The Mountain Xpress currently has an entry in the Knight News Challenge, and I’d like to hear your feedback and your ideas about how to move news, and this newspaper, further into the digital world.
We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.
If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it!
And here’s the Mountain Xpress idea, which we’ve dubbed the Buncombe Data Mine: we are asking for $75,000 to allow us to collect government databases and transform that information into charts, graphics, maps and other data visualizations that will then be shared with anyone, from journalist to blogger to whatever.
I like that concept and see many ways in which it would be a wonderful resource. ... especially if you could give it depth perhaps by adding historical info on places, people, and events for all of the over 200 years the county has existed. How many know where the town of Juno was in Buncombe County and its history, for example. In fact, a Land of the Sky Wikipedia (the software is opensource so setting it up would be easy).
I agree with Ralph - a locally oriented wiki would totally rock. I’m a contributor to wikipedia and would love to see this project grow. Plus, i’m sure i could find a place for a photo or two of mine.
I think it would be cool to build a social networking web site which would serve as a method for neighborhoods within the city to organize and communicate. There are already many neighborhood organizations, some with their own web sites, but to provide a centralized, ‘meet-up’ style of site and offer certain social and organizational features which would allow neighborhoods to interact with each other as well as the people who live in them, and could be really neat.
Features could include: —Shared calendars —Messaging —Communication board —News from local papers/tv/etc —Maps/Property/County GIS —Event coordination/listings —Historical info about a neighborhood —Info from local governments, law enforcement —Neighborhood blogs —Photo sharing/galleries
I’m sure more features could be brainstormed and folded in as well, but that’s a general list of things that could entice people to sign up and start getting to know each other.
This ‘getting to know your neighbors’ idea is what the site should revolve around. Anything that builds up relationships, opens up communication, and encourages community organization is beneficial as a whole for the city, in my opinion, and taking advantage of technology to do this seems like an obvious step to take.
I think it would be cool to build a social networking web site which would serve as a method for neighborhoods within the city to organize and communicate. There are already many neighborhood organizations, some with their own web sites, but to provide a centralized, ‘meet-up’ style of site and offer certain social and organizational features which would allow neighborhoods to interact with each other as well as the people who live in them, and could be really neat.
West Asheville already has tried something similar on its own using the NING social media netware, but it really requires more than just joining (like a yahoo group) to become useful. Unfortunately, that means both some resources from the coordinating group (like MountainX) and buy-in from the city such as Marsha Stickford, the city’s Neighborhood Coordinator.
The NING social model allows for some of the things: My Page, Member lists, photos, videos, forum, event (and sorta calendar), subgroups (usually individual neighborhoods such as Westwood) and even blogs. However, it hasn’t taken off yet and may never… alas.
For those interested in joining and perhaps injecting some life back into it, it’s here.
If MX is interested in using this particular model or something similar i’d love to hear it AND i’d be willing to help start it or volunteer some of my dwindling time to it.
You know, Xpress had a plan to do create a local Wiki a few years ago, but the IT guy who was putting it together left before the project ever got beyond the planning stage. They probably still have the domain and everything, I’d bet.
Wikis focused on single topics can be really awesome. I use the Ubuntu wiki regularly, for instance. There was even a local-music wiki for Asheville for a while.
Willc and Zen: An Asheville-centric (or WNC-centric) social networking site and an Asheville wiki both sound wonderful. As Steve pointed out in the last comment, we were working on a wiki at Xpress, but one tech guy could only do so much. We’re still limited in this dimension.
As Zen pointed out, Ning might do the trick for social networking. Seeming shortcomings: There’s no way to tie it into an existing member group (like mountainx.com’s), and as far as I can see, all the content resides with Ning, which is rather disempowering. But it has some excellent features. Maybe we should give it a go, at least to get something started. It would be pretty easy to do.
Steve is still excited about the Asheville wiki. Do we really need a lot tech assistance for this, Steve?
And I hope mountainx.com will be adding social networking features in the not-to-distant future.
Thing thing about Ning is that it’s all hosted by Ning, which means you have no ability to hack it apart and customize it to your liking.
When approaching a social network, you have to decide what features are most important to the functioning of the site and promote the best social interaction. Once those are nailed down, you then look at existing tools to see if they will work or can be modified to work, or you start creating something from scratch.
