All of the News Challenge projects are great -- check out the full list of winning projects, and video interviews with all the winners.

Earlier this week, Adam Glenn (my partner on this joint professional/citizen journalism project) and I traveled to Miami, FL for the official award ceremony. Generally I'm not one for formal ceremony, but this was a thrilling experience because all the grantees got a chance to meet and know each other. What fabulous conversation! The best part is that all the grantees will be contributing to a group blog and sharing expertise and insight. We couldn't have asked for a better support network.

But now that we have the money to fund this for a year, we need to knuckle down to the real work: building out the project site ( bouldercarbontax.org) more, and assembling and training the community of volunteers who will help us flesh out this project and make sure it's relevant and helpful to the Boulder.

In case you're not familiar with it, here's what our project is about...

Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker will follow the progress of the city of Boulder to use revenues from the nation's first-ever municipal carbon tax to fund municipal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We want to involve the community in exploring several important questions:

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• Does it make sense for a local government to try to address climate change?
  
• How is the city spending this money, and how (if at all) is Boulder likely to benefit?
  
• How are Boulder citizens, businesses, and organizations affected by the city's climate change action efforts as well as their own?
  
• How could the city best spend this money over the next few years?
  

Last week, Adam and I met with several key players from various sides of the carbon tax issue to explain what we'll be doing, figure out how best to get information from them, and to invite them to participate. The response so far has been great -- from carbon tax supporters, opponents, and just regular Boulderites. We're excited to see where their creativity can help us take this project.

After Adam and I take a well-deserved weekend off, we'll be kicking into high gear with this project. If you'd like to get involved, please e-mail me.