Final draft: Many-to-many Community News

* Project Title: Many-to-many Community News

* What makes this idea unique?

Democracy needs many-to-many communication. Without it, our self-government lacks something critical: us. This project proposes an online community in which people can 1) see peers' content recommendations and make their own and 2) ask the community, represented by a random jury, to send important news to everyone.

Local groups and people already trying to spread information will have our help to use us, too. All the while, our project creates a platform on which prominence comes from community-chosen importance.

Full openness, transparency, and easy (even effortless) participation are reasons our project will be a central point of news, discussion, and action, but our moral and practical case to be a common meeting ground rests on the democracy of our methods.

Our approach shows how a democratic media can be popular. People choose their own sources. Meanwhile, the editorial role is opened to all. (Our own Greg Coppola has a prototype at omni-news.net.)

The addition of democratically-voted distribution to everyone ensures a baseline common knowledge of news and information. It is how we can each have a claim to everyone's attention– how a mass media can be democratic.

Our project encourages full participation, but only requires minimal participation to succeed. A handful of people stepping up to editorial roles will provide wider choices of news and views alongside established sources. If everybody writes and recommends, it's even better. Likewise, a dozen people at a time can handle requests for wider distribution to hundreds or hundreds of thousands. 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?

These partners want to use it already: http://pwgd.org/cnp

Many-to-many Community News is intended for everyone, and we have several reasons to more people than those already active in their communities will use it:

• Openness to all
• Transparency of process
• Distribution decisions made democratically
• We will go to those writing and gathering information and help them integrate our tools into their own, so they can broaden their reach with no extra effort
• Our original content and democratic moderation will be easily republishable by others.

We will build plug-in integration for people publishing with open source software such as Drupal or Wordpress. We will go to all sources of news and information (town government, local media, groups, bloggers) and work with them to add this democratic space to their current outreach. People will not have to log into our system to provide content. Everything will be designed to make contributing as easy as possible.

Groups that do not have an on-line presence can use our tools to reach their constituents; their constistuents can in turn draw on and participate in the whole network.

* 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. While even competitors like Google and Amazon can have symbiotic relationships, a nonprofit organization dedicated to democracy is best suited to be the keystone in a flourishing ecology of news and information.

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 contributing information and choosing the scope 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 is already working, as volunteers, on 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. Even the two core democratic processes, peer subscriptions and voting on distribution will be separate modules that others can use seprately. 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.

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