Facebook Application for Personal or Community Online Newspaper

[The following inquiry letter is a modification of the original proposal.]

This project will create and host a Facebook Application which enables
individuals and groups to publish online newspapers. As part of the
Knight Drupal Initiative, we will contribute code and Drupal modules
allowing anyone to host a similar venture.

The online newspaper we envision allows timely publication of text,
images and media; comparable to already available blogging sites, but
emulating a widely understood newspaper model. Specifically, our
model supports:

* Multiple user roles including Editor, Contributor, Subscriber.
* Workflow in which Editors revise contributed content before publishing.
* Subscriber-only content and content for the public at large.
* Configurable sections to the newspaper, i.e. national, local, sports, etc.
* Configurable page layout showing headlines from various sections.

We envision use cases including but not limited to:

* A high school or college newspaper.
* A family newspaper announcing weddings, reunions, etc.
* A little league team or sports tournament.
* Tenants in an apartment building or neighborhood.
* Any small or specialized community.

This project has the opportunity to accomplish two important goals.
First, as an open source project, we develop code that will benefit
users of Drupal. Specifically the Drupal for Facebook project
(http://drupal.org/project/fb) which allows Drupal websites to publish
information to Facebook.com, and make use of a user's social network.
The code we contribute facilitates integration of any Drupal website
with Facebook, it is not limited to any particular type of
application.

The second goal is to make newspaper publishing as accessible as
possible to anyone, regardless of technical know-how. To meet that
opportunity we will host our own Newspaper Application, using the
code we contribute to the open source community. As a Facebook
Application, our service will be particularly easy to enable and use.
It will be accessible to anyone with a network connection, requiring
no software installed locally (for example it could be used from a
public library).

It's worth noting that while the application is exposed via Facebook,
the content is hosted on our own servers. Thus articles and
features are available both within Facebook,
and via a web site at another domain. In other words, we give users a
choice between using Facebook or not, and we are not committed to, or
limited to, Facebook in any way.

We believe the newest generation of web services (such as Facebook's)
represent the cutting edge of website development. Sites can take
advantage of these new abilities both by sharing information
(i.e. publishing articles to Facebook) and importing information
(i.e. knowledge of the user's social network). The Drupal for
Facebook project aims to enhance Drupal with these features.
At the same time, a second wave of applications is being built for
Facebook and similar platforms. These newer applications are far
more sophisticated and capable than most are today; and they need
advanced back-end tools such as Drupal to power
them. These are reasons why now is the right time to develop this set
of tools, and make them available to all Drupal sites.

We will measure our project's success by three milestones:

1) A stable, fully featured, and documented release of the open source
Drupal for Facebook project.

2) Hosted Newspaper Application is up and running.

3) Hosted Newspaper Application attracts a large audience (at least
1,000 different publications).

We expect to meet the first two milestones 6 months after the proposal
is accepted, and the third after an additional 6 months.

Dave Cohen, the author of this grant proposal, is also the founder and
primary developer of the Drupal for Facebook project. He is a
freelance software developer with significant Drupal experience over
the past 3 years.

The funding provided by this grant would go towards development of
Drupal for Facebook, and founding an organization to develop the
hosted Newspaper Application. An esimate of the funding required is:

2 developers @ $100/hour, 300 hours each = $60,000
1 media writer @ $65/hour, 100 hours = $6,500
1 creative @ $85/hour, 40 hours = $3,400
Marketing and advertising approximately $5,000
Hosting for first year up to $2,400

Total approximate estimate: $77,300.

Our goal is to be self-sustaining after the first year. At that time,
funding will derive either from online ads or premium features (the
base features of the Newspaper Application would remain free) or
possibly future grants from other organizations.

An initial version of this proposal, with comments from the Drupal
community, can be found at http://groups.drupal.org/node/13071.

Thanks very much for your consideration. We look forward to answering
any questions you may have.

I'm curious as to what the status of this proposal is?

My understanding, based on a conversation yesterday with Jose at the Knight Foundation, is that the proposal is neither accepted nor denied. It has not yet been presented to the Knight board. The earliest it may be presented is sometime in March. And I believe the other KDI proposals are in the same situation.

I would have replied earlier, but I didn't know the status myself.

hooray!

Where can this app be downloaded to be tested and extended?

A Ken said, Drupal for Facebook allows you to host your own apps based on Drupal.

The News Writer App is based on that project. It's rough around the edges; still working on UI, ease of use and doc.

Thanks Dave and Ken for your reply and for all your hard work on this app!

Dave Cohen or anyone that knows,
I'm having difficulty integrating my site to the facebook connect program. My site is here: www.InternationalChronicle.com and my Newswriter facebook application is here: http://apps.facebook.com/newswrite/eg/1000010/node/1000010 and my apps info is here: http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php?app_id=108523689227178&ret=2

I tried my best to follow the instructions at: http://drupal.org/project/fb but it's just not coming working yet. If an experienced Drupal developer is willing to help me, please email me at bryantjones(at)gmail.com. I'd be willing to pay you $50 for this to be integrated with Facebook and for my Drupal Newswire Theme to be made to look a little more like this: http://www.templatemonster.com/drupal-themes/25563.html

Also Dave,
I went to your app: http://apps.facebook.com/newswrite/ and wanted to join your beta program for your News writer (clicked "more info"). I saw your message saying to click the "contact us" link to join beta, but when I clicked it, it gave me this error message:
"Page Not Found
Could not find the requested page.
You are connected to facebook as Timothy Bryant Jones."
Would you please manually add me to your beta program? My Newspaper is called "The International Chronicle" and my facebook username is: Timothy Bryant Jones