$750,000 Proposal for a Hyperlocal, Citizen-participatory News Aggregating, Generating, Prioritizing and Processing Website for Chicago.

This is ambitious proposal was developed by a team of nine volunteers who submitted it to the Knight News Challenge in 2010. Five years later, in 2015, there's nothing like it anywhere. Inspired by hyperlocal sites like Chicago-based Everyblock (now owned by Comcast) and New Haven-based SeeClickFix, and also by the work of eDemocracy in Minneapolis, ChicagoWRKS.com was created to connect and empower users of social media and mainstream media with a view to making allies of citizens and government, and also young people and adults, in shaping the best future of Chicago and its neighborhoods.

 

The nine-member WRKS team possessed almost all of the skills needed to create a fully functional news and information platform for use by Chicagoans in transforming their neighborhoods. The missing skill? We lacked a rainmaker to raise funds to get WRKS off the ground. Here's our 20 second promotional video made by filmmaker Dan Skubal. It stars most of the WRKS team.