OpenBlock Blog

I am happy to announce that I’ve just made a new stable release of OpenBlock! A few highlights of what’s in 1.2:

• Many tweaks to the public site, including: a more useful default view of a news type (“Schema”), nicer-looking map, add/edit/delete forms with autocomplete for user-contributed “neighbornews” content.
• Improved geocoding and better handling of some street names (eg. highways)
• Many administrative UI improvements
• Added a generic CSV scraper, and admin UI for loading CSV files by hand
• Administrative moderation of comments
• Lots of new hooks and template tags for people developing custom code
• Python package API documentation
• Over 30 bug fixes.

Get it now, or try out our amazon EC2 AMI to get it running in seconds.

…And Thanks For All the Fish

This will be the last release I make under OpenPlans’ grant from the Knight Foundation. I’ll still be around on the mailing list, but I won’t be working on the code much anymore. Of course, OpenBlock remains free and open source, so I encourage everybody to fork it and see what you can make with it.

I’d like to thank: Luke Tucker for hacking away with me on this all through 2010-2011, Frank Hebbert for shepherding us through the second half, Andy Cochran and Phil Ashlock for design work, Nick Grossman for getting us rolling; the Knight Foundation for funding our work; OpenPlans for being an unreasonably good place to work; Joel at the Globe and Drew, Chris, and Andy at the Columbia Tribune for being great and patient partners; Rob Miller for getting OpenPlans involved; Ryan Thornburg for showing early enthusiasm and following through with OpenRural; the Caktus crew for the patches; Tim Shedor for doing an awesome job on larryville; everybody on the ebcode list for being the reason to do it; and crucially, Adrian Holovaty and the rest of the Everyblock.com crew for creating it in the first place. I hope I didn’t forget anybody, but I’m sure I did.

- Paul Winkler

Ryan Thornburg writes about OpenRural, an OpenBlock powered project:

OpenRural aims to lower the cost of gathering and publishing basic data about government and public life. Property sales, arrest reports, new business openings and restaurant inspections have long been a staple of community newspapers. But until now, publishing them has required a reporter to go down to a county office, pick up a piece of paper, and re-type the information into her newspaper’s publishing system. We aim to automate as much of that as possible. Lowering costs and serving an audience across all demographics, OpenBlock appears to meet all the requirements for itself being a penny press for the digital age. But generating cheap content doesn’t solve the revenue problem in a world of abundance and bad competitors who are willing to provide a similar or better service for even lower margins. The only way that OpenBlock — or any penny press in the digital age — is going to solve revenue woes is by increasing audience loyalty in both print and online. If OpenBlock lowers the cost of collecting and publishing commodity news in rural markets and staves off some bad competitors, then the next step will be for publishers to reinvest the savings into high-quality, high-impact public affairs reporting. Reporters who once gathered paper and went to meetings will need to do more stories about the “how” and the “why” rather than simply the who, what, when and where. For these rural communities to lift themselves out of poverty, they need to be able to look at trends in the data.

In the 19th century, the “penny press” revolutionized journalism by covering news that appealed to the broadest possible public. Today, as media organizations struggle to monetize online coverage and chase tech trends, they have all but abandoned less-than-affluent readers — and with them, the commitment to public service journalism. According to Pew, fewer than half of Americans who make under $75K a year go online for news. This panel will reconsider the digital divide in terms of information as well as technology. We’ll explore how low-income and working-class people – the majority of Americans – can be included in the future of online news. We’ll discuss new models for participatory, data-driven local journalism. We’re not trying to save newspapers or kill them off. Our aim is to help bring journalism back to those who punch a clock. This Future of Journalism Track is sponsored by The Knight Foundation.

Saturday, March 10. 9:30AM -10:30AM. Sheraton Austin. Capitol ABCD.

(Source: schedule.sxsw.com)

LarryvilleKU was launched on Feb. 2 this week, bringing OpenBlock to the University of Kansas community.

According to project lead Tim Shedor, the site is a joint venture of the KU School of Journalism and the Daily Kansan. It was funded by a Knight Foundation grant.

Check out the cool theme they developed, which re-flows dynamically to work well on both desktop and mobile devices.

Congratulations to Tim and the LarryvilleKU team — great job!

We’ve just learned about two efforts to work with OpenBlock at university journalism schools! From http://www.aejmc.org/topics/archives/3412:

Through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, AEJMC has funded ten proposals to develop innovative and creative academic applications of projects already funded through the Knight News Challenge…

• Jacqueline Marino, Kent State University; “OpenBlock Campus”
• Hyunjin Seo, University of Kansas. (OpenBlock) “LarryvilleKU: Web and Mobile Application of OpenBlock to The Kansan”