Comment And Vote On Our Knight News Challenge Submissions

Over the last few weeks a few people on our team have been buzzing away getting proposals together for the Knight News Challenge.  The deadline for submission was yesterday, and our proposals are now up and ready for comments and votes!

Owen’s proposal, made in conjunction with Leo Burd at MIT would connect the offline 75% through mobile voice community broadasting. The idea is to develop a telephone interface (not a smart phone or other mobile interface, but a 1G interface) for Drupal using VOIP technology.

One of our newest team members, Malcolm Van Delst submitted a propose to create a Mobile First version of the Open Outreach distribution under development by our Alumn Nedjo Rodjers and his new Chocolate Lily Web endeavor.  The idea here would be to make a solid mobile theme, and a package of all the necessary modules so that organizations using Open Outreach could easily make their website super accessible to users on mobile devices. 

Keeping with the Mobile First concept, Malcolm also proposed a Mobile First Drupal Distribution For Journalism. This distribution would make it easy for news sites, probably smaller local news sites and local news blogs, to quickly deploy mobile optimized web sites with Drupal that would not only allow for reading content, but would also make it easy to submit new content and interact with existing content via a mobile devise.

Benjamin Doherty proposed developing nota bene” or n.b. a better commenting system for Drupal. Nota Bene is inspired by the commenting system STET (which was developed for the GPL v.3 commenting process) and allows users to comment on specific sections of text. In turn it can visually represent which sections have generated more comments, and allow readers to view them contextually, rather than simply showing a long list of free form comments in chronological order at the end of an article.  CivicActions alumn Arthur Folshe and I talked about doing something like this for a prospective client a few years back, so I am very excited to see this proposal come out now.

Please take a few minutes to check out these excellent proposals, offer your comments, and vote on them.