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Re: [kGen] Vote: Kendra Hub at Knight News Challenge!...



On 23 Oct 2009, at 08:21, Gordon Rae wrote:
Thanks to Daniel for circulating this. I worked on an entry for the Knight News Challenge last year, and there were some really interesting projects. I'm reposting it because the deadline has been extended to December 15th, so there's more time to comment and work on it.

The one problem I see with the fit for http://cli.gs/6qsJN9 is the third basic criteria of "in a geographic determined community (local community)". Any thoughts on how to work that would be most appreciated.

It's good to see Kendra getting involved in a project about news as well as entertainment content. The recent speeches that Rupert Murdoch and the News International team have been making about paywalls and getting more revenue out of Google suggests that business models around the discovery of news content are going to develop quite significantly.

Agreed. It's a very interesting field.

Daniel, it would be good if you could explain how this fits into the bigger picture of what Kendra is doing with P2P-Next, Kendra Signposts, Kendra Trials and so on.

That's an extremely good question and I've been pondering it for the last few days. How do all these bits fit together? Kendra covers a wide remit - the whole content value chain in fact. In 2007 we had a lot of activity within Kendra (you included). But we still had no cash coming in to pay developers to build the dream. When Mark invited Kendra into P2P-Next (two weeks before submission date!) I jumped at it - in hindsight a little too quickly - not knowing the real costs in time and management needed to participate in an FP7 EU project. For example I didn't factor in >4 meetings per year so I'm couchsurfing lots! But we are getting the cash and paying developers to produce interesting tools aligned with Kendra's goals.

Then there's Saracen - a 3 year FP7 STREP starting in 2010 which we were simply invited into. That's looking at the Social aspects of content discovery. It's all serendipity. I'm really just going with the flow of what comes through the door. Kendra's remit is wide so I've not had to say "no" yet to any of them. And currently our submission success rate is 50% - so the pain of a small bit proposal writing has paid off. So, what these projects are enabling me to do is build a framework for Kendra development on a sound basis. The fruits are not yet ripe and we have a lot of work to do. We have a public trial starting in P2P-Next in July 2010 - so we'll be ready for then!

Apologies for not communicating much at all. It really has been a case of pedal to the metal and nose to the grindstone. And I can't see it slackening off much over the next few years. Kendra is a useful asset to include in an EU consortium - ticking the SME and content boxes. So, I expect a few more last minute inclusion in projects.

Main things I want to do is get a content owner facing trial of Kendra Signpost up and running for July 2010; get a new Drupal website for Kendra with trial interface on the front and nice multi-currency and multi-project accounting, case/time tracking and code repository back end. We'll see what Saracen is all about soon - and where it "fits in".

I feel that a master plan will emerge. It's a bit seat of the pants right now. One thing is clear that having Kendra projects (Kendra Signpost and Kendra Social(?!)) that are deliverables within EU funded project (P2P-Next and Saracen) is the right way to go - Kendra projects will out live the the EU projects and can be worked on and be useful afterwards. Of course we hope that this is the case for the EU project output too!

Kendra Hub? Just another opportunity to nudge the content world forward to being a more open and better place. It all fits in somehow I'm sure!

Cheers Daniel