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Part time gigs at NewsCloud

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

Easy install for NewsCloud

Update: The great folks at RackSpace are offering six months credited (a.k.a. free) services for hosting NewsCloud in the Rackspace Cloud.

NewsCloud can now be installed quickly, easily and affordably in just a few steps. Watch the video and follow the steps below:

1. Choose a server. Use an existing server or sign up for a hosting account. We recommend Rackspace's 1 GB Cloud server (configured with Linux Ubuntu 10.04) which costs $45/month (first six months can be credited, making it free). Make note of your server's IP address.

2. Point your domain name at your server. You can use an existing domain e.g. www.yoursite.com or any subdomain e.g. newscloud.yoursite.com or register a new domain. Learn more about mapping your domain name to your server.

3. Register for a Facebook application. Sign up for a Facebook application and configure it with your domain name. Make note of your application's secret keys.

4. Install NewsCloud. We've simplified the installation scripts to just a few lines. Note: be sure your computer is configured properly with Ruby on Rails. Also, here is a summary of the settings you'll need before you run the script.

> git clone git://github.com/newscloud/n2.git
> cd n2
> cap newscloud:run 

Visit your website (e.g. www.yoursite.com) to see your fresh NewsCloud installation, then use our wizards to customize it at your administrative dashboard (e.g. www.yoursite.com/admin). This customization checklist may be helpful.

During the coming year, we will continue to make the NewsCloud platform simpler to install, customize, manage and moderate. Our work is funded through April 30, 2012 with the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Stay tuned to this blog or follow us on Twitter (see button below)  for updates.

Follow @newscloud on Twitter

Release 3 of NewsCloud Facebook Community Platform is Now Available

Get the code for our third stable release of the NewsCloud Ruby on Rails platform - learn more at our open source blog.

Hosting the Open Source NewsCloud Facebook Platform

Part of the series on NewsCloud's Philosophy of Online Community Building and Social Media.

NewsCloud's open source Facebook platform can be hosted in a number of ways. 

The current codebase of NewsCloud is based on Ruby on Rails (here's why). You can download the latest daily code from Github anytime or download the last stable release (Release 2 is the most recent as of this post). The code is open source primarily because the platform has been built with a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Here are several different approaches to hosting that may work for you right now (we're working on some future options - see below):

1) Dedicated Linux server. You can use a dedicated Linux server configured to run Ruby on Rails. We have a dedicated server at JohnCompanies.com. The cost there is about $125/mo. This gives you complete control of the resources and environment for your application. You will need a system administrator with strong technical skills and experience with Ruby on Rails to install and host your application.

2) Amazon AWS. We also run sites in the Amazon AWS cloud. Our platform currently requires a Large 64 bit Server Instance. If you purchase a 1 year or 3 year reserved instance you can save quite a bit on hourly expenses. Our AWS reserved instance cost about $1400 and we pay about $90 monthly to host it. A support contract costs extra. AWS provides a number of advantages in your hosting environment. However, AWS also requires a very sophisticated system administrator to configure and manage. 

3) Shared Virtual Server with root access. You can try running your site on a shared virtual server with Linux as long as you have root access. Virtual Linux Servers at JohnCompanies run about $40 - $60 per month. Your mileage may vary on how well this runs our application. You'll probably succeed with small sites (low traffic) but have to expand later to grow.

4) Hire NewsCloud to host the application for you. NewsCloud is glad to host, support and manage your application for you. The general cost for a fully managed application (not including editorial and community management) is about $500 per month for small to medium sized organizations. You can email us for more information. We generally tell organizations to budget between $10,000 - $12,000 for the first year of set up, training, design customization, hosting and support.

5) There is also an older version of NewsCloud based in PHP which is currently not being maintained. It is available at GitHub here.

Here are some options we're working on for the future:

1) Amazon AWS Micro Instance. Amazon's low resource Micro Instance is free for one year to new accounts. We are hoping to reconfigure our use of Ruby on Rails services and plugins to fit within the .613 GB memory footprint of the micro instance. This will allow new users to easily get started with our open source codebase, run a small site for a year and expand later if they are successful with the platform. We're also planning to provide easy to follow recipes and a pre-configured machine image to reduce the workload for users wishing to host on this platform. We expect to work on this in Q2 2011. Note: Expanding from the Micro Instance to a Large Server Instance will require some system administration work to move over the application. Update: Amazon now supports seamless switching between micro and large instances.

2) Heroku Cloud. We're hoping to also configure our application to run in the Heroku Cloud as a 1 dyno - this would allow you to run the basic site at no cost in the Heroku cloud (for very low testing usage). However, this will be a great environment for testing your application and then expanding expenses and resources to fit your requirements. Again, we'll try to provide easy installation recipes to reduce the complexity for adoption in this environment. A baseline application for public usage will probably cost about $180 per month at Heroku. Note: The free Heroku account will not provide support for background tasks (delivering notifications, importing newswire feeds) unless they are run as CRON jobs separately. The advantage of Heroku is that it's more easily expandable as your community grows than the Amazon Micro Instance.

