The Sunlight Foundation would like to extend a hearty congratulations to the 2011 winners of the Knight News Challenge just announced today at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. They are an impressive collection of folks and we are excited to see such innovative ideas gain the support they need to expand.

Among the many winners we’re particular thrilled to see some familiar faces. Waldo Jaquith, a Sunlight mini-grant recipient for his work at Richmond Sunlight in 2008 getting video online from the Virginia legislature, got funding for the State Decoded platform to make state codes easier to use and understand. DocumentCloud, a great tool to annotate documents for journalists that has won News Challenge funding in the past, is a Sunlight favorite whose lead developer is a two-time winner of our Apps for America contest. We’re also big fans of ScraperWiki, a collaborative approach to building web scrapers to free data that has huge potential for journalists and others to sniff out interesting data. We look forward to learning about all the winners of this year’s challenge and will certainly look forward to integrating them into our work.

It’s so incredibly exciting to see the new ideas for open government and engaging citizens that have won these awards this year. Our community is getting bigger and better every year.

The Knight News Challenge is an initiative that promotes projects around the globe to transform journalism through innovative new tools and has funded over 75 projects with $27 million over the past 5 years. The Knight Foundation provides grant support to the Sunlight Foundation and we are proud to continue our partnership.