After over two hard weeks of work from Adam, Miles, and the rest of the team, CoPress has a new look. It’s actually been live since Thursday, but we’ve been tweaking things and squashing bugs since then and we’re finally ready to for new visitors. If you find something that needs fixing, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Along with a new, gorgeous theme generously donated by Woo Themes, we’ve got two new places to interact:

A brand new wiki to collaborate on knowledge around WordPress, Django, or even College Publisher. We’ve got the following areas ready to go, and would love your contributions:

• The Network. We’re creating a directory of student news organizations and the software they use so that if you want to find some help, you’ll know where to look. Add your news organization to our directory, and use your page to describe how your website works, who maintains it, and how it fits into the operation of the news organization. Check out the Miami Hurricane, the Whitman Pioneer, and the Daily Gazette as examples of what we’re looking for.
• The resources. Please add your favorite WordPress plugins, themes, or links to Django applications, and educate your community on what works best.

If you have suggestions as to how we should improve the wiki, we’d love the feedback.

We’ve also launched a forum for general discussion amongst the community. You’re more than welcome to propose your own questions, but every week we’ll propose a question of our own. Our plan is to also have topic-specific forums (i.e. WordPress or Django) that you can subscribe to via RSS. To kick things off, we’re asking:

• What are ways in which student news organizations can collaborate to succeed online? More specifically, what type of resources, support, or knowledge is your news organization lacking, and how can cooperation change this?

Weigh in by signing up for an account. As a caveat, we ask that you please be transparent in who you are and who you represent. Thanks!

Last, but not least, our RSS feed has been broken the last few days (thanks Feedburner). We’ll hopefully get that back up tonight. In the meantime, though, there’s an audio version of our presentation to BarCamp Mizzou online now and Miles Skorpen has written an excellent post about online workflow at the Daily Gazette. I encourage you to check both out.

Description (1800 characters) – Verdict: We’re golden, answer is within limit.

CoPress is a holistic, non-profit, open-source, and community-driven initiative to provide student news organizations with the technical ecosystem they need to thrive during the evolution to digital information gathering and distribution.

We want to reinforce the tremendous value which comes from passionate learners working together on common problems. At the moment, CoPress includes three parts: the software, the community, and the knowledge. CoPress will support popular CMS options with continuing code development, plugins, tuning to create workflows that fit our sector, and fee-for-service hosting/management (similar to the WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org experience). Through this process, CoPress will connect student newspaper online editors, webmasters, and developers with their peers through a variety of means, including a social network that plugs into the backend of CMS options, regular regional work sessions, and an actively updated directory of contact information and current projects. Finally, CoPress is an open model where all knowledge is recorded, indexed, and available. Our hub will provide members with the intellectual resources (tutorials, documentation, videos, podcasts, webinars, etc.) they need to improve their digital distribution platform. Members will be able to edit, contribute and improve the resource for their peers.

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities? (750 characters) – Verdict: only the first paragraph fits. Whoops.

With the near ubiquity of the web comes a tremendous potential for student news organizations to be far more engaged with their audience, and vice versa. CoPress is the network where online editors, webmasters and developers can come together with ideas and collaborate to make those ideas reality. At the moment, there is no such network for student news organizations. Those who have done innovative things with their online presence to date largely do so because of a unique level of talent at their organization. We believe it’s important for every student news organization to be creating a more engaged campus. A campus powered by increased digital access to information through functionality which shouldn’t be hindered the platform.

Thanks to the creativity of those involved with CoPress, we’ve got more than plenty of ideas to build levels of engagement, including:

• Geo-specific mobile delivery
• Voting functionality which lets the community decide which stories make the front page, much like Digg or Reddit
• Ability to track comment discussion by RSS, email, or Facebook and other means
• A newswire in the dashboard which automatically pulls links from other student news organizations based on your position. For instance, the links for a sports editor/reporter would be weighted differently then those for a news editor/reporter

Fortunately, the way that we’re approaching the CMS constraints, and overall digital distribution issues, allow us to divide and conquer on the ideas we’d like implemented. We’re structured with sustainable future growth in mind. CoPress is about building the open, inclusive community needed for student media to thrive in this crazy new age of technology.

