NewsCloud Newsroom Module

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newscloud-gdo's picture

[Edit: This proposal was formally rejected at the 11-Sept-2008 meeting. The applicant may reapply by filling out a new proposal that addresses the concerns outlined below. -- agentrickard]

The NewsCloud Newsroom module makes it easy for Drupal-based sites to integrate an interactive, social media newsroom. An early test release of the module was released in February 2008 (http://drupal.org/node/219425) and is part of the Drupal CVS tree. The Drupal Newsroom is a key component of NewsCloud's overall Newsroom Architecture (see attached PDF for background and specific scenarios the architecture enables).

The Newsroom module is currently in early beta. The basic functionality works although a few bugs remain. We would like to improve the robustness of the module and add new features. We would also like to solicit feedback from the Drupal community to build a list of suggested enhancements for future development.

The outcome of this project will result in more organizations with Drupal websites using our module to attract interest in and generate activity on their website while increasing the level of engagement and knowledge of current events with their members; this in turn will help them become more successful in their own mission. We will also conduct a survey of groups that used the module and provide a post-mortem of the impact of the module on their organization's missions. The post-mortem will also assess whether ongoing updates to the module are necessary and what features might be included.

Future work will include:

* Complete testing and bug fixing of existing beta module
* Building support for Drupal 6.x (the module is currently compatible with 5.x)
* Expanding the feature set
---Allow configuration of topic clouds to be done within Drupal. Currently, custom topic clouds must be configured at NewsCloud.
---Provide additional configuration options for controlling how content is presented and shared
---Provide individual member journals for tracking posted stories and comments
---Integration of NewsCloud's RSS feed engine for seeding content by topic
* Provide outreach to Drupal community
---Create introductory and operational screencasts
---Provide improved documentation
---Provide more timely technical support
---Attend conferences
---Request feedback from the Drupal community

How does your proposal meet the stated goals of the Knight Drupal Initiative program?: 

The Newsroom module makes it easy for an organization using Drupal to add news and social media features to their Website, keeping members more informed and inviting them to post stories and join discussions with other members. The module can be installed and customized in under an hour. The ease of applying these tools lowers the barrier to entry into social media, expands the number of organizations applying these features to their Websites and broadens the opportunity for discussion of mission-related topics.

What it does:

* The Newsroom module provides a page for organizations with Drupal-powered Web site to post news stories based on specific topic(s) from NewsCloud.com or stories posted by staff or site members. The newsroom module allows site members to browse headlines, read stories, vote, comment and post new articles.

* The Newsroom provides a way to add dynamic current events and news to a Drupal-based Web site. It's also a great way to stimulate involvement and discussion in a site's member community.

* The Newsroom allows organizations on different Web sites to collaborate, selecting stories for a topic-based newsroom, sharing the content and discussions from their site with other like-minded groups.

Features

* Share news stories within your Drupal-based Web site community
* Automatically feed stories into your Web site from NewsCloud.com based on a topic or seed them yourself
* Allow your members or staff to post their own stories
* Allow your members to participate in the story presentation process by voting on their favorites
* Allow your members to comment on stories and engage in discussions
* Allows your organization to pre-approve all public stories (optional)
* Republishes your news stories to the NewsCloud.com community (and optionally comments) for additional outreach
* Provides an RSS feed of your newsroom available for your site members

How long will your project take to complete?: 

The project will be funded for six months. During the first three months, we will complete primary development and extend our outreach efforts. During the final three months, we will continue providing outreach, support and bug fixes and assess whether a subsequent major update to the module is appropriate. If a significant future update to the project is warranted, we will apply for a follow on grant at the end of the six months.

How will you implement and distribute your project?: 

* We will hire part time staff to continue development and support of the project.

* We will continue to distribute the module through the Drupal module directory and through the NewsCloud Wiki, blog and web site.

To date, the module was developed by Dave Tarc (dave.tarc@gmail.com). Modifications made to the NewsCloud Web Services API were developed by Jeff Reifman (jeff@newscloud.com). The specification was written by Jeff Reifman with contributions from Alexandra Samuel and Rob Cottingham of Social Signal. Jeff will likely be involved as a project manager and developer. Dave may be involved depending his availability.

