CoPress

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: 
$300,000
Total cost of project including all sources of funding: 
$400,000
Expected amount of time to complete project: 
2 years

CoPress is a holistic, non-profit, open-source, and community-driven initiative to provide student news organizations with the technical ecosystem they need to thrive as information gathering and distribution goes digital. At the moment, it includes three parts: the software, the community, and the knowledge. CoPress will support popular CMS options with continuing development, plugins, code tuning to create workflows that fit our sector, and optional hosting/management (similar to the WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org experience). Additionally, CoPress will connect student newspaper online editors, etc. with their peers through a variety of means, including potentially a social network that plugs into the backend of the CMS, a yearly conference, and an actively updated directory of contact information and current projects. Finally, CoPress will provide members with the intellectual resources (tutorials, documentation, videos, podcasts, webinars, etc.) they need to improve their digital distribution platform. Members will also be able to edit, contribute and improve the resources.

5 comments

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?

We've got plenty of ideas

With the approaching ubiquity of the web comes a tremendous potential for student news organizations to be far more engaged with their audience, and vice versa. Thanks to the creativity of those involved with CoPress, we've got more than plenty of ideas to build levels of engagement, including:

  • Geo-specific mobile delivery
  • Community voting functionality like Digg or Reddit
  • Follow up on comments by RSS, email, or Facebook

There's even more on our Ideal CMS draft and older Ideal CMS Outline.

Fortunately, the way that we're approaching the digital distribution platform issue will allow us to divide and conquer on the ideas we'd like implemented. CoPress is about working together as a community around common goals, because we'll all benefit when we collaborate.

0 comments

How is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)

We're more than a CMS

There are CMSes out there for student newspapers to use. We are well aware of this fact. At the moment, however, there is no talented, diverse, and distributed body of student developers and technologists working together around improving a community platform for their specific needs. The people are there, but they need to be connected and coordinated.

If we're working on a common platform, and are connected in a network, then we can collaborate and innovate together, allowing us to build off the successes of everyone's collective efforts.

0 comments

What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?

We dig everyone's experience

For such a grand idea, do you think we'd bring a .22 to the fight? No, we're bringing the best and the brightest. We gather experience from everywhere we can, and our unique open and distributed model allows us to assign tasks based on skill set, etc.

On the CoPress team currently are:

Advisers and experience these guys have will be coming soon.

0 comments

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