CoPress - Building a better ecosystem
Describe your project – 1800 characters:
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.
First impressions
What follows are my first impressions, taking a read on your notes here, having read bits and pieces in tweets and blog posts about your project for a while now...
1. OK, you need two years and more money.
The first year, you can roll out a prototype school or three in the fall, a few more in the spring, and by the time the next summer rolls around, you have a service you've taken a school year to develop and improve before you bring it out on a larger scale.
2. Other than it feeling warm and fuzzy, being based on open-source software and thus extensible, what's the advantage to a student news org to use this instead of College Publisher? It's free, and hosted, and if you ever get enough traffic, there's a rev share on the national ads, right? How is this different. (I'd emphasize that it will be built on a platform that students can learn and adapt to their own needs, right?)
3. If you're going to offer hosting, that's going to cost money to maintain after a News Challenge grant would run out. What's the business plan moving forward? And if you're not going to offer hosting, what super-easy-to-install platform are you going to build the service on?
(WordPress or Drupal? Maybe... An Ellington-like Django-based CMS would actually be difficult, unless the student news orgs in question all have access to and control of their servers.)
4. One of the winners last year is building a CMS/community network tool (plus some front-end print scheduling?) for student media. How is this different (hosting? other services?) and why is it (also) necessary?
Responses to your questions
Hey Ryan,
I've responded to your questions on our blog!
Re: First Impressions
Thanks, Ryan! We've been discussing most of the points you mentioned in No. 2, 3 and 4 throughout the process, but not as much with No. 1 -- that's something we should definitely explore in more depth.
Would you be interested in joining one of our upcoming Skype calls? We chat every Sunday at 7 p.m. (eastern time).
Distinction?
What would be the noteworthy difference between this and all the other CMS's?
Good question!
Good question, maurreen! We're not actually building a CMS, per se. We're building the community around a CMS that makes the CMS itself successful. Our hope is to actually use a CMS that already exists, and build components to it that make it better (for our uses, at least). Make sense?