Jeff is a former Group Program Manager at Microsoft and founder of NewsCloud, ActionStudio and GiftSpot.com (now GiftCertificates). He is the primary developer behind the NewsCloud platform and is proficient in PHP, MySQL and Facebook application development. Jeff is also a freelance writer.

Dave Tarc is a talented software developer specializing in web applications and dynamic database-driven websites. Dave recently designed a patient tracking system for a medical clinic in Guatemala. Dave works in Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl and database systems include mySQL, Sybase, PostSQL. He holds a Bachelor of Computing and Information Science from the University of Guelph

What is your total budget estimate and how much funding are you requesting: 

The total budget for this project is $77,400. Most of the development, bug fixing, documentation and initial outreach for the project is front loaded into the first three months and the final three months of the project will focus more on ongoing outreach, support and minor bug fixes. We are separately seeking funding from additional sources for the overall Newsroom Architecture which will enhance the Drupal module as well as enable social media collaboration among groups using different platforms.

Estimates are broken into two phases (1 & 2)
Development and Bug Fixing
Drupal Module - 1 developer at 3 days per week for 3 months, 1.5 days per week for 3 months or 432 hrs at $85/hr = $36,720
NewsCloud Web Service - 1 developer at 1.5 days per week for 3 months, 1 day per week for 3 months or 240 hrs at $85/hr = $20,400
Documentation and Screencasts - 1 media writer at 1 day per week for 3 months, .25 day per week for 3 months or 120 hrs at $65/hr = $7,800
Technical Support and Outreach - 1 outreach specialist at 1 days per week for 6 months or 192 hrs at $65/hr = $12,480

AttachmentSize
NewsCloud Newsroom Architecture.pdf108.56 KB

Comments

Demonstration Site Link

newscloud-gdo's picture

We keep a demonstration site at http://newsroom.ourbridge.ca/

You can log in as admin (pwd: admin), staff (pwd: staff) or user (pwd:user). There is a cron bug that hasn't been patched in the latest release yet - so if stories don't appear at first, just click, sort by date. Please don't change the API key if you log in as admin, cause then we send our Canadian developer after you...

A couple questions

bonobo's picture

I have yet to rate this application -- it looks interesting, but I feel I don't know enough about it yet.

What is the status of the module now, and what still needs to be done?

Also, in reading through this, and from taking a quick look at the demo site, I'm having a hard time conceptualizing how this couldn't be achieved using a combination of taxonomy, rss/aggregation, and web services -- I feel like I'm missing something, and I apologize in advance for asking questions that probably have obvious answers.

Thanks,

Bill


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

newscloud-gdo's picture

Bill,

Good questions...

The status is that the module works at a basic level - but has a bad CRON bug and the developer has been busy with other projects and hasn't patched it yet. We also ran out of our earlier budget so development is stalled at this point. You can see the module work at http://newsroom.ourbridge.ca/ but sometimes you need to log in as admin pwd-admin and reset the newsroom due to the cron bug. I believe the fix is simple. But the feature set should be expanded per the proposal outline. We also need to do more outreach and get more beta testers to drive more feedback.

Second, the NewsCloud Drupal Newsroom is a component of a larger multi-platform approach to social media collaboration - see PDF recently attached to the proposal. You could do this all in Drupal but the NewsCloud web service enables the content to be shared with additional communities and the Newsroom Architecture in completion would allow for collaboration and co-moderated communities by mission-related groups on platforms such as Plone as well as Drupal.

Think I'm still missing something

bonobo's picture

RE: "Newsroom Architecture in completion would allow for collaboration and co-moderated communities by mission-related groups on platforms such as Plone as well as Drupal."

Could you explain this in more detail? I'm having a hard time envisioning a use case that could not be addressed by smart use of web services and/or open standards, with no real need for the Newsroom platform to be serving as middleware.