Currently, CoPress is already connecting student news organizations at schools including the University of Oregon, the University of Miami, UCLA, Syracuse University, Swarthmore, Wake Forest, East Conneticut State, Temple University, University of Florida, University of Pennsylvania, and others. Not only that, but the network is growing rapidly thanks to the viral strength of Twitter and other social communication tools. CoPress is about structuring the network so that it is efficient and effective in achieving these common goals.

How is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.) (750 characters) – Verdict: A paragraph and a half fits.

At the moment, there is no talented, diverse, and distributed body of student developers and technologists working together around improving a community platform for their specific needs. The people are there, but they need to be connected and coordinated because we face similar problems and can be far more powerful when we work together.

CoPress is not a content management system (CMS). We have no intention to invent yet another CMS. Our goal is to reinvent the options already out there, and tune them so that students can be more informed closer collaboration on platform development amongst student news organizations. Last year, the Knight Foundation funded the Populous Project at UCLA. The team behind Populous hopes to build a kick-ass CMS that provides real neat functionality. CoPress has been talking with Populous over the past few months and can’t wait for the time when we get to help them add to and improve the product.

We think student news organizations need to be involved in a collaborative process. For instance, say Daniel wants to implement shortlinks for his URLs, so that the links can be included in the print edition and students can tear out the URLs for the articles they want to comment on. Joey has already done this with his website, so Daniel gets help from Joey in setting this up. That’s the 1.0 collaboration model. 2.0 happens when Daniel and Joey work in connection over the internet, screen-capturing the process so that Betsy, Billy, and John can follow along too and implement the same feature at their news organization. Even more powerful is the 3.0 model, where the system automatically suggests features you should install based on what you’ve installed before and what your peers are installing. If we’re working on a common platform, and are connected in a network, then we can collaborate and innovate together, allowing us to build off the successes of everyone’s collective efforts.

CoPress aspires to be the synthesis for all of these connections.

What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project? (1800 characters) – Verdict: Our response almost makes it, but not quite.

We’re bringing together the best and the brightest to ensure long-term success of the network. We gather experience from everywhere we can, and our open, distributed, model allows us to assign tasks based on skill set, workload and need. We’ve gathering experienced folks in the right positions from across the country to support our vision, and will continue to do so as we scale. Honestly, it’s surprising just how many like-minded individuals think CoPress is a network worth building.

The CoPress team is a conglomeration of development, design, editing, and management talent from all across the nation, including Daniel Bachhuber from the Oregon Daily Emerald, Greg Linch from the Miami Hurricane, Kevin Koehler from the Old Gold & Black, Adam Hemphill, Joey Baker from The Daily Orange, Albert Sun from the Daily Pennsylvanian, Miles Skorpen of the Swarthmore Daily, Jared Silfies from the Temple News, Rick Martinez of FIU Student Media, and Ken Schwencke from the Independent Florida Alligator, among others. These are innovators who are actively leading the charge at their student news organizations, innovating on their own with platforms such as WordPress, Expression Engine, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, and Django.

Additionally, we’ve received feedback on CoPress’ evolution from Knight Challenge grantees including Anthony and Dharmishta of the Populous Project, Ryan Sholin of ReportingOn, Pat Thornton of BeatBlogging.net, JD Lasica, and David Cohn of SpotUs. CoPress is also supported by Bryan Murley of the Center for Innovation in College Media, Drew Geraets of the CUNY J School, Major Highfield, and Patrick Beeson.

Most importantly, everyone we’ve spoken to is enthusiastic about the potentials of collaborating through these means. We are quite confident that, if student news organization are going to survive the change from print to digital, working with CoPress is one of the few ways they can do so successfully.

1. OK, you need two years and more money.

The first year, you can roll out a prototype school or three in the fall, a few more in the spring, and by the time the next summer rolls around, you have a service you’ve taken a school year to develop and improve before you bring it out on a larger scale.

To this, I partially agree. Currently, we’re asking for $70,000 from the Knight News Challenge and have a time scale of one year. I am opposed, at the moment, to asking for more money than I think is necessary. We have little understanding of what our costs will be (plus I’m sure they will scale over time) and the other applications in the garage that have asked for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, seem outlandish. I don’t want CoPress to be taken as an outlandish project.

For me, the one year qualifies the amount of time it will take to build part of something cool. CoPress, by no means, would be “finished” at the end of the first year. A year, though, sounds good for project scope and two years sounds too long.

