Idea Lab

Digital Newsroom Wireframes Available

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm happy to announce the availability of annotated wireframes for the Digital Newsroom portion of the Populous Project. The functionality, as eloquently described by Gary Kebbel at the Center for Future Civic Media Conference, is being able to "edit from the beach." I'll never forget that description because it elegantly describes the core of what we're trying to accomplish with this software: allowing editors and reporters to get out of the office and into the communities they're covering more often. At UCLA we'll probably have to forgo the beach and just attend class more often, or after 10 hours...

• February 26, 2009
• 6 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

Populous Code Released

by Anthony Pesce
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have an exciting, albeit brief, announcement to make about our progress on the Populous project (formerly known as the Community News Network). Today we publicly released all of our code, in alpha, on the social coding site GitHub. The entirely of our progress so far is there, which at this point is an extremely powerful and flexible content management system. We've released it under an open source BSD license, and highly encourage anyone interested to check it out and contribute. We're coding Populous in Django, a Python rapid development framework specifically designed to quickly build robust news sites. So...

• November 24, 2008
• 1 comment