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

Please read the attached PDF

newscloud-gdo's picture

Bill,

Did you download and read the related PDF? That answers your questions. The Newsroom architecture is the smart web service that allows other sites to collaborate.

Please take a look at the PDF and let me know if you have more questions after that.

Also, the plug in (already in beta) provides a roll your own social media site in drupal today. It has the benefits of also allowing content sharing across NewsCloud and Drupal sites ... and in the future, other platforms as well.

It would take a significant amount of effort to configure a Drupal site today to do what the plug in already does.

Already read it a few times; didn't really clarify things

bonobo's picture

Like some of the other folks in this thread, I'm not seeing the need for middleware here, nor am I seeing needs that could not be addressed via aggregation/smart use of web services.

Additionally, I spent some time at http://www.newscloud.com/learn/apidocs, and still didn't see the need for an external service to do this work.

As this app currently stands, it relies on an external service that is in the early stages of development. A more compelling proposal would be a port of the Newsroom as a Drupal install profile, with targeted development on extending Views as Web Widgets, JSON Views, Services, OAuth, and FeedAPI related code.

So, you'd still have the interoperability and all of your newscloud functionality, but it would be based on a more mature framework -- and the port would be an excellent KDI proposal.


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

RE: "It would take a

bonobo's picture

RE: "It would take a significant amount of effort to configure a Drupal site today to do what the plug in already does."

Yes, it would definitely take some work, but you'd reap some additional benefits -- a look at the sourceforge page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/newscloud/ shows that there is 1 developer working on this, with a total of 13 commits since late 2006. Leveraging Drupal as the base platform would give you the freedom to focus on building out more bleeding-edge functionality for collecting and republishing news, as opposed to building out your base functionality for the sourceforge project.

I have yet to vote on this app, but if I had to vote on it now I'd probably give it a 1 or a 2 -- not because the idea isn't solid, but because the technical approach doesn't make the best use of available resources.


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

newscloud-gdo's picture

Thanks for your patience.

A terrific project, well worth supporting

Rob Cottingham's picture

We worked with Jeff in the initial conceptual stages of this module, and it's been a thrill to see it take flight. NewsCloud is a fascinating platform, with an active community and a very cool mission - but the Drupal fanboy in me is also delighted to see yet another example of how Drupal's extensibility can make it the tool of choice for people looking to integrate their site with a variety of other disparate platforms.

Aggregator?

agentrickard's picture

I am having a little difficulty with this proposal. Is this not similar to what Aggregator / FeedAPI and so on do right now? I am not sure I see the value add to the community, especially since the configuration still needs to be done at NewsCloud.

I voted a 2. The rationale needs work.

"The Newsroom module makes it easy for an organization using Drupal to add news and social media features to their Website, keeping members more informed and inviting them to post stories and join discussions with other members."

Well, these things are fairly easy now, with existing tools. Where do those discussions happen? On my Drupal site? On NewsCloud? On both?

I hope we get some good community feedback this week so we can get this proposal to where it should be.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/

Also not convinced

catch's picture

I pretty much agree with Ken - it looks very similar to what's already possible with feedAPI and friends (and there's a lot of active work going on with those modules and getting that goodness into the core aggregator), yet less flexible, and tied into a third party service. I'd rather see efforts going into improving these existing tools, and giving site owners more control themselves.

Read the PDF

newscloud-gdo's picture

Catch - did you download and read the related PDF? You can't at this time allow for cross-platform collaboration with a Drupal only Feed API approach. The PDF outlines how the newsroom architecture provides turnkey social media functionality in Drupal and in the future other platforms.

yes

catch's picture

The PDF doesn't really explain the role of newscloud in abritration of data between sites in any way. The main headline seemed to be 'you could add social media to plone'.

There's an SoC project for Views as RDF/JSON etc., feed element mapper allows feeds from any source to be mapped to drupal nodes + cck (and then these could be in turn fed out as RDF/JSON and so it goes on), services module already has support for views as service - while many of these elements are quite new, all the bits are there.

