NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

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.

Sorry We Won't Be Participating in the King5 Hacking Seattle News Contest

We were excited about demonstrating NewsCloud's open source capability to power personalized community news sites in the King5 Hacking Seattle News contest. But, yesterday, we saw that they require entrants to sign an 11 page contract.

The contest has been promoted as an open source pro-community contest: "the idea is to do it a in very open-source, for-the-community, by-the-community mode" but it actually disallows the use of copyleft GPL open source code (see permissive open source software license) and requires entrants to license derivative works of their entry back to King5 (see text below). Both of these points go against the very values of open source software and community development. If winning projects are open source, there is no need for King5 to require derivative works - as the code is already accessible to them. Requiring derivative works takes ownership of the entire entry e.g. specific website, creatives, conceptual ideas, data, etc.

So, with disappointment, we won't be participating in the contest.

6. e) The Participant’s Demonstration Version and the Winning Submission and all components of the Demonstration Version and the Winning Submission, including all ideas, creative elements, and any other materials and information contained in the Demonstration Version and the Winning Submission, must bewholly original with the Participant (whether an individual or as part of a Team), except that software available under a permissive open source software license (e.g., BSD license or MIT license) may be used if Participant complies with the terms of the license upon demonstration and submission to KING 5 and identifies such software and its attribution and licensing requirements to KING 5 in the Winning Submission.

10. a) By entering the Contest, each Participant grants to KING 5 and to KING 5’s affiliates, subsidiaries, partners, licensees, and successors and assigns (collectively, the “KING 5 Parties”) a nonexclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, distribute copies of, perform, display, adapt, use, and otherwise exploit the Demonstration Version and the Winning Submission and all of their components, including without limitation by posting the Demonstration Version and the Winning Submission on the KING 5 website or on such other Internet-related sites chosen by KING 5 in its sole discretion, in any manner, and in all media and formats whether now known or later developed, throughout the universe, in perpetuity, without any notice, permission or compensation (except where prohibited by law).  In connection therewith, each Participant hereby forever waives and relinquishes all so-called “moral rights (droit moral)” now or hereafter recognized in connection with the Demonstration Version and the Winning Submission.  

NewsCloud Presentation in Saint Petersburg, Russia - Hosted by iUni.ru

Some fun photos from our lecture in Saint Petersburg, Russia put on by our friends at iUni.ru. NewsCloud founder, Jeff Reifman, presented. Topics included NewsCloud, the Knight Foundation and entrepreneurialism. Great audience, great questions and we hope we didn't disappoint. Translation generously provided by Dinara Asadulina. Slides. View the entire album. Video coming soon.

 

India News Site is Latest to Use NewsCloud

Check out Indiali.com (on Facebook as an app here), the latest Facebook application powered by NewsCloud's free, open source software. The Indiali news community began as a Facebook page and has grown to have 3.3 million fans. Indiali's using NewsCloud to improve the quality of community features that they can offer.

As we've discussed before on this blog, Facebook pages are quite limited and don't offer a way for news startups to monetize their traffic.

If you want to learn more about Indiali, you can find its founder Aravind Chandreasekaran on Facebook or contact him through the application.

NewsCloud's free open source Facebook software is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through April 2012. NewsCloud can be installed easily in minutes and hosted for less than $45 per month.

This is how we roll...

One of the challenges we have working on grant projects is coworking from various coffeehouses. We'd prefer to spend money on development and design than rent. 

At left, Russell toasts our cozy, frequent coworking host University Zoka.

No Joy in Rockville Central Move to Facebook Page

Update: NewsCloud's latest free, open source release can be installed easily on a $45/mo. server. See NewsCloud's feature list. Read about our latest grant.

Having worked on our open source community Facebook platform for media organizations for the past five years, I found Rockville Central's post about migrating exclusively to a Facebook page fascinating but disappointing.

I don't fault the Rockville folks, they feel that their Facebook Page makes the most sense for them at this time - and they do a good job of explaining it. But, as they acknowledge, this may not be suitable for other organizations.

I was most struck by comments later in their post: "We have no desire to generate revenue". Not too many community building efforts can sustain themselves without some revenue. Volunteer community organizers generally burn out over time. They also acknowledge that competition, notably AOL Patch's new Rockville site, contributed to their decision to abandon their website.

