Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by NCommander on Monday September 15 2014, @08:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the warning-long-post-ahead dept.

Now that the latest release of slashcode has settled, and we're moving ahead towards towards getting the site self-sufficient, it's time to look at our longer term plans. I have talked about the direction I want SN to go, as well as some of the trouble getting from here to there. With the help of the staff, what I present here is a more unified plan on how we get from here to there for the community to evaluate. This should however be considered a draft, so, as usual, feel free to rip it to shreds, etc. In short, here's what I want to get done over the next six months:

  • SoylentNews PBC reaches self-sufficiency
  • Beginnings of a major "port and polish" on both content and the site itself
  • Build a more uniformed sense of community throughout the site
  • Compilation and completion of a "style and policy" manual
  • Preparations for running a crowd-funding campaign to get initial capital
  • Define, with assistance and input from the community, a mechanism for community governance
  • If possible, try and reach out to other not-for-profit journalist organizations for advice and guidance
  • Bootstrap the NFP umbrella from the B-corp's funds
  • Define a framework for which original content will be used on SoylentNews
  • Identify people who may be willing to work in a journalistic capacity with us
  • With the above frameworks in place, fundraise
  • Original content launches on SN

As usual, I'm going to go through these one by one, so check past the break

SoylentNews PBC reaches self-sufficiency

This one is pretty much self-explanatory, and we already have the basic plan in place. It is our hope that a combination of shop revenue and subscriptions will be able to offset our hosting and legal costs. Ideally, we need to raise about $10k a year to have a safe buffer here, though we can make do with less. As of right now, we have earned approximately $1300 from subscriptions and shop revenue, so we've made decent progress in this regard.

Broken down, our annual costs look like this (all values in USD):
  • $~3600 yearly hosting costs (can be reduced at the cost of site reliability; having multiple machines has already paid for itself in many regards. Active efforts in this area are ongoing)
  • $1-2k retainer for accountant + services at tax time
  • ~$5k retainer for a lawyer for the organization (something we will need sooner or later)

Ultimately, this is the most important thing that the site hinges on; even if everything else we do goes bust, as long as the site can pay for itself, it will continue to keep going, regardless of any of the staff's economic situation. Always remember, the site and the community come first.

Beginnings of a major "port and polish" on both content and the site itself

Let me break this into two sections for the sake of clarity:

The Site Itself

As far as websites go, SN is functional, but its UI isn't exactly great, with lots of tiny text and easy to miss boxes. There's room for improvement here to help make the site more usable for everyone; some low-hanging fruit is reorganizing all the preferences onto a single page, adding more descriptive help text on various things, and all-and-all improvement. We've already made a lot of great strides here, but the fact is, the site doesn't look much different from when we launched back in February.

Now, I will first up admit I'm not a website designer, nor a UI specialist, but those who weren't deeply involved with the other site will likely struggle to understand the interface. I think there's grounds here for a series of small but incremental tweaks to streamline the site for the general public, while allowing individual users to keep the current look-and-feel if they so choose. For instance, the improved threading interface, while a massive step up from 1997, is still somewhat awkward and feels tacked on. Unfortunately, our last recruitment drive was something of a bust, but I'm hoping if we bring up the topic as a dedicated article, we may be able to attract someone who is at least able to outline and identify the roughest points of SN, and help us modify the UI to streamline them. The current plan is for the next development cycle of the codebase to be mostly dedicated as a port and polish, fixing some longstanding pain like Apache 1.3, or finishing the long promised and underdeveloped modpoint rework.

As usual, we can use JavaScript/CSS and such, as long as the site degrades nicely, and loses no major functionality when either of those is disabled. I realize this adds a real burden to the frontend side of things, but we've already promised (and frequently delivered) that extra mile, and I have no intention of stopping. Most of our users have been with us since golive, and I don't plan to alienate anyone by disrupting how they use SoylentNews.

The Content Side of Things

First off, this isn't flack towards anyone; this is simply a statement of my observations and a feeling I've gotten from reading comments posted by the community. All and all, I think the editorial team does an amazing job in getting submissions in order and ready to go, and I can honestly say I want to see you guys keep up the good work. I do realize though that all of us are volunteers, and time can be very limited, as well as the position of editor being a lot of work, and relatively little praise. The purpose of this section is to acknowledge points that the community has brought up in comments and our progress at addressing them.

From where I'm sitting, we've done a relatively good job on getting a good variety of content out the door. While our focus is a bit scattered, I think we have sourced a decent variety of articles for community enjoyment and discussion. We've had some very broad and lively discussions on diverse topics, with some articles breaking 100 comments. Unfortunately, for as many successes as we had, we've quite a few posts go out with technical errors such as obvious typos, which sometimes go unedited even after the post has been publicly out for awhile (and said typos frequently get called out in comments). While the main-page at any given time is usually in good shape, folks tend to remember the bad, and not the good, so we need to find better ways to minimize the amount of mistakes that go out the door.

When it comes to editorial quality, my standards are the same as the Borg: absolute perfection.

On this front, I will be looking at ways to allow the community to suggest edits and revisions to the article (perhaps something similar to the Wikipedia "Proposed Revisions" functionality), to allow folks to fix what they see as wrong.