Reply to catch

newscloud-gdo's picture

Catch -

The PDF is a high level overview of how to link social media across multiple platforms. It's not a specification. The PDF explains scenarios that are possible when you use web services to link platforms rather than focusing purely on native support in one platform e.g. Drupal.

Views of RSS feeds in RDF/JSON is a good start but it doesn't address voting, commenting, user ranking, moderation, managing a news topic cloud to bring in multimedia, links and other related content.

You guys are thinking RSS feeds. The Newsroom module is a solution that provides more social media features.

It's great that you guys want to improve the Drupal platform and focus on intrinsic features. But, this is a project that not only supports Drupal but uses Web Services to make connections beyond just Drupal. And, the reason it's necessary to rely on this third party (intermediary/middleware open source) layer is because the newsroom specializes in automated news gathering...something Drupal isn't meant to do yet.

BIll has already covered

catch's picture

BIll has already covered some of this above very well, however I'll deal with some of your specific points:

Voting - fivestar, up/down and plenty of options for more with votingAPI
Comments - Drupal has comments. The comment module needs refactoring, that'd be a good proposal.
User ranking - badges, user points, fivestar again (with nodes as profiles)
moderation - modr8, Mollom, Views, Nodequeue

And yes, there are ways to expose these between Drupal sites, albeit fledgling.

For automated newsgathering - Development Seed have already built Managing News - it's catering to a different market but doing some of the same things.

ManagingNews is $1,000 per month

newscloud-gdo's picture

http://managingnews.com/pricing.html

It's not open source, it's not free.

Our drupal plugin leverages the comments and voting API in Drupal today.

The user ranking is done across the NewsCloud community - so we use a different more comprehensive algorithm dealing with social media.

I am not the developer who built the module but I believe we've tried to build it using intrinsic pieces wherever possible and then adding our value which is the social media newsgathering and community integration.

And finally, none of the points you mention discuss how content can be developed collaboratively across sites run by groups on different platforms.

Not trying to be argumentative here ...

I brought up managing news

catch's picture

I brought up managing news as an example of a similar system built on Drupal - it (and polymeme) demonstrates that such sites can be built, which reduces the need for non-Drupal middleware.

MN is open source

Boris Mann's picture

Actually, all of the components of Managing News is open source. The hosted service of MN is not free -- you pay for the UI, the hosting, and the totality of the configuration and so on being wired together. It's a valid / great business model to build around open source...

RE: "And, the reason it's

bonobo's picture

RE: "And, the reason it's necessary to rely on this third party (intermediary/middleware open source) layer is because the newsroom specializes in automated news gathering...something Drupal isn't meant to do yet."

See http://polymeme.com/ -- it's built in Drupal.

RE: "It's great that you guys want to improve the Drupal platform and focus on intrinsic features." -- for this proposal, I'm actually looking for the easiest way to accomplish the goals you describe. I haven't seen enough detail from the resources here, or from the API docs on newscloud, or from the sourceforge project, to convince me that building on top of the middleware is the cleanest way forward.


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

Re: aggregator

newscloud-gdo's picture

Ken, did you download and read the related PDF? I think it's important you read that to understand the differences between doing this with Aggregator/Feed API and with our plugin.

The plug in (already in beta) provides a roll your own social media site in drupal today. It has the benefits of also allowing content sharing across NewsCloud and Drupal sites ... and in the future, other platforms as well. Stories and comments are currently reflected in both sites. This could be modified with rules in the future.

Allowing admins to configure the newsroom from the drupal admin page is one of the things that we want to do - hence the reason we are applying for funding to improve the module.

It would take a significant amount of effort to configure a Drupal site today to do what the plug in already does.

How we plan to use it....

Alexandra Samuel's picture

We have two scenarios for using Newsroom with our clients:
1 - engaging your supporters: Invite your supporters to be part of a news gathering, tracking and response team by setting up Newsroom on your site. Now your supporters can help build out your site's news content -- increasing the content offered on your site and deepening your supporters' engagement.
2 - social media monitoring: Newsroom offers a flexible and powerful alternative to something like PageFlakes. Not only can you gather the news into one place by setting up feeds, but now you can annotate and discuss the results with your colleagues.

