NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog: Research

The Observer team working with us on our Knight Foundation grant project sent us this early report on their thoughts about the Insight application they've been testing on Facebook. We very much appreciate The Observer's willingness to share what they're learning with our open source community and early adopters.

Here are some of the highlights:

They've driven 31,195 visits to the Insight application and a bit more than one percent of these folks have authorized the application with Facebook, which is required for posting likes, comments or other content. Thus far, linking to Insight articles or features from the CharlotteObserver.com home page has been the most effective way to drive traffic.

Says The Observer, "We’ve gotten a little pushback from people because users must have Facebook accounts. We believe that alignment with Facebook is absolutely important, and the more the application can look at feel like the mega-site, the better. However, this bears watching."

This is not surprising given Facebook's huge privacy gaffes over the past month. Users are more skeptical than ever of Facebook and its third party application network. Note: NewsCloud's application technology allows other authentication systems to be used.

We generally encourage partners to promote their Facebook Connect application from their Website, and their Facebook application from their Facebook pages. Insight's Connect application is at http://theobserverinsight.com and its Facebook application at http://apps.facebook.com/observerinsight.

Insight Serving as a Community Radar or Listening Post

The Observer has been rapidly experimenting with various approaches to positioning Insight with readers:

This has included focusing on news for women; news from other sources; community directory; a question and answer site and now outside bloggers. We believe that we are now beginning to see glimmers that it might best serve as a listening and discussion post for Charlotte’s online community. By emphasizing that people can post blogs or links to stories they think are important, we are getting an early glimpse on a stories. There have been three specific stories in the past two weeks that we believe first appeared on Insight in the form of blogs and/or links to other sites. One was on a billboard that local atheists put up on Billy Graham Parkway (on Insight); one was on a controversial proposal from a local congresswoman (on Insight); and one was on the marriage of two Carolina brands (Cheerwine and Krispy Kreme) into one product – a new donut (on Insight). We have taken to calling Insight “the pulse of Charlotte” which may grow as we go along.

Learn more about how the blog post on the aetheists billboard led to front page reporting at The Observer and later national coverage when the billboard was defaced.

With regard to Insight's Directory feature (categorized lists of user generated links and resources), the Observer says: "This falls into the 'not working' category for us so far. We have been unable to generate posts from the public in any real numbers. This could be because it doesn’t fill a need; it could be difficulty with understanding how to post; or some other factor." The Observer's linked to Insight's Ice Cream Store directory category from this front page story on a local parlor - but did not have much success generating user submissions.

Similarly, regarding Insight's Questions and Answer feature: "There clearly IS a public need for this and we need to understand whether it is too difficult to use or something else is getting in the way. This is definitely worthy of more research."

Read The Observer's report in full. We'll continue to publish reports from our grant partners as they arrive. We're also continually expanding our online community building recipes illustrating how partners are using our Facebook application for outreach.

Posted at 05:53 PM in facebook, Journalism, Knight Foundation, Research, Social Networking, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Technorati Tags: charlotte observer, facebook, journalism, knight foundation

The Grant Application and Document Lifecycle - Managing Your Grant Project Series

This entry is part one of a series on Managing Your Grant Project which we'll be completing soon. Read part 2: Development, Outreach and Financial Tools We Use. Follow @newscloud for updates.

All the programming work we perform under the grants we've received from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is open source, but we also try to be as transparent as possible about our process.

The Knight folks have encouraged us to share all of our grant documents "from soup to nuts" in the interest of transparency and sharing. We hope these help you understand the process of applying for a grant or in making your own grant project more successful.

So, what kinds of applications and documents go into getting, managing and completing a grant? Actually, quite a lot. Here is a summary:

The Preliminary Proposal - First, we contacted the Knight Foundation staff with our idea and after a series of discussions, we submitted a preliminary proposal summarizing our intent.

The Short Online Proposal - Next, we were asked to submit a brief summary of the proposal to their grant website.

The Full Application Proposal - Then, we were invited to submit a full application proposal. This level of details requires deeper planning and effort.

Then, the Knight team does their work, creating a Presidential Writeup for internal review.

If the grant is approved, a grant agreement between the foundation and the fiscal sponsor or recipient nonprofit is executed.

A contract agreement is also executed between the fiscal sponsor and the contracting agent, in this case, NewsCloud's founder, Jeff Reifman.

The fiscal sponsor and the grant agent set up a budget spreadsheet which mirrors the chart of sub-accounts from the budget in the full proposal. This is updated periodically if changes need to be made (significant changes require approval of the foundation) - see final adjusted budget.

We issue our first press release and track PR and media coverage on our blog throughout the project.

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.

We published Dr. Greenhow's social media research to our blog as she completed each report. The Hot Dish summary is an excellent read on what we learned about youth, journalism and in social networks. We also were invited by Nieman Reports to submit an article about our grant for their Journalism and Social Media issue. Grist's summary article on the Hot Dish contest is also worth reading.

And, of course, we post the source code to our project publicly for everyone to use it. Learn more about our ongoing open source work here.

At the end of the grant, we issue a report back to the foundation showing our achievements (and shortcomings). This is the final report, it is a time for gathering feedback from our team, reflection and learning.

p.s. Yes Amanda, as soon as their is a public documentcloud repository, we'll post this stuff there instead of Scribd.

Posted at 09:35 PM in facebook, Journalism, Knight Foundation, Open Source, Research, Social Networking, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)