We're often asked if you can run our platform on your own server or a shared server. We generally can't answer questions about your individual hosting environment but a good guideline is that you need root access to the server, you need significant memory ~ 1 GB and knowledge of installing and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications.

If you have more questions, please visit http://support.newscloud.com

Read the next post in this series: Choosing between a Facebook Application and a Facebook Connect Website.

 

 

NewsCloud Release 2 is Now Available

Yeah us! And thanks to the generosity of the Knight Foundation who supports our open source work! Our second major open source release of the NewsCloud Facebook platform is now available.

This is the same code powering the Boston Globe's Facebook application. You can read a summary of features here. 

Knight Foundation News Challenge Deadline is December 1, 2010

If you have an innovative media technology idea, you might be able to get funding from the Knight News Challenge contest.

Run by the Knight Foundation, the grant competition awards up to $5 million annually for innovative projects that use digital technology to transform the way communities send, receive and make use of news and information.

More info can be found here: http://newschallenge.org. The site includes application information, as well as details about past winners.

This year’s application deadline is December 1. The News Challenge is looking for applications in four categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community.  All projects must make use of digital technology to distribute news in the public interest.

The contest is open to anyone in the world.

A simple description of the project is all you need to apply. Submit a brief pitch to http://newschallenge.org. If the reviewers like it, you’ll be asked to submit a full proposal later.

If you have questions you can a) reference the FAQ:http://www.newschallenge.org/frequently-asked-questions, or; b) check the archived chat transcript here: http://www.newschallenge.org/1026-live (another live chat will be held 1:30 p.m. Nov. 18 at newschallenge.org)

You can follow Knight Foundation at http://twitter.com/knightfdn. The News Challenge Twitter hashtag is #knc

 

Most Popular NewsCloud Posts on Social Media

I thought it might be useful to post some of our most popular and frequently visited pages from our blog:

• Our Facebook Application Feature Summary

• Seven Reasons to Download NewsCloud's Open Source Facebook Application Code

• Why We Migrated Our Facebook Application to Ruby on Rails and Fascinating Python vs. RoR Thread

• Our Open Source blog, GitHub Page to Download Our Code

• Support Site & FAQs

• Our Research Page & Hot Dish Climate App Findings (pdf)

• The Evolution of Community Newspapers in the Age of Twitter and Facebook

• What a Facebook News Portal Will Mean to News Publishers

• A Billionaires Guide to Stopping Theft of Your Online Newspaper Content

• The Grant Application and Document Lifecycle

• Development, Outreach and Financial Tools We Use

• How We Caught Missing Wired Magazine Writer Evan Ratliff

• Founder Jeff Reifman's blog, his Microsoft Tax Dodge blog or his tech blog

 

Development, Outreach and Financial Tools We Use - Managing Your Grant Project Series

This entry is part two of a series on Managing Your Grant Project which we'll be completing soon. Read part one: The Grant Application and Document Lifecycle. Follow@newscloud for updates.

We use a variety of tools to execute our grant and we'll summarize these for you in three categories: Software Development, Communication and Outreach, Financials and Legal Resources.

Software Development Tools

We host all our code at Github which offers free accounts for open source projects. Github is an excellent source code management system which allows our team to work together remotely and allows other developers to fork our code and add new features to be re-integrated with our main tree. It also allows users to download any release or even unstable (latest) code from our project at any time. Github facilitates the transparency and open source nature of our grant software development efforts.

Lighthouse is a bug/ticket management service which we use to track defects and feature requests and organize our work across milestones. It's a critical resource for our project management work.

Lighthouse is also integrated with TenderApp which we use for NewsCloud's online support and feedback. So, if a use reports a problem, we can easily create a new defect ticket in Lighthouse or attach it to an existing one. TenderApp has become a critical service for interfacing with our grant partners. It also offers free accounts for open source projects and has great t-shirts! 

Since we're using Ruby on Rails, we get live defect reports via HopToadApp and performance statistics via NewRelic.

 As a Mac user, I am (lowly) part of the cult of Textmate, a great editor for software developers on OS X. I've also recently begun using Balsamiq, an interesting AIR-based mock-up tool e.g. I created this mock up of our future topics page with Balsamiq.

A lot of our partners use Google Analytics for tracking usage statistics on their Facebook applications. We've also begun experimenting with TypeKit for custom font styling within our applications.

We get a ton of bug reports about the incompatibilities caused by the pathetic non-standard versions of Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (nightmare!) so we fire up Parallels Desktop to reproduce these. We're thankful Facebook has begun encouraging IE 7 users to upgrade.

When we're co-working, we use a Sprint Overdrive modem for Internet access. It works well in some locations, not well in others. It is not as reliable a device as my old Verizon USB modem, but it provides router capability for multiple users. I recommend waiting for version 2.0.

