Item No. 12 in my proposal for a Knight grant asks:
Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area? (Limit of 2,075 characters, about 325 words — This needs to be trimmed.)
Related efforts are either narrowly focused or much broader than community news projects.
Sprints are a type of short collaboration in software engineering. They are part of a method of agile development, designed to respond quickly to needs and requests of the market.
* At Slate, Tim Harford writes about research on whether newspaper Web sites should be free. The article is based on work by economist Matthew Gentzkow. (The PDF is about 30 pages.)
* From Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller via Poynter’s online news mailing list, I learned of the Newspapers on Drupal group. Members are listed here. Drupal is an an open-source content management platform.
* At Common Sense Journalism, Doug Fisher suggests the news industry form a cooperative “skunk works” — described by Wikipedia as “a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.”
Lockheed Martin had the first skunk works by that name, in the 194os in Burbank, Calif., to rapidly develop the XP-80, a new jet fighter.
The phrase is based on the “skonk works,” or the still, in the “L’il Abner” comic strip by Al Capp.
