Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

The first Knight funded Drupal project to release its open-source code, Managing News, launched last week. You can read about it here: Media Innovation with Drupal.

This week, on the fifth day of being publicly available, the project has been downloaded more than 1,000 times.

Here are 50 examples of what people are doing with it.

* rowingnews.org.uk
* pulse.buzzr.us United Nations World Food Programme
* climap.net
* news.freejacksonvillenews.com
* news.1qk.com
* mn.newslogs.com
* managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk
* catholicnewslive.com
* noticies.consultes.cat
* mn.forest.linnovate.net
* www.cafepresse.ch
* mn.mwu.dk
* news.kultur-online.net
* beta.metaboone.com
* news.twodogsdigital.com
* mnews.webandfinearts.com
* augmentions5.omega8.us
* http://planete.magento.fr
* news.nguyentiensi.com
* zensci.com
* earthfeeds.com
* managingnews.peopleatwork.fr
* news.positivechoices.com
* managingnews.rhizom.nl
* news.krongnang.com
* news.fen.net
* news.freejacksonvillenews.com
* managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk
* skateboarding.com
* earthfeeds.com
* jaunum.iem.lv
* news.soniccat.com
* news.investic.net
* pg.galaxy.esn.org
* www.wotcher.co.uk
* rowing.magnity.co.uk
* www.freshfail.com
* gamemakerstream.com
* news.sotak.cz
* menanews.org
* managingnews.aegir.erdfisch.de

How are you using it? Please let us know or send us your ideas on how it could be used to inform local communities.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Managing News released its open-source code. It is the first out of six Drupal projects funded through the Knight Drupal Initiative to do so.

Managing News is a news and data aggregator that also maps and charts the information it collects to let users visualize the news. It can help teams scattered across cities, communities or people around the world share news and information. It can also be used as a news hub to show news on a given topic (think Google News, but focused on a topic or local community and with stories shown on a map). It has been packaged as a "product" so that any person or organization can quickly set it up on a web server.

It is also built to be fully extensible and used for other data aggregation and visualization purposes.  For instance, it has been extended by one group and is currently being used to visualize voting data for every province and district in Afghanistan as part of that country's runoff presidential election.

Below are examples of projects that could now be more easily done using Managing News:

D.C. bikes Map

Stumble Safely

Food Security Portal

Knight Journalism Tracker

H1N1 News Tracking

To download the code visit: http://managingnews.com/download or Drupal.org.

We thank the Drupal community for partnering with us to speed media innovation through the creative use of the free, open-source technology in communications.

Bill Fitzgerald, Knight Foundation grantee and alpha tester of Managing News, wrote a post about the project, "An Early Look At Managing News", where you can see step by step how the application works.

Last week Development Seed released new open-source code in preparation for part of their Knight funded mapping project. This piece of software allows anyone to switch between mapping providers without writing any code.

Development Seed received a $195,000 grant to add a mapping tool to Drupal. With it, people will be able to geo-tag stories and see their location on a map. The developers are also creating a news monitor that allows people to aggregate multiple local news sources based on topic or issue to the open and free Drupal platform.

Knight Foundation’s grant to Development Seed is one of a package of six grants that made up the Knight Drupal Initiative, a contest that tapped into a massive network of computer programmers to get their recommendations for speeding media innovation. In separate posts I will talk about each of the grants.

The Drupal community is a group of more than 350,000 members, mostly computer programmers who write free software together, collaboratively, on the web and the individuals and organizations that use the software to publish content online. You can learn more about Drupal at: www.Drupal.org.

A video on how this new piece of software works is available on Planet Drupal TV.

Do you have innovative ideas on how to use this mapping tool to improve the way you receive, share and understand news about your community?

The Knight News Challenge contest has allowed Knight Foundation to partner in digital media projects around the world. The contest provides a global view of new media trends and helps Knight Foundation discover some of the information needs communities have in the digital age.

In the second year of the Knight News Challenge Knight discovered two major trends:

1. The use of Drupal open-source software as the base for many projects that intended to bring digital journalism to local communities; and
2. The need for local online news sites.

Out of the Drupal trend, Knight created in partnership with a massive community of programmers, the Knight Drupal Initiative. This initiative led to the funding of six projects that aim to speed media innovation and lower the barriers to online publishing.

Out of the trend that demonstrated the need for local online news sites Knight hosted a digital journalism meeting. The meeting led to the funding of four online only community news sites. The Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, Chi-Town Daily News and the St. Louis Beacon. Last week the Voice of San Diego received recognition from Investigative Reporters and Editors for bringing citizens in their community the information they need to lead informed lives and hold their governments accountable.

Is there an online news site in your community? Do you think online news sites are the future of news and information? Please comment below.

Just announced from the DrupalCon stage:

The Knight Drupal (an open source content management system) Initiative’s winners (background on this project), announced at the DrupalCon DC Conference, will receive a total of $485,380 to:

* Create concise, up-to-date instructions for Drupal software packages so that tech novices can use the tools; (Winner: Programmer Addison Berry/ add1sun)

*Create a free publishing system to make it easier for several geographic communities to share local news with each other; (Winner: Oregon-based funnymonkey.com (billfitzgerald)

*Allow anyone, anywhere to easily create a Drupal online news site whose content can be published on Facebook in order to reach an extended social network; (Winner: Software developer Dave Cohen)

*Develop software that allows people to create and share a personalized stream of information within their social network, helping them to filter and recommend articles to others interested in the same issues; (Winner: Instant Syndicating Standards, a Brazilian non-profit)

*Add a micro-blogging function to Drupal that will allow users to transmit brief text updates on their Web sites (Winner: Web developer Rob Loach)

*Create a tool that will help residents better communicate and understand information about their community by allowing them to geo-tag – or add a geographical identification – to stories so they can be displayed on a map; (Development Seed, a Washington D.C. firm)

The Knight Drupal Initiative tapped into a massive network of programmers, to get their recommendations for how to hasten media innovation for the common good.

The Drupal Community, a group of about 350,000 programmers who write free software collaboratively on the Web, solicited, reviewed and recommended the projects for funding. The Drupal Community also includes the more than 1.4 million users worldwide who rely on Drupal to manage the content of their Web sites. The application process was open, meaning anyone could submit or vote on an idea. Knight Foundation made the final selection.

Congratulations to the winners; we welcome your thoughts on the KDI, the process, (and congratulations to the winners!) below---

p.s. Knight Foundation staff Jose Zamora and Kristen Taylor are attending DrupalCon and look forward to talking with Drupalers.