Congratulations Jeff on bringing Newsroom to Drupal -- and thank you!

NewsCloud is open source

newscloud-gdo's picture

Just fyi - if it wasn't clear before. Not only is the Newsroom Module built on a web service but it's built on another open source platform.
You can read more here and get links to our sourceforge sites
http://www.newscloud.org/index.php/Welcome_to_the_NewsCloud_Wiki

Cool

agentrickard's picture

I think it is just taking us some time to get up to speed on what you are doing and how that differs from other projects in this area. I have not taken the time to digest the PDF, yet.

I'm really unsure about the social media part here -- that is an external service, too? Will try to read the PDF with greater scrutiny before tomorrow's meeting.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/

Ideas for moving forward

newscloud-gdo's picture

Ken, Bill, Catch,

It may make sense to postpone review of this proposal until we can talk further about specifically what pieces of Drupal we would leverage in upcoming versions of the proposal. I would be very open to that if you would be more comfortable with the proposal once it integrates some of the ideas from today's comments. It's unfortunate the pool of reviewers is still small and that we didn't flush out some of these points until the eve of the review.

@Bill: PolyMeme is a highly customized Drupal site. The Drupal module we built is a simple plugin module that anyone can add to their site. How much money and how much time would it take you to integrate PolyMeme features into an existing Drupal 5 site?

@Bill: re: "A more compelling proposal would be a port of the Newsroom as a Drupal install profile, with targeted development on extending Views as Web Widgets, JSON Views, Services, OAuth, and FeedAPI related code. So, you'd still have the interoperability and all of your newscloud functionality, but it would be based on a more mature framework -- and the port would be an excellent KDI proposal."

I agree - I thought we were already leveraging the best available Drupal components in our existing solution. Some of our decisions had to do with initially targeting Drupal 5.x. Part of the future work would be to look ahead to expand the module for 6.x and best design practices. I appreciate that you think this would be a good proposal.

Finally, the Drupal module was built on a tiny shoestring budget to date. You can set up a topic driven newsroom in 30 minutes and extend the capability of any existing Drupal 5.x site. None of the examples you've cited can do this as quickly or inexpensively.

As for doing it in the future with only intrinsic Drupal modules with a configurable profile - this would be great if Drupal was further along to the point where there were specialized modules. The functionality you see in the current plugin module (http://newsroom.ourbridge.ca is just a small piece of the newsroom features we could add using the NewsCloud API. I would argue there is always going to be a place for these added value content and community services to be integrated into Drupal via Web Services. But you should insist that plugin developers use as much Drupal infrastructure as possible in their solutions...which I think we've done well and indicated that we will continue to do.

The purpose of this KDI proposal was to get some real resources into expanding the beta module which I think shows some impressive integrated capabilities with a free service and easy install today.

I also think you guys limit your view to NewsCloud to bringing in wire feed stories. And that's a very limited view of our platform and it's capabilities.

RE: "PolyMeme is a highly

bonobo's picture

RE: "PolyMeme is a highly customized Drupal site."

Of course it is. That's not the point. We're talking about building complex functionality here. Polymeme is a great example of how you can leverage Drupal to harvest a large amount of content from a wide range of sources. If it was easy there would be no need for a proposal.

RE: "Finally, the Drupal module was built on a tiny shoestring budget to date. You can set up a topic driven newsroom in 30 minutes and extend the capability of any existing Drupal 5.x site. None of the examples you've cited can do this as quickly or inexpensively."

Setting up a topic driven newsroom is not very complex. If this is the entire point (and yes, I know/assume that your vision extends well past this) then this is too low a bar, and makes for an apple/oranges comparison.

