It’s fantastic to see the eight winning projects awarded more than $3.2 million today from the Knight News Challenge on Open Gov. We’re always thrilled to see the field of open government expand and look forward to the development of these great ideas.

The recipients include a few familiar faces, such as former Sunlight Labs directors Greg Elin, with the GitMachines project to help developers easily build technology that meets government regulations, and Clay Johnson for Procur.io that hopes to simplify and open up the process of bidding on government contracts. We’re extremely proud to see some Sunlight grantees get support, too. Oyez is an awesome project that frees state and appellate court documents and more that we supported in 2012. Nikita Bier with Outline.com, a 2013 Knight News Challenge winner, received a Sunlight grant last year for the Politify.us project. If you’re looking for some funding to jumpstart your idea, apply for an OpenGov Grant from Sunlight here.

Congratulations again to the winners and we’re excited to see how these projects will strengthen the Open Gov community. The Knight Foundation provides grant support to the Sunlight Foundation and we are proud to continue our partnership. Check out the video below for a brief overview of the winning projects: