Project has launched!

We have launched our experiment and will run until August 19th. Check it out at http://www.newskraft.org

Experiment Launching July 16th

The launch has been rescheduled to July 16th at the site newskraft.org

Experiment Launching June 13th

After much progress with a full redesign of the front-end and a series of articles explaining the project, not to mention approval from the UCSD institutional review board, the experiment is scheduled to launch on June 13th.

Funding Works

Good news: the aggregator now allocates funds across winning stories.  Screenshot below.

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

How it Works

The network is divided into two classes of participants: “editors” and “judges,” with distinctive roles.

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.

It’s an Aggregator!

Lots of progress has been made recently.  The voting and social networking code is working well, and I’ve implemented an early version of the vote tallying and story display code.  So it’s officially a news aggregator: it displays a sorted list of news stories with the most important one on top, all determined by our novel authority network.

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

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.

Rapid News Awards Update #3

General News

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.

Rapid News Awards Update #2

I’ve made some progress in the past week.  We now have a simple voting facility.  Votes are cast using a bookmarklet: First you navigate to the page you want to vote for, then you click the bookmarklet, which inserts your vote into the RNA databse.  When you load the RNA app, it reads in all the existing votes so far and displays them as a list.

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”.