Communication & Research Tools

We choose to issue biweekly status updates via email to our foundation contacts, our team and other stakeholders. Here is an example status report from February 27, 2009. These reports are not required by the foundation but help us organize our work, get help with risk areas and open issues, highlight our achievements and keep everyone on the team plugged in. 

For email, we're big gmail users. No surprise there. 

We use TypePad to publish this blog and our open source blog. It's powerful, affordable and regularly improving. Wordpress is also great.

Recently, we've begun using Google Wave and are quite impressed with it. Wave has improved a lot over time. It offers a way for our team to collaborate together, while not losing important information from our conversations and IM chats. It also helps minimize the need for IM or phone interruptions.

We also use Google Docs to share documents and spreadsheets and Google Groups to communicate with our grant partners. 

We use Adium with Google Talk to keep in touch with team members throughout the day.

Hootsuite is our favorite Twitter client which we use for outreach about our grant activities on Twitter. We also like Tweetdeck but find it less reliable, especially on mobile devices.

Financial Management Tools

We manage our finances with Quickbooks. Quickbooks make tracking expenditures and reporting to our fiscal sponsor fast and easy. We use Microsoft Excel for sharing budget spreadsheets back and forth. We use online bill pay with our bank to send checks to contractors.

Quickbooks can take a bit of time to set up but once we configure the Chart of Accounts to match our grant budget items, it's fairly straightforward to track payments and track our spending to plan.

We turned off the sketchy (hard to cancel) eFax service last year (which we used to use to capture PDFs via local fax) and now scan any documents to PDF over WiFi with our Epson Artisan Scanner.

We actually run an extra gmail account for our grant which we CC: every contract, receipt and invoice sent to our fiscal sponsor. This helps us create an online archive of all the materials shared back and forth with them.

Legal Resources

The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard has been an extremely helpful resource to our team. 

Please let us know if you have additions, feedback or comments!

Seven Reasons to Download NewsCloud's Open Source Facebook Application Code

Here are seven reasons why you should download NewsCloud's Facebook application code and get involved in our open source efforts:

1) Facebook: Our code provides a great base platform for running a community or news-related Facebook application but it's not dependent on Facebook. Our code simultaneously provides a Web-based solution offering Facebook Connect for authentication (or password-based login) - other authentication schemes can be added.

2) Crowdsourcing: Our code essentially provides an open source crowdsourcing toolkit for engaging readers with each other. We have features for idea gathering, Q&A, event calendars, forums, blogging and directories. Our goal is to compliment news sites with unique features that add value for readers. Read our complete feature summary.

3) Ruby: Our code is based on Ruby on Rails - so it's MVC and leverages a bunch of open source technologies and plugins such as: Facebooker, il8n, Formtastic, VoteFu, Taggable, Restful Authentication, Routing Filter, Friendly_id, Rack, Will Paginate, Cucumber, rSpec, HopToad, NewRelic, Bootstrap, HAML, SASS, Compass, 960.gs et al.

4) Journalism: Our code is part of a Knight Foundation grant to support journalism organizations. We're working with publishers such as The Charlotte Observer, KPCC radio, The Boston Globe, the Detroit Free Press, WKYC TV, MinnPost and the State Press (covering Arizona State University) to help find new ways to engage their audience and strengthen their business models.

5) International: Our code supports i18n localization so that you can run your Facebook application in any language or several! We want journalism organizations worldwide to use this code!

6) Open Source: Our code is licensed via the flexible MIT Open Source License meaning that you can re-use it liberally for your own projects - even if you're a for profit corporation.

7) Funded: Our code will continue to improve and grow with the generous funding of the Knight Foundation through April 2011. That's when our grant ends! In the meantime - and hopefully beyond, you can get involved in a super cool fun engaging high-tech open source pro-democracy journalism project with other fun folks.

Here are a few more reasons to get involved now*:

• The next five people to install the code and configure a Facebook application or Connect Website will receive $25 iTunes Gift Cards.
• The developer who builds the most useful add-on feature by June 30th will receive a $150 Amazon gift card and $100 in iTunes gift cards.
• The developer who builds the best refinement of an existing feature by June 30th will receive $100 in iTunes gift cards.
• The three developers who post the best ideas for new features (here) by June 30th will receive $25 iTunes gift cards.
• The first person to track down our tallest developer (find him on Github) at Open Source Bridge 2010 in Portland and offer him a Coke or a coffee gets a $25 iTunes gift card.

* Contributions will be judged subjectively by the NewsCloud team. You must email jeff at newscloud dot com with details when you complete one of the above tasks. Gift cards will be mailed to you.

What are you waiting for?

• Share this post with your friends
• Grab a fork of the code
• Follow us on Twitter @newscloud
• Follow our blog at http://opensource.newscloud.com
• Visit our support site at http://support.newscloud.com and join the conversation about our project

Did we remember to thank the great folks at TenderApp.com and GitHub for freely supporting our open source project tools? and the Knight Foundation who pay for everything else? and our partners who are on a mission to sustain great journalism?

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.