Software Platform
From Banyan Project
The Banyan Project's software will be be open source and many-faceted. Here here are its six crucial aspects of the platform when it matures:
Publishing: With minimal editorial intervention, the software must bring together news and features (including audio and video as well as text and still photography) from many sources into a seamless presentation of the day's news, including integration of community and national aspects of issues and topics for readers across the country. It must include features that minimize the chances that franchisee/licensees that produce the news for different communities will diverge from Banyan standards. The news presentation design will draw from the best practices of the most successful existing news sites. The software will allow user/readers to customize the way they experience it, with options from RSS to email alerts to customized gateways that first give subscribers what most interests them.
Participatory Journalism: Easy-to-use participatory journalism tools will be crucial to Banyan's call-and-response culture. It must offer reader/users an array of responses, with these as a minimum: 1) click a box to say whether the story was helpful or not; 2) post a comment about the story; 3) join a discussion group on the issue that the story advances, if only to read what others are saying; 4) invite other people they know to the discussion group; 5) start a discussion group if none on the issue exists; 6) email the editors directly with suggestions or information for further stories, or 7) submit an article, images, audio or video for publication. The software must also offer reader/users a chance to flag stories as offensive to the value proposition of relevance, respect and trustworthiness, and to track and aggregate all such complaints so the editors can monitor the work of franchisees and learn what troubles the public they serve.
2.0 Community: It must provide a welcoming "public square" for people to come together in community, to learn from each other and from resources Banyan links to, and to employ provided bottom-up Web tools that will enable them to use the power of networking to organize to take action on issues that matter to them. This 2.0 civic networking software will dram from the most effective of social networks like Facebook as well as from the Barack Obama and Ron Paul presidential campaigns. It will also incorporate the best practices of the most high-functioning engaged Web communities -- and strive always to set the pace. It will be designed to ensure 1) accessibility to less-than-expert Web users and 2) a safe space in keeping with Banyan's value proposition of respect and trustworthiness.
Membership: It must use nearly frictionless techniques to help reader/users understand the value of the Banyan community to their lives -- and make it painless for them to act on their understanding by signing on as shareholders in the co-op that will own and operate the Banyan Project. Further, it must enable enrichment of the relationship in ways that maximize retention of members -- and maximize viral growth in readership and membership. It must remove every obstacle to payment and cage membership payments and many other payments, from renewals to ancillary product sales, to contributions -- even advertising revenue.
Advertising: It must sift all possible advertising and screen out any that would be less than trustworthy to the Banyan Public; it also must make it easy for reader/users to flag ads they think cross the boundaries set out in Banyan's advertising policy.
Viral Tools: Every page must offer readers an array of easy ways to invite others to read the article the page provides or to invite them to join a discussion or otherwise engage. Such “viral” features will build Banyan's public in a trustworthy way -– most new reader/users will arrive because someone they know has invited them.
Creating the software platform will constitute one of the Project's greatest challenges, and can't be undertaken in any serious way until significant money is raised. Several members of the Banyan Advisory Board are web developers or otherwise technically sophisticated, and they will be guiding the collection of ideas for creating the ideal platform.
If you have ideas to contribute, please email the Banyan moderator, Tom Stites.