In my experience, it’s much better to take that approach than to put all your time into an existing system or platform, only to discover later that it doesn’t really do what you were hoping, or that it isn’t promoting the types of social interaction that are needed for your community to work.
I do agree with Ralph Robert’s recommendation of MediaWiki for the wiki. All you need is a relatively recent LAMP setup (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
Back some 15 years ago or more, the Citizen-Times produced a weekly print section simply titled “Neighbors.” It featured stories and news based around the traditional neighborhoods we have in the north, south, east and west portions of the city. It was quite popular.
Translating that to the Web through something like the West Asheville Ning site would be great, but as Zen points out, somebody really needs to drive it.
If it’s of any assistance, I can pitch in some time to help out, but I can’t drive the thing due to a very busy schedule. I can offer technical (web dev and server admin) expertise if it’s needed. I work nearby so it would be easy to meet up if needed.
It’s time to land a Knight News Grant for Asheville (Oct 2009). We made it past initial cut last year, but didn’t ultimately win. There’s now less than a week till this year’s proposal deadline. Let’s get cracking!
I plan on writing one proposal up. There’s no limit to how many can be submitted, so if you get inspired, write one up yourself.
Any feedback, encouragement or assistance will help.
To recap last year: WillC suggested on this thread, to some popular acclaim, that we need to promote neighborhoods and groups social networking, by establishing and operating a site with calendar, blog-hosting, Asheville wiki, neighborhood micro-sites etc. Zen, RalphR, Sandford and Shanafelt seemed interested in some of all of the ideas.
This year I’m thinking along those same lines, although I’m not sure that one site can do the job any more, what with the explosion of Internet activity and social-media platforms. So I’m thinking that we should retain WillC’s purpose and neighborhood localism, but do something with the following components:
1) JOURNALISM AND SOCIAL-MEDIA TRAINING: train and support people to report, use social media tools, curate/tag/organize the accumulating info.
2) TECHNICAL SUPPORT: develop a software-developer cooperative, made up of local techies who are interested in creating software tools and will be available to help bloggers and others with technical problems.
3) WEBSITE SERVICES: establish and maintain a website (with any necessary hardware & hosting arrangements) for neighborhoods, groups and individuals to use
4) DATABASE/ARCHIVE/LIBRARY: develop and operate a database with rich APIs that allows individuals to push local data in and pull it out for their own use; this DB would archive local twitterstream (perhaps the entire pipe??) and any other public-timeline social-media streams; the DB would connect and thread relevant data held on other local sites using a sophisticated user-generated tagging/voting system to show relationships and value.
5) COMMUNITY-WIDE EVENTS TRACKING: Maintain a calendar, alert system, discussion & collaboration tools; operated and contributed to by citizens and local media operations.
6) LOCAL WIKI: Asheville and WNC are ripe for a wiki. The tools are available; this citizen-based operation will generate the trained and energetic population to contribute richly to the knowledge database
7) ADVERTISING NETWORK: develop and operate an advertising network that allows local companies to make one media buy for Asheville blogs and websites, with revenues to be apportioned according to views/clicks or other quantifiable measures.
OUTPUT/BENEFITS OF THE PROJECT:
• enhanced grassroots networking and vibrancy;
• increased news gathering, dissemination and ingestion, via an invigorated, trained and networked population of citizen journalists, professionals and semi-professionals;
• better archiving & organization of local information and stories of value to the community
• easier access to relevant local information
• a financial support system for the enhanced, community-based info networks
• better training and tech support for local residents, in particular those disadvantaged segments of the community who may need additional support/training.
FUNDING:
Local: I see a several local revenue streams: a) training tuition b) tech support c) donations and memberships d) advertising revenue
Nonlocal: The Knight News grant
I’m willing to bet y’all aren’t the only ones with this kind of entry this year.
So the sales pitch is, “Why in Asheville?”
Example of others: The Sacramento Press was one of five ideas presented in a pitch and critique session at the Online News Association meeting recently, and they won the session, getting support and advice from venture capitalists and others for a year. Local journalism efforts, especially with a training component for citizens, are very hot right now, it seems.
I still would love the Asheville WIKI and think it’s viable.
Why Asheville? Not just knife-fights, but because we’ve got the combination of art and technology lovers and just the right size (goldilocks porridge - not too big nor too small).
