News Challenge: Open Gov. The foundation sought projects that would open up government data to citizens on the local, state or national level. At least 886 groups submitted ideas for a sliver of the $5 million prize money.

As we wrote at the time:

Amid all of the submissions are some familiar innovations we've already encountered at Atlantic Cities, formerly as nascent ideas now competing for a chance to scale up: our favorite guerrilla wayfinding campaign from Raleigh, North Carolina; Code for America's playful StreetMix web app; the San Francisco-based Urban Prototyping Festival; and a community-driven transportation planning project based on the kind of data analytics we wrote about here.