This is an application for a Knight Brothers Foundation 21st Century News Challenge grant. In the spirit of open source, I post it here in the Drupal forum for discussion and as an example for people to pursue additional grants for the journalism, civic engagement, and physical community-building for which Drupal is so suited. Note that the grants could cover establishing sites as well as module development.
Project Category and Title * (255 characters)
News Challenge Idea: Related Items, a module for the community-oriented and open-source content management system, Drupal, to let users quickly and easily connect any piece of content (news, idea, group, event) to any other content they consider related.
Briefly describe the project for which 21st Century News Challenge funding is requested. Keep in mind the purpose is to develop physical communities when answering the following questions in your description:
What makes this idea unique? * (no more than 350 words)
As an open source extension to software created, supported, and used by a vibrant community, Related Items could be part of many other projects the Knight Brothers foundation might well fund in their own right.
This idea is unique in the scope of possible applications that its simplicity, modularity, and open source implementation make possible. Any site using Drupal, an increasingly popular choice, could easily add this module to allow users and/or staff to rapidly associate any item on the site with any other item. News articles would have related past and current articles. Forum topics, blog posts, ideas, actions, event notices, and groups' home pages, could connect to news content and vice versa, and to each other.
Connections would be two way by default. Content with the most connections would be listed first (and inappropriate connections could be voted against and cancelled out). Administrators could allow connections by content type and list related items by type. Drupal modules can already automatically link to related content based on keywords. User-created connections would add far greater more value to this, and could use the automatic links to help users find and endorse a connection with one click.
Many great ideas rely on user-generated content or community involvement. Related Items, uniquely, works with even the barest initial level of user involvement. One person making a connection can prove valuable to a whole community.
Related Items could alert people when newer content is connected to older content they chose to track: an excellent way for good news sites to retain readers, who value follow-up. That's just the beginning of the power of this simple idea. Many good news articles will be about community problems. Related Items can help readers find the ideas and groups of people working on solutions.
Working with other Drupal modules, Related Items could connect national or regional content to local groups, actions, and events based on users' locations.
The Related Items module has great potential to connect people and ideas across both time and space, turning journalism into an engine of community involvement and social change.
Who else would want to use it, and why? * (no more than 150 words)
News sites of all kinds that want to build community, tie news articles to ideas and actions, or just let users help show the content's connections and continuity, would likely want to use the Related Items module-- and could, simply by downloading it.
This is especially true since high-profile news sites and many more up-and-coming potentially great news and civic participation sites already use Drupal. The large http://NowPublic.com and Lisa Williams' archetypical local citizen journalism site, H2Otown of Watertown, Massachusetts - http://www.h2otown.info - run on Drupal. So does the sophisticated http://new.savannahnow.com/ and the hyperlocal http://www.poconoclassifieds.com/ and the thriving http://blufftontoday.com/ and the Belgian Indymedia site http://www.indymedia.be/en to name but a few. Many more are in alpha testing with, considering moving to, or yet-to-be-born in Drupal.
Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project? * (no more than 350 words)
I am passionate about this project. I am part the open source, Drupal, and media education and reform communities-- plus a town meeting member.
A part-time Drupal developer, I could given time make Related Items myself (with the help of others, as always). But I would rather use a Knight grant (supplemented by my own contribution if necessary) to hire veteran Drupal programmers to craft the Related Items module.
Once developed, I will undertake at my own time and expense the crucial task of maintaining the module. (Nothing unusual -- every Drupal module needs a volunteer to fix bugs, update to new versions, and act on feature requests -- but the level of maintenance plays a huge role in how widely used a module becomes.)
I would promote Related Items in the Drupal community. A very diverse group of sites, many focused on building communities (some ideologically, but more geographically) already use Drupal and would be able to use the Related Items module immediately.
Most important for the goals of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, I'll be able to describe how to use Related Items to foster physical communities.
The Related Items module isn't a leadership-level idea by itself, but it could easily have the biggest community-building impact, dollar-for-dollar, of any project you fund. This is largely thanks to the value inherent in Drupal's state-of-the-art open source technology, which is rapidly becoming the standard for anyone serious about building a community site. Its highly modular design allows for a very solid core with many excellent third-party contributions, which Related Items will be.
One more example to show the potential: http://folkjam.org/ is pioneering the use of content with a location attribute to instantly show people activities near them. Pairing this with Related Items, news (or news aggregating) sites will have the ultimate functionality to bring on-line connections to real communities.
I thank you for your attention and Gary Kebbel for creating connections in the real world himself. I am glad of this opportunity and would love feedback, including related items (compatible projects) I should know about!
There's the proposal for a module I see as being hugely useful. Comments and collaborators welcome!
Comments
A warning on the Knight foundation's stated word limits
They actually have character limits as evidenced by the error messages I received:
# Field what makes your idea unique has gone beyond 2075 characters.
# Field who else would want to use it, and why has gone beyond 2490 characters.
# Field why are you the best person or organization to develop this project has gone beyond 1245 characters.
And actually, the limits are somewhat below the character count as my CopyPasteX tools indicated, and below their own JavaScript automatic truncating. Save yourself some trial, be less verbose than me. After trimming to exactly their stated word counts, I then had to cut some more to get somewhere below those character counts.
~benjamin melançon, human being
person who gives a damn, http://pwgd.org/ - "building the infrastructure of a network for everyone"
member, Agaric Design Collective, http://AgaricDesign.com - "Open Source Web Development"
benjamin, Agaric
Node Relationships
With slight modifications, the node relativity module, clipper module, relationship module, or playlist module will do what you want. They all use some form of node-to-node relationships. There is also work to get CCK to implement a flexible node relationship backbone. I might be available to develop the custom functionality desired in this spec, you can contact me with my drupal.org contact form.
CRE could provide so usefulness
My project http://www.drupal.org/project/cre is a complex collorabtive filtering module. cre.module itself is an api that could prove useful for your project. It is based SOLELY on votes and voting patterns of users
Good News: Related-nodes module fund request reaches 2nd round
... that's also the bad news, there's a somewhat expanded version of the application to be filled out.
Now, I want to take any money I can get in grants, and give it to Drupal developers other than myself. Two comments have got us on the right track, the other area of this related nodes concept which I think I particularly need help with is dynamically searching for and displaying nodes (without leaving the present screen), and if there's a way to list last-visited nodes.
What I'm trying to say, is if you can do this work (or some of it), and especially if you can also help fill out this application, the $2,400's yours! Also, I have a number of larger proposals for democratic communication with Drupal on which I'd like to collaborate with others.
From the Knight Foundation's e-mail:
~ben
People Who Give a Damn :: http://pwgd.org/ :: Building the infrastructure of a network for everyone
Agaric Design Collective :: http://AgaricDesign.com/ :: Open Source Web Development
benjamin, Agaric
Semantic Search
Congrat's on the funding - I'll be following this project.
May work with my project:
http://drupal.org/project/semantic_search
And this project
http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search
This might also be useful
http://drupal.org/project/relatedlinks
My take on related items!
You might try this:
http://drupal.org/project/relateditems
cheers! ;)