This is the last piece of major functionality for a working system. The rest is details.

Editors follow and unfollow judges, thereby bestowing “authority” on them. If a judge is followed by five editors, for example, the judge has an authority of five.

Judges vote to support stories after they are published on the web. A judge’s vote adds his or her authority to the ”score” of the story, and a running tally is kept of the highest-scoring stories.

Every few days, an “edition” will be published in which the highest-scoring stories from the past few days are publicly recognized and “funded” by the system.

The system will have a fixed number of editors (say 15 or so) and potentially thousands of judges.

The intent is to leverage the network’s authority structure to award funding to the “best” works of journalism in a participatory manner, or phrased as a question, to ask what kind of journalism will be favored by a particular community under these affordances.

The next steps are user authentication and a number of aesthetic cleanups.  Then we hit the pavement.

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.

Lyn Headley of rapidnewsawards.org will be on a panel at South By Southwest on March 13th with David Cohn of Spot.us.  We’ll be talking about community-funded reporting, so please come and take part.

News For Editors and Judges

The site is progressing nicely.  In addition to the voting capability, we now have a notion of “publication,” in which the periodical makes a transition from one edition to the next.  This is where we will plug in the final vote tallying and funding functionality.  It will also enable people to browse through previous editions.

Here’s a screencast showing how the site currently works.

News For Developers

Our code is now publicly available at github, the social coding site. Sit back and watch the codebase grow.

What’s Next?

Installing a unit testing framework and implementing follow/unfollow.

Um, What’s Rapid News Awards Again?

See our home page.

Technically, I’ve made a lot of progress with the architecture of Google App Engine + Google Web Toolkit.  These are fairly complex tools and there’s a definite learning curve, but so far I’m quite happy with them.  There are still a lot of policy decisions to make regarding how the data is structured, how it is transmitted across the network (serialized), and how the AJAX client is structured.   I’ll be tackling those issues, along with a testing framework, in the coming weeks.  I’ll also start working on the process whereby one edition transitions to another, which I’m calling “publication”.