When WHYY launched NewsWorks a year and some months ago, I was a skeptic. While they were using the right tools, their terms of service agreement looked like it was designed to stifle any real community engagement. The ToS still reads like it was crafted by an RIAA lawyer who’d sooner hug a panhandler than give $40 to public broadcasting. But I was dead wrong about NewsWorks’ ability to engage its community.

In the year or so since they launched, the folks at WHYY have attracted and engaged people in civil and informative conversations. If that sounds easy to you, head on over to Philly.com and troll their comment sections for a minute. I don’t know the ins-and-outs of NewsWorks’ moderation process. I do know that good moderation requires more people, time and thought than most organizations are willing to budget for. Doing it well on a public broadcasting budget — that’s commendable.  Keep reading…

Tags: creative commons, newsworks, Philadelphia, Public broadcasting, whyy

One of Philly’s public radio stations, WHYY, has launched a crowd-sourced website newsroom to CPR an otherwise moribund pool of local journalism. It’s called Newsworks ~ a Joomla install with a new template and Community Builder.

As an effort in community journalism, I wish them well.

Their site, though, flies in the face of their mission. Everything about the site is built on community effort, yet they don’t acknowledge open source anywhere. their ToS contains language that probably violates the GPL (the license on which their site is built).

And if one truly wanted to crowdsource journalism, isn’t using a Creative Commons license a natch? Between the ToS and the Discussion Agreement, I don’t see much potential for growing community engagement.

I don’t have a problem with community conduct; I’ve signed the Ubuntu code of conduct. But I have a nagging feeling that the folks that put Newsworks together — the back-end and the content — are newbies to online communities.

Tip to my friends at WHYY: It’s not that hard to reach out to Lessig or Bacon, and they’d be happy to share what they know (being community-oriented and all).

Tags: creative commons, jono bacon, joomla, lessig, newsworks, npr, whyy