Idea Lab

DocumentCloud Going Open Source Every Step of the Way

by Jeremy Ashkenas
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

What does it mean to work on a project where open-source principles are written into the founding contract? A little over a month after receiving a 2009 Knight News Challenge grant, DocumentCloud released its first open-source component. The system, called CloudCrowd, performs the distributed computing that helps process the vast quantities of documents that will eventually be stored in DocumentCloud. It might seem premature to be releasing code so early -- in the past some Knight grantees have chosen to wait until the end of their grant -- but the larger part of open-source is community, not code. We're planning...

• October 29, 2009
• No comments

Community Media's Path Out of Obscurity

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Times of great change represent an opportunity to shift power, and the power shift many of us are working towards here is the democratization of the media. We seek to establish truly effective alternatives to the commercial media system, alternatives that are not relegated to obscurity. To build an effective alternative, we must begin by identifying the needs that are neglected by commercial media. Then we can capitalize on the competitive advantages that non-commercial media institutions have over our corporate media counterparts. Today, the media serve three primary needs: The media facilitate consumerism: The media informs consumers about products and...

• September 9, 2009
• 2 comments

EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service? We at...

• August 18, 2009
• 8 comments

EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service? We at...

• August 18, 2009
• 8 comments

EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service? We at...

• August 18, 2009
• 8 comments

Source Code for Balance

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Okay, so you haven't been waiting for this with baited breath the way everyone was waiting for the EveryBlock code. Nonetheless, after a few months of wrangling on and off with Git Hub I finally sat down and worked through a bunch of nagging authentication issues and managed to post the code for Balance! our game about balancing city budgets. Assuming we haven't made any terrible mistakes (I already spotted one little error. If you spot it too you can buy me a beer!), we'll post cleaned out versions of the other games we've developed in the next week or...

• August 10, 2009
• No comments

ReportingOn 2.0 Launches Next Generation of Backchannel for Your Beat

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers. It's still the backchannel for your beat, but it's an absolute re-imagining of the network. For those of you who haven't been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it's a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source. (You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts right here at IdeaLab.) The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that...

• July 2, 2009
• No comments

EveryBlock Source Code Released

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "micro-local" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose. You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it'll probably make sense only if you're a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps...

• July 1, 2009
• 1 comment

Strategizing Media Software Development: Some Lessons Learned

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a story showing the extent of complications in getting a system going, so I'll tell it simply. It's my non-geek experience of work for a community newspaper that aims to produce world-class code for community papers that is singing-dancing, super-portable and open-source. The history started in the buzz around the World Summit on Information Society which helped to move OSS into the mental horizon of non-techies like me. When the Rhodes journalism school where I work acquired Grocott's Mail, the local newspaper in 2004, we had to install a load of new PCs to accommodate students who would now...

• February 5, 2009
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First Beta Site in the Open Media Project is a Success!

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Urbana Public Television, the first of six Public Access TV and Community Technology Centers to implement the model and modules developed for Deproduction's Knight News Challenge project, has launched their new Drupal website with our help. Lead Developer for Deproduction/Civic Pixel, Kevin Reynen explains the process of setting up this revolutionary new system with Kate Gorman of UPTV, "Launching a basic Drupal site can be a lot for someone to take in... let alone all of the new hardware, networking changes, file transfers, encoding, projects, reservations, error logging, etc, etc. I'm sure Kate was overwhelmed at times, but she persevered...

• February 2, 2009
• 3 comments

Populous Is Adopting News Mixer (And More)

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're chugging along over at Populous, and getting closer and closer to a public release of our CMS beta and demo. Right now we have an alpha of our CMS we're using to test and get selected feedback on, and we still have a bit more refinement to do to get things up and running for public consumption. I'm excited to discuss some of the other projects and features we're incorporating into Populous. We realized a long time ago that we weren't going to be able to make a viable platform for online publication unless we included a number of...

