Spot.Us (www.spot.us) is a community funded reporting platform set up in the Bay Area by David Cohn with the help of a seed grant from the Knight Foundation. I think its a phenomenal idea for two reasons
1. There is a serious lack of good journalism these days. Newspapers are going out of business, cutting down on their journalist staff, travel etc. Similarly, the pressure to increase TRPs and enhanced competition have forced TV channels to sensationalize their content. Catering to the lowest common denominator. Even a campaign such as Jaago Re that encouraged people into voting more cannot run without useful, deep information on who to vote for. It is a widely accepted fact that the funds required to produce deep stories that provide the context & background are getting scarcer. This is a very scary thought – I did a very very quick scan on the homepage of Times Of India today (www.timesofindia.com) – the mix between serious stories and fluff / semi-porn is roughly 60 – 40. What is more disappointing though is that the longest story doesnt have enough depth.
This paucity of journalism, some claim, is countered by the rising trend of community or citizen journalism. My belief is that while community journalism is good in certain situations – its not effective at uncovering deep stories.
There is a huge need for good journalism which (being a public good) is deep and neutral. And funding for this will not be coming from the traditional media channels or from foundations or the government (though government funded journalism is great – NPR & BBC are great examples).
Which makes Spot.Us a winner. Freelance journalists who are experienced in certain beats can propose stories they want to cover and cite an amount that they’d need to raise to cover the story. And citizens can donate money towards stories that matter to them. Completely liberating – and aligned to market needs !
And Spot.Us has done well – they’ve managed to fund a significant number of stories – and some of the amounts raised have been substantial: USD 4,000 for a beat covering the city hall.
2. Its Open Source: In my last post on Good Bytes, I’d talked about a crowdfunding project that we’d be launching soon – to fund journalism and legal action against corrupt people in power. I was reaching out to different people with expertise in creating such platforms and got pointed to Github (www.github.com) which is a website that has the source code for many opensource projects. And the source code for Spot.Us was there !!! This is the blog post on which I found the source code link posted there by David himself and here is what we had to write:
“Just about every week I get an inquiry from someone to start their own version of Spot.Us. From up North (Canada) to down South (Brazil) and all the way over to Australia. I’ve gotten requests on how Spot.Us can expand to new regions. So here it is….
The code for spot.us is 100% open source.
(Technically I haven’t slapped an OS license on it. But I will.. promise. And in the meantime, this is a poor man’s version of it: “you can use the code.”)
I wanted to wait until I had some more features to do this post. And now – those features are ready. Since we are also in the Chronicle today – I figure it is a good time to give away any secret sauce we might have.
What this means:
- We have absorbed 90-95% of the cost to start your own community funded reporting site.
- It can be nonprofit or for-profit. You could end up making LOTS of money if it works for you! …. just don’t forget to hire me
- I’ll help. If somebody is very serious about this – I will get on the phone or even meet in person to talk about how you can do this.”
And this felt like a prayer answered ! Never have I felt the amazing thing that is opensource software so strongly till now – not while using wordpress or firefox. Here’s a guy who’s running a non-profit – very early stages and they have their own set of issues: raising funds to support a new innovation, ironing out the 100s of process issues that he must be facing and he is giving away the software for free and also volunteering his time to help other projects.
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Which brings me to what Good Bytes will create. I believe that there is a lot of value in such crowdfunding platforms within India – wherein the government does not fund a lot of innovation in journalism, arts & culture or social impact engineering etc.
The first platform we will create (built around the Spot.Us code as far as possible with our own improvements and customizations) will be a platform that will enable Indians (in India and abroad) to crowdfund journalism that covers deep and pressing matters. These could be investigative stories exploring corruption, or educational stories exploring how climate change is proceeding in India and what can be done by us, or awareness building stories exploring how some sports such as archery dont get their due in terms of governemnt or private funding or these could also be stories that are inspiring.
I’ve been talking to technology folks trying to round up a few volunteers who’d get involved in this platform. And will formally start raising funding and putting together a full time team in place soon.
Would appreciate if you can point me to some smart Ruby On Rails developers / architects since Spot.Us is developed on that.
Cheers
