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There are just a couple of days left to get in your Knight News Challenge proposal. The deadline to apply for a slice of the $5m up for grabs is November 1 at midnight PDT.

On Wednesday, I submitted my idea – Legacy2010.com: Helping Vancouver citizens understand how the Winter Olympics are changing the city.

The 2010 Winter Games are a source of controversy in Vancouver. Supporters talk about the investment in infrastructure and commercial benefit of hosting a major sporting event. Opponents condemn the negative social and environmental impact of the Games.

This proposal aims to help the communities in Vancouver a way of working out for themselves the impact of the Olympics by making data around the event visible:

The goal of this project is to show, through the creation of an online database service and discussion forums, how the social, economic and cultural make-up of Vancouver is being changed by the 2010 Winter Olympics. The project will shed light on the role of big sporting events in a civil society, and providing the community with easily accessible data drawn from sources at a city, provincial and national level.

The idea taps into current trends in database driven journalism and crowdsourcing. The aim is to empower citizens to explore and study the data for themselves, helping each other each other understand the impact of the Olympics on their neighborhood.

Hopefully this will be a model that can be adopted by future host cities.

If you want to read the full application, comment or rate it, please head over to the Knight News Challenge site.

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