Interesting note for the Knight Drupal Initiative.

Washington, D.C. – The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute today announced the launch of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

The high-level Knight Commission will look into whether the information needs of 21st century American citizens and communities are being met and make recommendations for public policy and private initiatives that will help better meet community information needs.

The commission will be lead by Theodore B. Olson, former Solicitor General of the United States, and Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience for Google.

Why is this interesting to Drupal? Well, the Knight Commission website is Drupal powered. And the goals of this public committee are very similar to those of the Knight Drupal Initiative. It would not surprise me if some of the findings of the commission made their way into the hands of Drupal developers very quickly.

See the full press release.

I have been quiet recently. (There are good reasons for that which I will not bore people with.)

But we are about ready to make some noise in the Drupal community by opening the Knight Drupal Initiative to proposals.

For those of you who were not at DrupalCON Boston, here is the short summary of where we are:

• Knight Foundation came to us with an idea for funding Drupal-related projects.
• After some great community meetings, we came up with an open proposal process for applying for grant money.
• There will be an ongoing process of applying for Knight Drupal Initiative grants.
• The Drupal community will filter and recommend proposals. Knight Foundation will provide funding and management for accepted applications.

As I said, we are just about ready to announce the program as ready for proposals. But first we have a few tasks to clean up.

If you have a few minutes, please look over the task list and pitch in. We especially need some :

• Editors to look over the documentation for clarity.
• Designers to make us a nifty logo.
• Marketers to write us some good copy for promoting the KDI in the community.

Hats off to JoshK, John Britton, MatthewS and Moshe for their hard work on this to date.

(And, yes, we have taken a while to launch the initiative. But that was so we could all help get Summer of Code going for this year without distracting from its very important mission.)