Second, Ryan asks:

2. Other than it feeling warm and fuzzy, being based on open-source software and thus extensible, what’s the advantage to a student news org to use this instead of College Publisher? It’s free, and hosted, and if you ever get enough traffic, there’s a rev share on the national ads, right? How is this different. (I’d emphasize that it will be built on a platform that students can learn and adapt to their own needs, right?)

Boy, do I ever agree with you. As I’ve written before and before, “hackability” is critical. Student news organizations need to be working on an open source platform (or, bowing to Kevin, Ken, and Expression Engine, at least one with a plugin architecture) so that they have the ability to innovate as fast as they can. If anyone tries to argue with me that student news organizations don’t need digital distribution platforms they can innovate with, I won’t listen to you. The software College Publisher uses is, from all of my experiences, clunky, janky, and proprietary. We’ll win people over when we show them we have an easy-t-deploy, maintainable, and open and innovate platform to use. Hell, we’re friendly too.

At the moment, we’re not working on a national ad network, although ability to deploy ads will be functionality we provide in some capacity. I’ve heard rumors that there is another group working on the ad coop, however.

3. If you’re going to offer hosting, that’s going to cost money to maintain after a News Challenge grant would run out. What’s the business plan moving forward? And if you’re not going to offer hosting, what super-easy-to-install platform are you going to build the service on?

(WordPress or Drupal? Maybe… An Ellington-like Django-based CMS would actually be difficult, unless the student news orgs in question all have access to and control of their servers.)

The business plan is being worked out. Currently, we’re looking at a few different potential revenue streams:

• Fee for service: core CoPress developers offer technical support (database porting, site theming, temporary support if you don’t have an online editor for a term, etc.) for affordable rates.
• Flat rate fee for basic hosting, management, and support
• Grants and donation drives; foundation support
• Using The Point for raising money for plugins/add’l functionality; money raised will fund development by a web developer from the CoPress community

And it’s funny you ask about what platform we’re going to use. We’re in the process of researching the best one for our needs through our surveys and CMS audit. We’ve developed a list of what we think is critical functionality [Google Doc], and are in the process of researching how well Drupal, WordPress, Django, and/or Ruby on Rails could be hacked to fit these needs.

The million dollar question:

4. One of the winners last year is building a CMS/community network tool (plus some front-end print scheduling?) for student media. How is this different (hosting? other services?) and why is it (also) necessary?

Ryan, I think what you’re referring to is the Populous Project. We actually were talking with them about a month and a half ago, but haven’t heard anything since. What we’re doing is similar in the CMS sense (although we preferably won’t be building an entire CMS from scratch) but different in approach: we’re focusing on the technical ecosystem first. The medium to long term survival of CoPress requires a vibrant ecosystem of student Online Editors, etc. because they’re going to be the ones hacking away, educating and supporting each other, and advancing innovation in student news.

We’re working together in an open, transparent, and collaborative fashion, and that’s how we’re different.

Update: Oddly enough, the CoPress Google Group received an email from one of the Populous Project grantees a couple of hours ago in regards to why we shouldn’t consider Ruby on Rails. Hopefully we’ll hear more about their development soon.

I thought I would pitch this question to our CoPress Google Group, but then it hit me. If we want to be a transparent, “open source” organization, the input of our community is even more important (sorry team, you’re more than welcome to weigh in too). The question I have is this:

How should we deal with your data?

Specifically, we’re collecting a wealth of information from the respondents of our September 2009 survey, the first of many attempts to guide our decisions by real world data. Data that you guys generously provide to us. This data, however, isn’t necessarily all accessible on the internet, and some of the answers to the questions you might not necessarily want spread out all across the web.

Even more specifically, all of this information you enter is currently being piped into a spreadsheet only I have access to. Thank you Google for making surveys brain dead simple. CoPress, up until this point, has been a pretty laissez faire enterprise. Team members contribute when they feel like contributing, and there has been very minimal organizational structure. One unfortunate outcome of this is that I’m not quite sure just who I should be able to share the result database from the survey with. Should everyone on the list serv have access to it, or just a select group of people? If it’s a select group of people, who are they and how do we determine this?

See the issue I’m facing? Granted, it’s definitely a first world problem, but I’d like to postpone creating a more rigid, exclusive organization as long as I can. We definitely want consistency as to who is working on the project. At the same time, though, I’d love our community to jump in and contribute as they see fit.

What do you think? What type of privacy policy should we adopt for data that is not our own?