A Philly-based open source tool called DocumentCloud — used by over 8,000 journalists at some 1,600 news organizations around the world — will roll out a “News Nerds in Residence” program to build digital tools for newsrooms.

Backed by a $50,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, the program will bring on three collaborators for a quarter-length residency throughout 2018. The “News Nerds” will get access to DocumentCloud’s user base to test out projects that, if found useful, will become core features of the online platform, which currently hosts some 3.6 million documents uploaded by journalists.

DocumentCloud is one of eight organizations favored by a $4.5 million round of grants announced by the Knight Foundation on the ten-year anniversary of its News Challenge, the same push from which DocumentCloud was born.

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