NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Unspace to Maintain NewsCloud's Community Starter Codebase

It's been a long, wild ride but our three and a half years of awesome grant-funded work with the Knight Foundation winds down next week. Working with Knight has been a thrill and we love all the friends we've made there. It's taken us from Seattle to St. Louis, Miami to New Orleans, Hamburg to Paris and even Saint Petersburg (almost to Beirut, but that's another story). 

Our latest stable release of NewsCloud runs on Rails 3.x and now we're handing things over to Unspace. Unspace is a premier Ruby on Rails software development team from Toronto.

Editorial note: Toronto's in Canada. It's a lot like New York but smaller, cleaner and mostly for Canadians. They serve coffee there in pint glasses - but we trust them with our software.

Read today's press release about the new Community Starter Rails 3.x release and Unspace's new cloud-based managed services. If you haven't watched our video intro to Community Starter, you should.

Unspace was Canada's first Rails consultancy and has been at the forefront of this community since 2004. Unspace has contributed major open source projects like Haml and Sass (Another editorial note - Haml and Sass are awesome - and used in NewsCloud's Community Starter) and has hosted widely acclaimed conferences like RubyFringe and FutureRuby. You can learn more at unspace.ca or follow them on Twitter at @unspace.

In the future, if you want managed services, talk to Unspace ... and they will be maintaining the open source Github code base for NewsCloud's Community Starter.

We also want to send a special note of thanks out to Russell Branca who led the development for most of NewsCloud's Rails codebase. Russell has moved on to a job at Cloudant. Lucky Cloudant. And to Amer Dahmash who valiantly stepped in to carry the torch the last few months. Amer's about to head off to South America by car.

Jeff Reifman is co-organizing Initiative 103 ... an effort to reign in corporate power in Seattle. I103 would reverse Citizens United in Seattle by banning corporate spending on elections. Two other Washington cities are already running similar initiatives: Pacific Northwest Emerging as a Stronghold for a New Kind of Activism.

Related Links

• 2008 Research Grant - Can Facebook Make America Smarter? See Research
• 2009 Launchpad Grant - Working with twelve media partners
• 2011 Making Facebook-Connected Communities Easy - Watch - Install
• The Grant Application and Document Lifecycle
• Development, Outreach and Financial Tools We Use

NewsCloud Community Starter Released on Rails 3

For immediate release: Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Contact:
Andrew Sherry, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, (305) 908-2677, media@knightfoundation.org
Meghann Millard, Unspace Interactive, (416) 977-0269, meghann@unspace.ca
Jeff Reifman, NewsCloud, jeff@newscloud.com

NewsCloud Community Starter Released on Rails 3
Rails experts Unspace Interactive to offer cloud-based managed services

    SEATTLE, WA. — Social media developer NewsCloud has released its open source Community Starter on Ruby on Rails 3. Community Starter is a simple, affordable platform to launch social media communities and add interactive features to existing websites. NewsCloud developed Community Starter with a $190,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

    Community Starter sites connect users to each other with news and features such as blogging, discussion forums, photo and video galleries, classifieds, peer to peer questions and answers, idea gathering and event calendars. Every Community Starter feature is tightly connected to popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.

    Visit www.communitystarter.org to watch an introductory video and to launch your own social media community. “No other platform provides such a turnkey suite of rich interactive features than you’ll find in Community Starter,” said Jeff Reifman, NewsCloud Founder. “You can even launch your community with news content from your favorite Twitter feeds.”

    “NewsCloud’s Community Starter is a simple and affordable tool to integrate news sites with some of the biggest social networks. It is especially useful for local community news sites and community foundations supporting local journalism,” said Jose Zamora, Knight Foundation Journalism Program Officer. “NewsCloud’s Community Starter allows community foundations and local news sites to reach their communities on the social networks they use most, increasing their reach and their capacity to inform and engage.”

    Rails experts, Unspace Interactive, are now offering cloud-based managed services for the Community Starter application. Organizations seeking hosting support and customization can contact Unspace to review their requirements.

    Open source developers can participate in the evolution of  the Community Starter platform by visiting our github page http://github.com/newscloud. Beginning May 1st, Unspace will assume management of the Community Starter open source repository, providing enhancements, developer support and routine maintenance and updates.

