Photo by TheBusyBrain

In an effort to work on more interesting projects, TFnS will occasionally post a project idea in hopes that there's a client out there who's interested in funding the work. If this idea isn't up your alley, check out some of our other ideas.

Background

Journalism is entering an interesting period of development. While many traditional media outlets are dealing with broken business models and reduced income levels, there is still a strong demand for the watchdog function that the media has traditionally provided. In order to remain competitive in a world where the competition for information gathering can legitimately come from anybody with a computer and an internet connection, media outlets need to look to alternate ways to engage the public and stay relevant.

There is a growing trend with media outlets to encourage citizen journalism. In it's current form, it's basically outsourcing the role of a traditional journalist to people in the community for free. This has limited value, since the vast majority of citizen journalism is a) too localized to be of any significant value in and of itself b) amateurish and c) often times just an excuse to run a press release.

Media outlets are also starting to explore data mining as a possible news source. Many different news sites are providing publicly searchable databases as a way to let those curious enough about the information to explore it in a raw format. This has its limitations in that the media outlet essentially controls the basic format and scope of any information provided from the database.

Media outlets need to utilize the crowd in a more intelligent manner. By allowing the crowd to say essentially whatever they want (standard citizen journalism), you end up with mostly noise. Holding information in an ironclad format (typical data mining setup by media outlets) doesn't engage the crowd in any significant way.

What media outlets need to do is provide tools to the public that will allow people to move past the limitations of citizen journalism and data mining. Having publicly available databases can provide a context and a focus for citizen journalists to work around. By providing tools to allow the public to better explore and compare multiple databases, media outlets can move from the unmanageable role of content provider to the more sustainable role of content moderator.

Proposal

So what kinds of requirements are needed to pull this off?

• Data Entry Interface - We need an interface that allows users (both in-house and out-house) to enter and categorize information.
• Data Relationships - We need a way to show how information relates to one another. It's one thing to have a crime database and a property value database. It's another to show how property values correlate with the types of crimes reported in an area. By providing flexible ways to relate data, we can discover information about our communities that's much more useful than what any one data source can provide.
• Data Visualization - Data isn't useful unless you can provide smart ways to slice up and look at the information. Besides a standard table view, we need to be able to provide different types of charts and mapping functionality in order to make this more useful.
• Context Suggestions - Our system needs to be smart enough to suggest how data sets might be related to each other. This can be accomplished through a variety of means.
• Visualization Ratings/Moderation - Inevitably, somebody is going to prove that owning kittens combined with rainy weather increases the likelihood of street crime in a neighborhood (given a large enough data set about weather, crime, and pet ownership). We need to be able to moderate uninformative visuals in an open manner as to not give of the image of bias-ness.

Note that much of this functionality is already built into Drupal via the ubiquitous CCK and Views modules. The challenge is going to be providing the interfaces for all of the requirements that will allow a layperson to create meaningful data sets without them having to know what a node or a view is. There may be some scalability issues involved, but these issues are not insurmountable.

Inspiration

• Swivel
• Everyblock
• Washington Post Local Explorer
• Many Eyes

If you're interested in working with TFnS in creating this project, head over to the Contact page and fill out your contact information so that we can get in touch.