* Project Title: Many-to-many Community News
* What makes this idea unique? * (no more than 350 words)
Democracy needs many-to-many communication. Without it, our self-government lacks something critical: us. PWGD proposes an information network in which people can 1) see peers' recommendations and make their own and 2) ask the network, represented by a random jury, to send an important item to everyone.
This answers the question of how everyone can have a claim on everyone's attention, how a mass media can be democratic. It also suggests how a democratic, open, and participatory media can be popular. People, after all, are choosing their own editors. They no longer have to choose a whole publication to do so, and the editorial role itself is opened to all. (Our partner Greg Coppola has a prototype at omni-news.net.)
The addition of the jury-voted important information for everyone to receive ensures a baseline common knowledge.
Significantly, this idea encourages full participation, while only requiring minimal participation to be successful. A handful of people stepping up to share editorial roles with established sources will provide a wider range information and interpretations. If everybody writes and recommends, it's even better. Likewise, a dozen people can handle a request for wider distribution to hundreds or hundreds of thousands. The community does not need the impossible time commitment of most users voting on most items to function democratically. If requests prove too numerous, a cosponsor or two could be required, but mostly with a new jury handling each request the work would be shared in tiny pieces by the entire community.
This simple approach lays a foundation of support for building physical community and supporting journalism. Content from diverse news sources will be side by side for people to choose from, and will help people form affinity groups. All this news and information will be in a framework that encourages comment, discussion, telling others, and proposing real actions.
* Who else would want to use it, and why?
People who want to blog about the night life or report on local issues; people who want to get all their local news and information in one place; town governments, civic groups, businesses, religious and other organizations that want to reach their members through a easily accessible medium; and organizations who could further make use of PWGD's collaborative editing and democratic decision-making tools to produce their newsletter for members or general news.
We will build plug-in integration for people publishing with open source software such as Drupal or Wordpress. We will go to sources of news and information (town government, local media, bloggers) and work with them to add this democratic space to their current sources of outreach. People will not have to log into our system to provide content specifically for us. Everything will be designed to make contributing as easy as possible.
Groups that do not even have a way to reach their constituents can use our tools: we hope of course these constituents would choose to follow other sources of information as well, in any case they would receive the important announcements and so join a community of shared knowledge.
Specific people and groups already want to use this idea: http://pwgd.org/community-news-partners
* Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project?
If quality local journalism is to thrive in the 21st century, it will have to be in a mutually beneficial relationship with myriad ways to share information locally. A nonprofit organization dedicated to democracy is better suited for this task than a for-profit or even a nonprofit with any other purpose.
A centralized place for community information is far from a new concept, but the philosophy is – an open, nonprofit philosophy, combined with sophisticated technology for enabling everyone to participate in both contributing information and deciding about it's level of distribution.
Key organizational and technical partners for the Natick pilot project already include Omni-news.net, SpaceShare.com, MyNatick.org, and the Center for Information Awareness (COAnews.org), and the Amazing Things Arts Center.
Excellent technical talent has already signed onto the project. Money is needed to pay these and other developers and to take on the critical challenge of bringing organizations that are just getting by with their current methods of communication and outreach to make the small changes needed to their practices in order for them to participate in a common on-line system. Our open approach, and the evidence of the on-line and physical communities we have already built, show us to be uniquely suited to build a vibrant on-line community that reconnects people to their physical community.
The software for this will be modular and open source. And we will adopt and help others adopt common formats for sharing news and information. Our open source software and open standards will give others' (and our own) future projects new ways to share information and news that we can only imagine now.