About NewsCloud

    Launched in 2005, NewsCloud’s Community Starter provides robust open source community engagement solutions for news and community organizations. Visit newscloud.com or follow @newscloud on Twitter for additional information and updates. NewsCloud’s Knight-funded research on the engagement of young people in Facebook is available at www.newscloud.com/research.

About Unspace

    Unspace Interactive is a premier Ruby on Rails software development team located in Toronto, Canada. Unspace was Canada's first Rails consultancy and has been at the forefront of this community since 2004. Unspace has contributed major open source projects like Haml and Sass and has hosted widely acclaimed conferences like RubyFringe and FutureRuby. You can learn more at unspace.ca or follow them on Twitter at @unspace.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation 

    The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation invests in journalism excellence worldwide and in the vitality of U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950, the foundation has granted more than $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

Watch the new video guide to NewsCloud's Community Starter Application

Watch our brand new video introduction to the NewsCloud Community Starter Application. NewsCloud's Community Starter is an open source platform integrated with Facebook and built in Ruby on Rails. It's been primarily funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation:

Rails 3 and Design Upgrade Almost Done

We're putting the finishing touches on our Rails 3 upgrade and site design updates. We'll have more details soon...

Social Media Explained ... Finally...

We love this social media explainer ... via Douglas Wray via Rachel McCaffrey.

 

Part time gigs at NewsCloud

Check out a list of paid (or volunteer) open source jobs for the NewsCloud platform. More coming soon...

Good Reads: Why Our Startup Decided Not To Target the Newspaper Industry

"As the co-founder of a technology startup that once considered the news industry as a source of partnerships and revenue, I agree with Wilson that startups should look elsewhere. However, the reason they should do so is not because the media industry lacks problems that need to be solved. If anything, the media industry has problems that span every sector of the industry and every segment of the value chain. Rather, the reason why startups should look for other opportunities is many industry problems are so intractable, and the chance for making a successful business is so slim, that it simply doesn't make sense to target it." Read the full article

 

Try NewsCloud Free for Six Months at Rackspace

First we made NewsCloud easy to install, then we made it cheap, now we're making it free to get started building a social media community for your favorite topic, neighborhood, city or school:

The generous folks at Rackspace are offering six months of credited hosting (up to $250 monthly) for anyone hosting NewsCloud in the Rackspace Cloud through their startup program. Now, there's no reason not to try your hand at launching your own social media community.

To get running, just follow these signup and installation steps. Then, send in the Rackspace Promotional Discount Agreement to activate your six months of credited hosting. Be sure to email us so we can tell you how to turn on the "Powered by Rackspace" text in your site footer.

While most content management systems are optimized around publishing, NewsCloud's features offer ways for your audience to participate and lead the site with user generated content. As activity increases, you can integrate advertising and paid content referral systems to capture new revenue streams. We also offer some innovative ways to populate your site with content from RSS and Twitter Lists.

NewsCloud is a free, open source project funded by the great folks at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Read more about our Knight-funded research into the engagement of young people in news in Facebook.

Questions? Visit our support community or email us. Be sure to follow us on Twitter @newscloud.

The Boston Globe Experiments with NewsCloud's Lending Library

Check out The Boston Globe's new lending library. The lending library allows the globe audience to share and give away stuff they don't regularly use such as books, DVDs or other household items. It's a great way to bring their community of readers together in the real world to increase collaborative consumption.

The Globe is offering the lending library through its Your Boston community site at http://your.boston.com. Readers log in to Your Boston through their Facebook accounts.

NewsCloud makes it easy for readers to list items by allowing keyword searching and lookups of the Amazon product catalog. You can list books and DVDs in seconds.

NewsCloud's platform is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Our software is freely available to the open source community. Any publisher that wants to launch their own classifieds system or lending library can do so easily and affordably.

 

Facebook Pages Losing Discussion Features

AllFacebook reports that Facebook will be removing discussion tabs from Facebook Pages on November 1, 2011. This is a pertinent example of one of the risks of relying on Facebook Pages for community building - you're only given the features they want you to have and they can take them away at any time.

We think NewsCloud's free, open source software platform is a great Facebook-connected alternative to pages. Read our post about the pros and cons of Facebook Pages and learn how to install our open source software.