Knight News Challenge Winners Make Courts, Local Government More Accessible

Anyone who's ever tried to follow a court case, interpret a legal document or even obtain one in some jurisdictions, knows how difficult it can sometimes be, even for the dogged journalist determined to see what's in those dockets. Those legalese-filled decisions and depositions are gold mines of information and stories, but they're often out of reach or understanding of the average person. This week alone the Supreme Court of the United States this week alone handed down major judgments invalidating parts of the Voting Rights Act and bans on gay marriage, to name a few of the decisions released. How many other court cases out there are setting precedents in your state and community? Chances are you don't know, or even more likely, don't know how to know. Figuring out what's on the docket, where things stand and what they mean ... well, who has time and the skills for that? Enter Oyez Project. Now, thanks to funding from the Knight Foundation, the group that has long brought clarity to SCOTUS proceedings can take it down a level, so to speak, and expand its interpretations to state supreme courts and federal appellate courts. Oyez is one of eight projects aimed at opening up government data and resources that received a combined total of $3.2 million in funding in the latest Knight News Challenge contest. While not all of them are, strictly speaking, related to news, they are all related to making government more transparent and easier to understand and work with. That's the goal most journalists aim to achieve as well. Here's a brief glimpse of this round's winners, announced this week: From the press release about the winners, here's the scoop on the basic gist of each winning project, which in total netted about $3.2 million in funding: Civic Insight: Providing up-to-date information on vacant properties so that communities can find ways to make tangible improvements to local spaces; OpenCounter: Making it easier for residents to register and create new businesses by building open source software that governments can use to simplify the process; Open Gov for the Rest of Us: Providing residents in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago with the tools to access and demand better data around issues important to them, like housing and education; Outline.com: Launching a public policy simulator that helps people visualize the impact that public policies like health care reform and school budget changes might have on local economies and communities; Oyez Project: Making state and appellate court documents freely available and useful to journalists, scholars and the public, by providing straightforward summaries of decisions, free audio recordings and more; Procure.io: Making government contract bidding more transparent by simplifying the way smaller companies bid on government work; GitMachines: Supporting government innovation by creating tools and servers that meet government regulations, so that developers can easily build and adopt new technology; Plan in a Box: Making it easier to discover information about local planning projects, by creating a tool that governments and contractors can use to easily create websites with updates that also allow public input into the process. The full break down of each project is in the release, but as a reporter and a citizen, several of these made me light up at how useful they would be to me personally. I'd love to follow the status of the road projects in my community, even on basic websites built with Plan a Box, and just this week someone in a group I belong to asked about what kinds of permits they need to open a business, so something like OpenCounter would make it easy to know about, and therefore comply with, local requirements. What's your favorite project of the bunch, and what kind of open-government service would you like to see someone create?

Fishbowl

Knight News Challenge Winners Make Courts, Local Government More Accessible

Meranda Adams

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Meranda Adams