There are a few weaknesses I see in this proposal; the largest one I see is the requirement of the newscloud middleware. What is missing from this conversation, the pdf, and the api documentation is why, exactly, this middleware is needed. What management tasks does this perform that require it to be built on a custom platform? As the app currently stands, all of the Drupal functionality relies on this middleware being up to the task. A piece of middleware that leveraged Drupal as the development platform (seeing as how Drupal already has mature, well developed functionality that is duplicated by the NewsCloud apis -- such as this and this) would be far more compelling, and would have the added benefit of drawing from a larger pool of developers.

RE: "I also think you guys limit your view to NewsCloud to bringing in wire feed stories. And that's a very limited view of our platform and it's capabilities."

I'm not sure why you are assuming this. If I thought this proposal was just about aggregating wire feed content, I would have voted it down without a second thought. As it stands, you have received very constructive feedback. If there is something I am missing, please explain it to me. I have taken my time to provide feedback on this proposal on several occasions. I have taken time to read and re-read a fair amount of the information available on the web about your platform -- including your pdf, the api docs, the newscloud wiki, and the limited information on the sourceforge project. In short, you've had a fairly attentive audience -- take that for whatever you think it's worth.


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

RE: "How much money and how

bonobo's picture

RE: "How much money and how much time would it take you to integrate PolyMeme features into an existing Drupal 5 site?"

From this blog post, dated June 30th by the person behind Polymeme, it looks like the entire site was built in 4 months as a side project, with limited funding.

Some of you know that since early March I’ve been working on a side project — a meme-tracker for global news and ideas that would help us break through the echo chamber of news about the iPhone, Barack Obama or the Brangelina twins. I hardly imagined where I would end up when I started in early spring — with no technology or funding to pursue the idea of a meme-tracker that would crawl any blogs that I like and find what’s meme-worthy on them. But it seemed liked a fun project, so it was not that hard to invest almost all my time and savings in it; well, I learnt A LOT in the process — that was a good decision, after all. I didn’t really imagine that I’d end up with my own quite sophisticated system to track 25,000 blogs and a very intimate knowledge of Drupal — but this only proves how easy and cheap it’s become to innovate in the new media space.


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

newscloud-gdo's picture

That's the point of this module. It's not trying to force a group down a path of 4 months of development.

It leverages the best components of drupal - then adds the strongest components of value-add from NewsCloud.

And, it has the capability to support collaboration between groups on different platforms.

I can't define the differentiating factors for you any more clearly.

Standards

Boris Mann's picture

I think what we're saying is that we would be MORE interested in something that implemented standards in this space -- e.g. OAuth, OpenSocial, etc. -- rather than this middleware system that will mainly benefit ... the middleware system.

Yup.

bonobo's picture

There are a few sticking points here, but the technical approach with the middleware system is certainly one of them.


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

Process

agentrickard's picture

I read through the PDF today and kept coming back to other projects -- Calais, OpenID, FeedAPI, Drupal-for-FaceBook -- which provide parts and pieces of what this proposal is discussing. I share concerns about the middleware layer. But at the same time, the cross-platform integration hub is a good one -- and somewhere I suspect Reuters and Calais will go, if Google and Yahoo do not beat them to it.

As for the way the KDI is unfolding, we have seen a slow uptake of community involvement and review -- the discussion here is quite good, and all, I think, designed to make this a better proposal by addressing the needs of the Drupal community.

When we do proposal reviews, like today's, I think that every proposal should get on the review agenda twice. So I don't think we are ready to reject this proposal, even if it doesn't pass today. (We did something similar last meeting, and I think it will become the standard.)

I do wonder how the middleware approach would strike people if this were a more famous brand (Google News) or a more Drupal-centric one (NowPublic). There is a large part of me that says hey, if a platform developer wants to invest in Drupal, that means we get more coders.

Perhaps the missing piece here is what (if anything) gets funneled back to the Drupal project, as opposed to the benefits for individual Drupal-powered sites.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/

Middleware concerns

bonobo's picture
  1. Use of standards: is the middleware powered by open standards? How are users controlled? How is data/content managed? What web standards are used to simplify this essential task?

