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Goals for 2010

By Donna Liu,Founder, AllPrinceton

This is AllPrinceton’s to-do list for the rest of 2010:

Website

  • Further refinement of the architecture of the site
  • More de-bugging of functionalities
  • Making the interface more user-friendly
  • Adding mobile interface
  • Extending further into social media outlets

Community Relations

  • Increasing the number and diversity of “Trusted Authors”
  • Boosting the public profile of AllPrinceton
  • Offering more training for potential contributors to the site, including local public school students

Editorial Content

  • Establishing a more regular schedule of coverage
  • Building up a reliable stable of freelance reporters
  • Offering a publishing platform and news lab for local students of journalism

Commercial Sustainability

  • Instituting an ad sales program
  • Creating a local business directory
  • Building a subscription-based “commercial circle” through which merchants and services can publish directly to their audience
  • Exploring commercial sponsorship and fundraising opportunities

Self-evaluation

AllPrinceton is still in the “quiet” phase of development. We have done no marketing campaigns yet, but focused instead on a series of private talks with community leaders, activists, educators, and media. It seems best to get community input while shaping the site, rather than present the community with a ready-made site that may not match their needs.

Reception to the project has been extremely positive. Organizations agree on the need for a timely, online community-based news and information site. Several groups have asked for an online space for them to communicate internally and externally.  Others are looking for a unified calendar that can be sorted by category. Still others are looking to participate in a common and searchable place for all the relevant civic information. The library has even suggested that we base ourselves there, as they reinvent their own role in the digital age.

But it can be challenging to translate those positive feelings into productive action. AllPrinceton will be holding reporter workshops starting in late October, which will help build a community of contributors who are comfortable with publishing in this format.  The first of these will be tailored to residents who have already expressed interest in contributing, but need some training and support. The second one will be in conjunction with a Digital Media Bootcamp which I am coordinating at Princeton University. Journalism professors at Princeton University have been offered AllPrinceton as a multimedia platform on which their students can publish their work. A similar invitation will be extended to the local high schools.

Another challenge at this stage of the project is how to translate collaborative ideas into user-friendly web tools. As one of my phone app developers put it, “intuitive is hard” to develop. Open-sourced out-of-the-box solutions are powerful, but really quite buggy.  It is one thing to start a local news blog with a single column of content. There are lots of free solutions for that. It is altogether a different level of difficulty to design a self-organizing online community of information. While I still believe OpenPublish is a good framework to start with, customizing it can create an endless to-do list of features I wish the site had. I was brought up short by the critique of a younger reader, who said she liked the site, except it looked too much like a newspaper! Work to be done…

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