Many-to-many Community News (Final as submitted)

* Project Title:

Pilot Project: Many-to-Many Community News (initially for Natick, a town of 32,000 at the center of population for Massachusetts)

* Total estimated cost of project (U.S. Dollars):

$200,000

* Time needed to complete proposal:

2 year(s)

* 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.

Full openness, transparency, and easy (even effortless) participation will help make our project a locus of news, discussion, and action. Our moral and practical claim to be a common meeting ground rests on the democracy of our methods.

And it will actually happen because we're going to get out there and hustle. Starting in Natick, we will help groups and active citizens, one by one, add our tools to their outreach efforts. They'll join a platform on which prominence comes from community-chosen importance.

We will show, first, a democratic media can be popular. People choose their own sources (in a network which, uniquely, opens the editorial role to all). Our Greg Coppola has a beta at omni-news.net.

Second, a mass media can be democratic. Voting on news to be disseminated to the whole community shows how we can all have a claim to everyone's attention. It also ensures a baseline of common experience.

Our project encourages participation, but requires only minimal participation to succeed. A handful of people stepping up to editorial roles alongside traditional sources provides wider choices of news and views. If everybody writes and recommends, it's even better. Likewise, a dozen people at a time handle requests for distribution to hundreds or hundreds of thousands. With a new jury handling each request the work is shared in tiny pieces by the entire community.

New from diverse sources will be side by side and will help people form affinity groups as they choose sources. Everyone receives news voted important (rampaging elephant) even if not subscribed to the source (lost pet news). All this news and info 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: pwgd.org/cnp

Many-to-many Community News is intended for everyone. It will reach beyond our base of people active in their communities for several reasons:

• Openness (kids to businesses– all)
• Transparency of process (trust)
• Distribution decisions made democratically (fairness)
• We will help those writing and gathering information (town government, local media, groups, bloggers) to integrate our tools into their own, so they can broaden their reach with no extra effort
• Original content and democratic moderation easily remixed online and offline

We will be free web and e-mail publishing for anyone, especially anyone who cares about any local issue and wants to be instantly plugged into a larger 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.

If we accept advertising or add local trade, revenue would be shared with content providers. More important, our project gives a second life to news stories as a basis for community self-organization.

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 contribute information and choose the scope of distribution.

Natick pilot project team members already include Omni-news.net, SpaceShare.com (ridesharing), MyNatick.org, COA News, and the Amazing Things Arts Center. More: pwgd.org/cnp

Software developed will be open source - part of an evolving world-class CMS, Drupal. The two core democratic processes, peer subscriptions and voting on distribution, will be separate modules, which could especially be used by large membership groups. A module to prevent overlapping subscriptions from duplicating content will be a third major contribution.

We will adopt and help others adopt common formats for sharing news and information. Open standards will let future projects share news in ways that we can only imagine now.

Excellent technical volunteers are already working. We are going to do this, and more. How quickly is up to you. We ask Knight to select any piece of the software and fund that, if the entire project including outreach cannot be funded.

Our team members have built online and physical communities independently. Together we will build an open, vibrant online community that connects people to each other, shared goals, and courses of collective action in geographic communities.

[Links and emphasis were not captured by NewsChallenge web form.]