Around forty people came to a Knight News Challenge meetup in Vancouver in October 2008 to hear Susan Mernit set out what the Knight Foundation was looking for in the projects it funded.
She named four tests a proposal had to pass. It had to be innovative, judged relative to where it would run — what counted as innovative in Canada was not what counted as innovative in Uganda. It had to be open source, scalable and replicable, because Knight wanted tools others could take up. It had to serve the public interest, with the aim of a more active and better-informed citizenry, which could mean simply providing somewhere for democratic argument to happen. And it had to serve a specific geographic community, with a local testbed — the model being EveryBlock, which started in Chicago before expanding to other US cities.
Beyond the four tests, Mernit described the kinds of idea that tended to land well. Knight had no specific social-justice remit but was looking for work that supported democracy, and was particularly interested in proposals that took data and information which was effectively invisible and made it public, so that a discussion could form around it. Framed broadly, the foundation was trying to restore a function that US local newspapers had performed: giving a community a single place to find out what was happening in it.
The judging had also changed since the programme’s first round two years earlier. Proposals were screened first by a committee drawn from online news and technology, with members ranging in age from their early twenties to their sixties.