Excited about data? Here are two opportunities to help get you funding and prizes for your ideas on how to make it useful, understandable and actionable.

• The Knight News Challenge: Data is seeking innovative ideas to collect, process, visualize or otherwise make actionable the increasing amounts of data available. Applying is easy - eight questions and 500 words gets you a shot at a share of $5 million. There are just two weeks left in the challenge, don't miss the deadline - noon EDT June 21. Learn more at NewsChallenge.org and @knightfdn.

• The Civic Data Challenge, sponsored by Knight, is looking to turn existing civic health and community attachment data into beautiful, useful applications and visualizations to help build stronger communities. Challenge participants who analyze and create visual representations of data will be eligible for various prizes. The deadline for the challenge is July 29. Learn more atCivicDataChallenge.org and @CivicData.