  2. Longevity/viability of the middleware: this whole project is predicated on the middleware being up the task. According to the sourceforge page, it has been built by one developer, with 13 commits, since fall, 2006. Given the complexity of what the middleware needs to do, and what appears to be limited developer support behind building/improving the middleware, the question needs to be asked: why doesn't the middleware leverage an existing framework? It doesn't need to be Drupal; it could be Plone, Django, or what have you, but rolling this type of product without leveraging ongoing efforts in open source communities doesn't make an effective use of resources. If the middleware was attached to a pre-existing open source community, there would be more eyes on the code, and more direct contributors to the project.

RE: "I do wonder how the middleware approach would strike people if this were a more famous brand (Google News) or a more Drupal-centric one (NowPublic)." -- it would be an improvement, not because of any particular infatuation with a brand, but because it's an indication that it's not going to go away.

In one of my earlier comments, I said that a port of the existing middleware to Drupal would be a great KDI application. As it stands now, the middleware is an enormous obstacle, as the rationale behind this approach has not been made clear in this conversation, on the sourceforge project for the middleware, in the downloaded pdf, and in the newscloud wiki. Without a clear rationale for this technical approach, I'm hard pressed to vote this app above a 2, which is too bad, because the idea has some merit.

There are additional questions I have, but until the middleware piece is addressed they're largely moot.

And, fwiw, I have yet to rate this project -- I'll hold off in hopes of seeing a revised proposal with relevant detail.


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

Final thoughts

newscloud-gdo's picture

I appreciate everyone's feedback. Ken, thanks for looking at the big picture here.

The goals of KDI are:
* To enable more people to enter the digital conversation by lowering the technical barriers to entry.
* To provide powerful tools for digital publication, free and open to all.
* To encourage people to improve their communities by supporting the free exchange of information and ideas.

This module does this by providing a simple, quick installable solution for social media to be added to an existing Drupal 5.x site.

There will be developers with value-add middleware that reach out to the Drupal community to build plug-ins and it's up to the Drupal community to either welcome or reject them. I would recommend a broad approach to opening third party developers.

Reviewers can vote down this proposal because it isn't Drupal-based but the examples and open architectures they've mentioned just aren't appropriate.

This module can be installed easily in 30 minutes to deliver content and community features immediately and they leverage the most sensible pieces of Drupal today.

The counter examples mentioned are very complex systems that can not be easily added to existing sites (at this time).

As for architectures, NewsCloud is open source, the Web Services API is open, we support OpenID and a number of other integrated services in our platform. However, for this Drupal module, OAuth made no sense - Drupal members use the service on their Drupal sites. We just authenticate through an API key. Drupal members don't need to login at NewsCloud to benefit from social media. As for FeedAPI, again this service offers functionality beyond RSS. As for OpenSocial, it's clearly not ready for prime time and offers no advantages here.

All of this said, if there are technologies that really make sense to plug into future upgrades to the module, I am all for adding more open architecture to this. So, please if you suggest an open technology that should be part of this, please tell me what scenario you would use it for and keep in mind ...

The profile of this module is to lower the barrier to entry to social media to any Drupal site. So we have a sub-30 minute install goal. Groups can have content seeding and sophisticated social media features on their site with almost no effort.

And finally, with regards to the Drupal's community mission statement of collaboration, this is a innovative module because of the way it supports collaboration between communities across multiple platforms - and I'd encourage the Drupal community to be more open and supportive (at least curious) to this. I really appreciate Ken's comments on this point.

As for the Source Forge stats, Bill should look at the Facebook Newsroom Framework which has 490 downloads over the past six months. The Facebook framework runs the social media cloud on Facebook ... just as this Drupal module runs it on Drupal. And, this architecture would support a Drupal group dual publishing to Facebook or multiple organizations co-moderating social media communities across both platforms.

