One of the best possible results of the Networked Journalism Summit, I’m told, is collaborative work by WNYC and the Ft. Myers News-Press to create a tool to enable crowdsourced collections of data from the public (a la WNYC’s Are You Being Gouged, which required lots of manual input and analysis).
This inspires another thought: Wouldn’t it be great if news organizations of all sizes and shapes could share applications that would enable networked journalism? Imagine if any news org could get their hands on that crowdsourcing tool to start mobilizing their audiences to go get information. Imagine if someone created a tool to make it easy to compile news reports via Twitter or photos via Flickr and make it ready for embedded publishing with an optional admin tool to clean things up. Imagine if folks wanted to follow in the footsteps of MyHeimat or NorthwestVoice and reverse publish content from the public into print with less cut-and-paste hassle. What other ideas could you imagine?
And this leads to another question I sent to the folks working on that app: What platform would be best for this? One thought is Django. Others like Drupal. I don’t know enough to know. Your suggestions?
