Today the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the winners of this year's Knight News Challenge on open government. The winning projects will receive a total of $3.2 million for their ideas.

These projects will provide new tools and approaches to help people interact more effectively with their governments.

The winners are:

• Civic Insight, $220,000. Providing up-to-date information on vacant properties so that communities can find ways to make tangible improvements to local spaces.
• OpenCounter, $450,000. Open-source software that governments can use to simplify the process of registering and creating new businesses.
• Open Gov for the Rest of Us, $350,000. Providing residents in low-income Chicago neighborhoods with tools to access and demand better data around issues important to them, such as housing and education.
• Outline.com. A public policy simulator to help people visualize how public policies such as health care reform and school budget changes might affect local economies and communities. (Unspecified award amount, through Knight Enterprise Fund)
• Oyez Project, $600,000. 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.
• Procur.io, $460,000. Making government contract bidding more transparent by simplifying the way smaller companies bid on government work.
• GitMachines, $500,000. 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, $620,000. Making it easier to discover information about local planning projects. A tool that governments and contractors can use to easily create websites with updates that also allow public input into the process.

In addition, six other projects (identified through the News Challenge on OpenGov) received funding via the Knight Prototype Fund, which provides up to $50,000 so that innovators can take their projects from idea to demo.