NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Get involved in our design discussions for the new Facebook application

Whether you have or haven't heard about our recent grant and alpha Facebook code, you may be interested in following some of our ongoing design and requirements discussions for our news community Facebook application.

Thoughts about the feature roadmap are discussed here. The latest block diagrams from our design partner Seattle's Eye Level Interactive are here. What's on your wish list? Hope to see you in the discussions soon.

Here are some general thoughts about building loyalty in news communities that provides a bit of a background on our thinking.

Big shout out to TenderApp.com for offering free use of their great online customer service and support tool for ours and all open source projects.

Have You Ever Wanted to Disappear? Wired's Repomen Contest

Lone Shark Games, in conjunction with Wired Magazine and Universal Pictures, is looking for a few creative, honest, adventurous people to go on the run starting in late February. You need to be available through late March to leave your regular life behind. (If you are chosen, we will give you exact dates.)

via wiredinsider.com

We were involved in finding Evan Ratliff in the first Wired Vanish contest, see How We Caught Missing Wired Magazine Writer Evan Ratliff. This time, Wired and Lone Shark Games are expanding the contest and inviting the public to participate as runners. Should be quite fun...wish we weren't so busy with our grant project next month or we might... disappear too.

NewsCloud Receives Knight Foundation Grant to Launch Facebook Sites for Twelve News Organizations

Through April 2011, twelve news organizations will launch Facebook sites with NewsCloud's open source Facebook application technology, thanks to a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The goal of the grant is threefold:

1. To launch community news sites inside Facebook with twelve media partners showcasing different ways of leveraging the popular social network to reach new audiences.
   
   
2. To improve and expand the features and capabilities of the existing NewsCloud Facebook application.
   
   
3. To broaden participation in the open source development community around the NewsCloud Facebook application.

With these goals in mind, we've launched two new sites to make collaboration easier. We're posting most of our design and development documentation for review and discussion at http://support.newscloud.com. Open source developers can follow our progress and download the code from http://opensource.newscloud.com. 

While the NewsCloud Facebook application was initially developed in the PHP programming environment, this week we're releasing an alpha test version built for developers on the Ruby on Rails framework.

Media organizations interested in learning more about the grant program can also contact NewsCloud privately through the above support website.

Research results on the engagement of young people in news in Facebook from the Knight Foundation's 2008 grant to NewsCloud can be found at http://www.newscloud.com/research.