• January 12, 2009
• 5 comments

A Talk with the Creator of Drupal

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here at the IdeaLab, we've been hearing a lot over the past year about Drupal, the open source content management system that is now powering tens of thousands of websites, including Ourmedia, The Onion, Sony Music artists (I really like myplay.com) and a host of citizen media sites.The other night I had dinner with Dries Buytaert, the self-effacing founder and creator of Drupal. Buytaert chiefly credits the tens of thousands of volunteer programmers who contributed to the platform's code base over the years. (Ourmedia is about to relaunch on Drupal 6; here's our beta site.) In this 11-minute interview,...

• October 8, 2008
• 1 comment

Denver Open Media Close to Selecting Beta Sites

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you know of a Community Technology Center, Public Access TV station, University Media Program, or other non-commercial, community media outlet who may be interested in participating, please invite them to apply at http://deproduction.org/ombeta.

• October 5, 2008
• No comments

None of Your Business Model

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"What's the business model?" It's a question I hear again and again at meetings and events. The existing model for newspapers is quickly unraveling, so we need a 'new new thing' to serve some of the vital functions that newspapers used to. Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture....

• August 10, 2008
• 6 comments

Should We Teach with Open Source Software?

by Pam McAllister-Johnson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Western Kentucky University if one of seven academic programs working on a joint Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant (Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael's College, the Univeristy of Kansas, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas). Three student-developed projects were presented at the Online News Association conference last year. This summer, the innovative digital news projects are being tested at newspapers. We were instructed to use open-source software for our projects. Open-source is free. In the open-source community, there are comparable programs for every retail package produced by the big companies. Open-source software can be well- documented...

• May 28, 2008
• 6 comments

Ceibal Jam! Developing Apps for the XO Laptop

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the '$100 laptop') to recreate the student computer's user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. That decision led to the defection of Walter Bender who had been OLPC's president of software and content and a longtime colleague of Negroponte. It also led free software guru Richard Stallman, who ironically switched to a XO laptop himself just before the announcement, to ask out loud, "Can...

• May 14, 2008
• 2 comments

Open Source Flash Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is another update from our research assistant on the "Playing the News" project. The team has been exploring "mini-games" that would provide a challenge as players move through the information from the news stories. Fabio has discovered some open source flash sites that might help. "As I mentioned in my earlier post, this week I started looking into open source flash games that could be adapted for our purpose. After some research on the web, I found this website http://www.flashadvisor.com/movie/index.php?viewCat=24 . It's called Flash Advisor and it's a collection of resources for Flash programmers and what not. I went...

• April 25, 2008
• 6 comments

A Coder Practices Multimedia Journalism -- with Open Source Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, the first two programmer-journalists whose Medill education is being financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships, have begun their second academic quarter (of four). They are reporting in Medill's Chicago newsroom and taking our introductory new media class, Interactive Techniques. For the new media class, they (like all the other students) are required to identify a topic that they will monitor and blog about it at least five times per week. All the students are required to set up and manage the technology underpinning the blog as well -- using Wordpress. Ryan's blog is called Digital...

• April 23, 2008
• 4 comments

Is it a Game Without Moving Parts?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're knee deep in our second game and I realized that I never came through with my promised recap of our last minute technical decisions on the Garbage Game. For one thing, as I mentioned, we jumped ship from OpenLaszlo in the interest of expedience. As I've noted here before, the game design field isn't exactly awash in programmers eager to work in anything but Flash. We found a local programming shop that was game for the challenge, though, and sat down with them to iron out our technical specifications. They'd never worked in OpenLaszlo before, but it looked like...

• March 3, 2008
• No comments

Open Media Publishing: One New Option

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

EngageMedia, an Australia-based open media organization that promotes social justice and environmental issues, has just released a major open source software package called Plumi. Based on the Plone content-management system, it's designed to let citizen publishers create their own video-sharing communities out of the box. Given that websites like YouTube and Yahoo Video retain extensive rights to your video while keeping their own distribution platforms under lock and key,  Plumi is one of the important new forces pushing toward democratic, independent and open media. For the announcement and technical details, head here. To download Plumi, head here. A demo...

• February 14, 2008
• 4 comments