Rapid News Awards Update #4

General News

The South by Southwest panel on community funded reporting was a most interesting and rewarding experience.  I noticed a real sense of interest and engagement from the audience in pursuing the difficult  questions of how to give audiences and community members a larger stake in the production process, while maintaining a high caliber of journalistic integrity.  Spot.us has been around for long enough now that it is starting to show some results, and people are keenly interested in interpreting these results while learning more about the spot.us model, and others such as rapid news awards.

At the panel I delivered a talk entitled “Rapid News Awards: Democratic Expertise, with Funding!”  The slides can be found here.

News for Developers

The code base has doubled in size since the last update.  We now have a fairly extensive test suite and testing infrastructure that  will ensure steady development and reliability.  The internal code for the social graph has also been implemented.

What’s Next?

A user interface for moving back and forth between editions, viewing social graph changes, and individual user accounts.  I am also moving back to the east coast for the spring.