We've long felt that Facebook pages are a poor substitute for hosting engaged and informed communities. Not only are Facebook Pages proprietary, unattractive, inflexible, unsearchable landing pages for browsing but they don't provide hosts the ability to provide unique interactive features. For example, NewsCloud's platform offers e.g. news, blogging, photo & video galleries, resource directories, event calendar, predictions game, classifieds and lending library, question & answer feature, discussion forums, idea gathering, et al. See the complete feature summary.

Yet, we understand that tools like ours are still a bit too expensive and complex for small media sites like Rockville Central. 

Beginning in May, NewsCloud will be almost exclusively focusing on making our Knight Foundation-funded open source community social media platform more accessible and affordable to small community media organizations. In the meantime, we've written a guide for community foundations on how to work with grantees to launch sites on our platform.

We see Rockville Central's decision as an indicator that platform providers like us have more work to do to become a viable solution for smaller communities. Stay tuned in the coming months (follow us @newscloud) to keep apprised of upcoming announcements about our efforts in this area.

I'll make it a personal goal of mine to see if we can get the Rockville Central folks to launch a NewsCloud-based site by early 2012.

 

Minnesota Public Radio Launches Economic Beat Reporting Site on the NewsCloud platform

This guest post is written by Minnesota Public Radio's public insight journalist Paul Tosto:

    When Minnesota Public Radio News launched the MinnEcon blog  two years ago, we wanted to capture the everyday stories of Minnesotans living through the Great Recession. We had good success finding stories via our Public Insight Network. But early on it was clear the old blog format didn’t fit our ambitions.

    We wanted to create a networked hub of beat reporting, a site that didn’t just tell readers to leave a comment at the bottom of a post but invited them to ask and answer questions, easily share anything that interested them about the economy and create or jump in to discussions. We started working with NewsCloud last fall to build that site using its open source platform.

    The result: A remade MinnEcon that integrates social media, public insight and MPR News reporting -- from radio stories to news shows to all the stuff we do already online.

    The site went up officially a couple of weeks ago. Soon, we'll reach out to the thousands of Minnesotas in the MPR News network who’ve responded in the past to our queries about the economy and connect them to the site.

    With MinnEcon, we're building something with the NewsCloud open source platform that could become a standard beat reporting tool: A flexible app that's easy to set up and configure to specific beats, easy to run and connected to Facebook, the world's largest social network.

    It can easily be maintained by a beat reporter and editor. That's one of the real beauties of this project. There’s enormous potential to reproduce the model for any beat and any reporter, no matter the size of the news organization.

The NewsCloud open source Facebook community platform is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Anyone can download the code for free. Follow us @newscloud.

Social Media Ideas for Indian Country

The Potlatch Fund is the first community foundation to apply for a Knight Foundation Information Needs Community Challenge Grant to build a NewsCloud site uniting it's Northwest regional Native American communities:

The platform will leverage a variety of NewsCloud’s features to help Native American communities connect, engage and share information with each other online, in ways that aren’t possible today. Some of these features include: dissemination of foundation, grantee and local news, peer to peer news sharing, blogging, image and video galleries, discussion forums, resource directories, classifieds and lending library, idea gathering and question and answers. The Facebook authentication used by NewsCloud allows community members to interact with their real names and faces, building connection in deeper ways than other web technologies. This was one of the findings in the Knight-funded research on the Hot Dish climate change project.

If you're interested in learning more about how to use NewsCloud for your community foundation or its grantees, read our post How Community Foundations Can Create Local Online Hubs with NewsCloud.

Classifieds and Lending Library Feature in Beta Testing

You can try our new Classifieds and Lending Library feature now in beta testing at The Needle, our Seattle prototype site. We've added these features to enhance the NewsCloud platform for attracting readers to our news communities.

The Lending Library allows people to share physical goods with their neighbors, friends or any Needle reader (i.e. you can share items with everyone or choose to share only with your Facebook friends). Adding books, DVDs and other items is quite easy with our Amazon product lookup - just type in a keyword or ISBN/ASIN # to quickly add the item. You can also post items to sell or offer them for free.

The Lending Library is a feature that NewsCloud had provided in an earlier Facebook application that is now moved over to our open source platform. 

We'd also encourage you to watch Rachel Botsman's Ted Talk on the emerging collaborative consumption model on sharing and swapping physical goods.

We think we've designed a Classifieds system with Facebook integration that beats CraigsList (which doesn't allow for lending physical goods). Please give us your feedback.

The NewsCloud open source platform is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.