I just posted an entry to the Knight Foundation's News Challenge contest.
Here's the text of the entry. You can leave comments here, and I'll update if they accept the entry.
** Describe your project:
Innovation and communication are two of the keywords that highlight hope and progress in our world today. This project aids open, innovative communities in California with web infrastructure, training, and facilitating regional collaboration and communication.
We define "open, innovative communities" as those communities working to produce new options, products, and innovation in products, services, or processes that are open source and benefit the human condition as well as the public good, with a focus on quality of life issues like food an water quality, farming and agriculture, and sustainable energy generation and usage.
The purpose of this project is to create, customize, and distribute a Drupal based platform to serve open, innovative communities. We will provide training for community based innovators to make use of the platform to meet their needs for publishing news, tracking projects and to send and receive RSS feeds through the site to other regional innovation communities.
Our goal is to aid 100 innovation communities in going online with the software, though we expect the project to have far greater reach.
We Will Develop: Drupal Base Platform, Written and Video Training (http://drupal.org)
We Will Provide: Free Software, Installation, Customization, Training, and Phone/Email Support
The Base platform: Publishes News, Tracks Projects, Publishes Custom RSS, Consumes/Filters/Aggregates RSS, Manages Users
The core outcomes of the project for communities are: Increased Visibility, Regional News Networks, Regional Awareness, Lower Barrier to Entry, Better fit Technology, Cross-Pollination, and greater efficiency and effectiveness in communications internally and externally.
We will focus on the needs of innovative communities in California, but anyone can access the software or training materials.
** Describe how your project help people publish news:
So far, results are very positive. Traffic to the Beta site at http://factorefarm.org has increased to 1000+ visits per week from just 100, and the community is receiving additional donations for projects.
More importantly, more people are contacting the community about collaboration than ever before. Since the launch, new collaborators from local and regional communities have contacted the Beta community offering support and collaboration, and they found the site through normal web search, something that had never occurred before.
In addition, individuals and organizations from Europe, Africa, South America, and all over the United States have contacted them in just the 30 days since the site launched.
** Describe how your project is innovative:
* We offer participants the ability to control their own platform on the web, first and foremost
* We seek to aid with a full solution: platform, training, and service
* We are ready to be hands off. With full documentation, we hope users won't need us!
* We are in favor of generalized solutions, allowing many, many people to benefit from the work of a few
* We Seek to enable voluntary 2 way communication between otherwise disparate groups
* We have a working Beta showing promising results
* The entire system, with training, will be published to the web and remain completely open
* We have the experience necessary to turn 1 success into a network of 1000 networks
** Describe how you or your organization has the ability to implement this project:
We have been customizing web applications for clients for 10 years, and we have worked exclusively with Drupal for the last 5 years.
We have created and installed almost 200 individual instances of Drupal, and we have helped 1000s of people to learn, use, and prosper in their endeavors with Drupal.
In the last year it has become clear that the economy and other funding or resource issues have saddled innovative organizations with outdated systems that are insufficient to the needs of their business and publishing. In addition, these same organization need and want to make use of more advanced systems that will help them to more effectively share their work and collaborate with others.
Currently our team includes 3 Drupal experts, degreed computer science engineers, who have been working as independent contractors on Drupal projects, as well as content managers who assist organizations in learning to use the sites we build and to make use of the tools and technology available.
As mentioned above, the base platform is about 65% complete, and we have the staff and resources on hand to complete that work, to create the training materials, and to expand the effective use of the platform by increasing the number of sites installed and the number of people trained to administer the software. We have years of experience with these exact tasks, and would like nothing more than to be able to offer them to this amazing group of innovation communities.