Knight News Challenge

September 14, 2008 by Steve Hanson

I've given this some thought for the last few days.  I think that for purposes of the Knight News Challenge, and its rules and emphases, we should position a request for money here to be for a more limited area than I would consider for the whole project.  In particular, they like requests that serve a community or area - that wouldn't preclude doing a national proposal - for example, they've awarded money in the past for national proposals that cover a set of geographic areas - but the more I think about this, the more I think that the request should concentrate on Wisconsin, and emphasize the notion of supporting rural citizen journalism.  

Off the top of my head, I think that the proposal should cover some number of areas - we need to position this as a unique project and I think the general concepts should include:

• Syndication - sharing of content between the local citizen journalism/political sites, based on Creative Commons licensing - this will need to include a possibility to tag content for what level of sharing is allowed for each piece of content.
• Possibility of sharing of content between the citizen journalism sites and some Mainstream Media sites. For example, Madison Commons does some of this currently - this is an issue we probably need to talk to John Nichols about.
• Events Calendar - I've been doing some interesting work along these lines with using Ical for sharing between calendars.  This mostly is working fairly well now in Drupal, and I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities - though I keep getting caught on things like bad Timezone implementation, etc.  Anyway, I think it's entirely possible with some of the work that's being done with things like the FeedAPI module to be able to work on the idea of distributed calendars, including the possibility of some integration with Google Calendars - thsi would provide a fairly simple mechanism for a local area to build their own calendar in Google Calendar, but still be able to pariticipate without any more powerful in-house calendaring system.  There are a lot of issues to work out here, and this might be an area where we could attract some seed money from the Knight Drupal Initiative. 
  
• Advertising network - I've been looking into this a little bit.  I think there's a real possiblity for building some ongoing sustainability for sites by allowing them to build a state-wide advertising network (and either to replicate this across states, or just have a general RootsWire advertising network.  I'm looking at two possible approaches to this --- one being the Blogads Network, the other being using Adify . The 2 approaches would have somewhat different results - Blogads tends to attract strictly more progressive advertisers, but it's sort of a seat-of-your-pants operation.  Adify is a much more business-oriented system and would probably attract more serious advertisers, but it's sort of a stretch.  For the nonce, I've applied for an Adify account for RootsWire - I'll be interested to see if we're accepted.  I don't want to get anyone's hopes up here - none of this is likely to produce great honking amounts of cash for anyone, but I do find those little checks and Paypal payments showing up every so often are a nice surprise - being able to leverage this across a network of sites can only help.
• Training - I think we need to work out some sort of arrangement for CItizen Journalism training.  This could easily be in conjunction with other organizations - for example, the Madison Commons people do this on a fairly regular basis, and I have some contacts in Minnesota who are interested in extending their training into Wisconsin.  This could be sort of a RootsWire camp - different training sessions on Citizen Journalism, technical issues, general web site issues, etc.  I've already been thinking about trying to set up a BarCamp sort of training over in this neck of the woods, which hasn't been exactly attracting a world of interest - maybe it should become a Journalism BarCamp???  This could also fit in with some of the stuff people are talking about with JTM - it would let us kind of blaze a trail of a slightly more practical branch.
• Equipment - one thing that I could see coming out of this would not only be training in techniques, but a way of building a set of more standardized equipment for use.  For example, I did some work with a Flip Video camera at the Democratic Convention.  I didn't particularly like the Flip in a number of ways - it's sort of lame in many ways.  But it IS extremely easy to use and we could easily bulid some tools for sharing and working together with a simple technology.  Part of this proposal could be to buy a smattering of cheap technology that the local WIsconsin contributors could hand out to reporters/contributors.  This could be Flips, it could be cheap digital cameras, etc.  It could also include tools for using the ubiquitous cell phone video and still camera technologies to let the local sites leverage this for reporting.
• Tools - I am thinking here about what sorts of software tools would be useful for this collaboration.  If we were talking, for example, about heterogeneous technology (think all Drupal sites) the issue would be much simpler - but we're not.  The let a thousand flowers bloom approach causes a lot of issues re: integration.  Perhaps there's some room for a compromise - a set of tools that works on Drupal sites, and a set of more general tools.  We probably need to start discovering what the different existing sites think their needs are along these lines- maybe they don't think they have any?
• Central skills bank --- One issue I keep running across is that there are times when I'd really like to farm out a little piece of work - this is often graphical, since I'm a graphics dunce.  It might be neat if there was a central pool of people in the area who provide those sorts of skills - design, programming, hosting, etc. - and who could be called upon by the members.   I'm not quite sure how this would work out - in a lot of cases it could probably be the different members contributing their own local skills and people into a pool for example.
• This is a painful one, but I'm going to bring it up - one thing that I keep hearing from everyone in this sphere is that they have the business smarts, and the desire, and the writing skills, but not the tech skills to keep a site running in a reasonable way.  I on the other hand tend to have the tech skills, but not a lot of the other things, particularly business smarts.  It would probably be fairly easy to build a turnkey package for a local site - there is a lot of activity in the Drupal sphere on this, and there are already some proposals for software development, etc.  The wonders of Open Source.  So - my question here is what sort of Tech resources could RootsWire provide to member organizations?
• This is one that I'm afraid may become an internal issue --- I'm not quite sure how we reconcile the natural goals of this project with our own political beliefs.  I know Borges feels more strongly about some of this than I do --- I am not really sure it's a natural thing to just say that RootsWire is a progressive organization.  I mean, I think I am, and I think Borges is --- but should RootsWire be?  First of all, I think it's hard to fund a blatantly partisan organization.  Secondly, I think that part of this project should be an attempt to level the playing field - so I don't for example feel any need to give Charlie Sykes a platform   -  but what about a conservative Wisconsin blogger who isn't a nutcase?  Is it really reasonable to say "you can't participate  - we don't agree with your world view".  I think that in the long run part of the excitement and interest of a project like this could come from  tension.  One of the things that REALLY bothers me about the blogosphere in Wisconsin - the Cheddarsphere as Folkbum would insist - is that it is almost always a matter of preaching to the choir.  Imagine, for example, how much more interesting it would be to have on-line debates that were more or less even-handed.  I think this is an area where we'll need to have a clearer understanding.