Drupal 5 EOL

catch's picture

One thing I missed here is that this proposal is for Drupal 5. While it now looks possible that the Drupal 7 release cycle will be extended, maybe until the middle of 2009, that only gives Drupal5 at most one year. If our normal one year release schedule holds, then it's less than six months. Given the 3 month development schedule (and perhaps another month of KDI review and tying up loose ends if accepted), then that gives a Drupal 5 module about a 3-9 month lifetime at most. Drupal 6 has been out for over six months now, and all major modules have releases - while some sites are being started on Drupal 5 still, that's beginning to come to an end, there's much less of a reason to use D5 if creating a module or install profile.

The proposal includes adding D6 compat...

newscloud-gdo's picture

See above.

Ahh, I missed that too. Good

catch's picture

Ahh, I missed that too. Good then ;)

Installer

agentrickard's picture

One of the features that Knight really likes is the Drupal install profile. Is that part of the plan here?

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http://ken.therickards.com/

Unrated

agentrickard's picture

I just removed my rating. Very interesting discussion today in IRC. Will rethink after some changes and research.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/

Quick summary from today's IRC discussion

newscloud-gdo's picture

The IRC discussion was very helpful in drawing out new ideas with respect to the approach here.

  • The proposal could benefit from a more detailed description of features, and pros and cons for using the module vs. other solutions
  • The proposal needs more specification details regarding specific Drupal features that will be supported e.g. platform targets, install profiles, themes, et al.
  • Folks liked the idea of having a service that linked multiple platforms beyond Drupal e.g. Plone, Facebook, etc.
  • People would like there to be a service option that can be run w/o relying on the NewsCloud service. e.g. a cloud server that could be installed and run to deliver the functionality of the NewsCloud service without the connection to the NewsCloud community
  • Jeff and Bill will have an offline chat and follow up with further comments here

If I missed anything, please chime in.

My 2 cents

ceoaainc's picture

I am an accountant developing my own site and I love the Newscloud feature because it is very simple. 1. Enable the feature in Drupal. 2. Set up my Newscloud. 3. Copy the API. I can now start writing and linking to stories. Within 20 minutes I have basically live, relevant content with pictures that users can comment and vote on. It allows me to engage my readers by making them a part of the news cycle. I can focus my feed so that I only import approved news from my Newscloud that relates to wealth building. (Stocks, Real estate, and small business development). The fact that someone without any understanding of IT and coding can do this with free software amazes me. The only problem is that the feed from Newscloud is not working that great. Please continue this project and get the bugs out.

newscloud-gdo's picture

The alpha of the standalone PHP version of this project was released today. It might be interesting for folks who followed the thread here to take a look.
http://blog.newscloud.com/2008/10/announcing-the.html

The Social Media Toolkit (SMT), is an open source platform designed to help organizations run community-driven, topic-based and geo-centric news websites, similar to NewsCloud.com, albeit simpler and more streamlined. You can see examples of the SMT running here: http://election.newsi.us, http://sarahpalin.newsi.us, http://seattle.newsi.us, http://tech.newsi.us and http://climate.newsi.us.

The alpha release is a preliminary testing release to gather feedback from organizations and open source developers. The initial alpha feature set and design/stylesheets are very basic - but show the potential of the new toolkit. We hope to add more features and improve the default design in the near future.

What can I do with the Social Media Toolkit

Essentially, you can quickly set up and publish one or more topic-specific news sites with great social media features such as registration, voting, comments, newswires, posting and resource links. Stories are initially seeded from NewsCloud's topic clouds. It's easy to create new topic clouds if you want to. (During the test period, the SMT is restricted to approved clouds. If you would like to propose a new topic related to your organization or are interested in using the SMT for commercial purposes, please email us.) Organizations with similar missions can also collaborate to moderate specific topics.

Social Media Toolkit entered in News Challenge 2009

newscloud-gdo's picture

For those of you that followed this thread, I've entered the overall Social Media Toolkit (which incorporates plug-ins for Drupal, Plone et al) into the Knight Foundation News Challenge 2009.

This year, Knight's News Challenge applications are open for public review. I'm encouraging NewsCloud readers and open source developers to take a look at and rate our applications.

You can learn more at the NewsCloud blog: http://blog.newscloud.com/2008/10/review-newsclouds-knight-news-challeng...