On the other hand, on any discussion regarding articles themselves, we need to talk about the content itself. I do recognize that is a bit of a more subjective subject thing, but we have a bad tendency to be hit or miss. I'll be the first to admit that we're a little all over the board and generally run whatever comes into the queue. This isn't helped since I've pushed the angel of "general journalism" vs. limited to a subset (ala arstechnica), which I suspect has made it difficult to define what we will and won't run.

For example, here are two articles that were at the top of the page from when I originally draft of this post:

Scrabble Champ Wins with Vowel Movements
Download Wrappers and Unwanted Software are Pure Evil

One of those is very high quality, and an excellent summary, while the "Download Wrappers and Unwanted Software are Pure Evil" is... not. As someone who always strives for the best, I think we need to tighten this up. Either we have to be more liberal with the use of the "Reject" button, or willing to go the extra mile and edit things into a consistent level of quality. Since I brought this issue up internally, there has been progress on defining a specific and firm guideline on how to format stories, and the criteria to decide if we approve them. As of this writing, this is still somewhat of a draft, but I am looking at running a dedicated article on this subject for some time this week, to get community feedback.

Build a more uniformed sense of community throughout the site

So, this one might be a bit controversial, but in some respects, our community is somewhat scattered. The fact is that the only venue for discussion on the site is on articles themselves, or on IRC. As a group, we're more or less united against becoming what the other site became. I see a couple of common names on posts, but I don't really know fellow posters that well. On various discussion forums I was active on, such as Bay12, you frequently get to see and perhaps know others. Within the developer community for Ubuntu, you frequently talk and discuss matters with other devs on a regular basis; as far as user-to-user communication goes on SN, one's options are essentially limited to email, journal posts (which have their own limitations), and conversation via threads. This is definitely not ideal, and while we have the friend/foe system (referred to as the Zoo), I suspect 99% of users never use it since they don't really know anyone in the community.

A lot of it is that the general involvement in SN is a passive one; folks read articles, and perhaps comment or submit something interesting. There isn't an active focus on discussing things except for the occasional "Ask SN" topic that pops up every once in awhile. Now obviously, this isn't something we can just magically snap our fingers and make appear overnight, but it is something we can help provide the tools for allowing this sort of kinship between users to form. For one, having general purpose discussion forums would help provide a venue where users can bring whatever comes to mind, and just socialize. Sub-slashes is another venue where a group of users can form to follow a common interest, such a DIY community, or folks who are interested in Magic the Gathering. The objective here is to figure out how to allow folks to us SN to socialize and form a cohesive identity, while still allowing folks to create communities-within-communities.

I'm open to ideas on how to improve the site in this regard, and perhaps run a more general (Ask SN) discussion on it.

Preparations for running a crowd-funding campaign to get initial capital

So, in previous brainstorming sessions on how to fund the site and original content, one of the ideas that came up and stuck was doing a crowdfunding campaign. As things stand, I think this is likely our best source of being able to fund our operations, as well as being most in line with our founding principles and goals. As with all things, crowdsourcing comes with various risks and never is 100% guaranteed to be successful.

As things stand, we need a sufficiently large userbase to successful fund such an endeavor, as well as a need to identity folks who would be willing to write for us. In a broader sense, we need to identify what we're looking for from authors, assemble a plan and business model to pay them from raised revenues, and then proceed to implement it. Some high-level ideas have been thrown around before, but we need something tightly focused here to help build out our business model.

Furthermore, in the interests of remaining a free and independent entity, preparations, and further research in bootstrapping a parent NFP should begin to take focus here. This leads in directly to my next point

Define, with assistance and input from the community, a mechanism for community governance

The fact is, a good chunk of the community is likely to be pretty 'meh' on governance issues. This is an unfortunate reality we need to live with, but at the end of the day, these same people are the group we are accountable to. As such, they need a way to have a direct say in our operations, while still allowing the staff to be able to operate the day-to-day business without getting overburdened in bureaucracy.

One possible solution for this (and for now the primary plan), is to have the SoylentNews PBC bootstrap a parent not-for-profit, which in turn draws its board directly from the community via elections (also known as a member NFP). While the specifics need to be determined, in a broad sense, I'd like to see where the board can nominate candidates, and if need be, the community can also elect and appoint its own representatives. Once established, the PBC would "sell itself" to the not-for-profit, giving majority control of the company to the board of directors, creating in effect a two level system.

* The SoylentNews PBC will continue to manage and oversee site operations, as well as being self-financed, and continue to operate as an independent entity, The NFP board will be able to "pull rank" via shareholder meetings if need be should the PBC board get out of line, providing the necessary community oversight, while still allowing the staff and directors of PBC a relatively free hand in managing site operations. To help fund the PBC, a method of allowing some of PBC's revenue to migrate into the NFP will be established to allow the NFP to function.

* The NFP itself will be tasked with broader objectives as defined by the manifesto, such as public awareness on freedom of speech, etc. Depending on the circumstances, the NFP may or may not pursue 501(c)(3) status, as well as helping to establish other projects in the name of freedom of press.

As some may have noticed, this is a somewhat different position than I had been pitching before; the reason being is in many of the discussions that arose since completing incorporation, it has become clear that we need to be accountable in some fashion. While many people have stated that we could just fork the site, the fact is that would splinter the community and cause a huge repetition of effort. Our best line of defense is to allow the community to, if need be, take action should they feel the need to do so.

Bootstrap the NFP umbrella from the B-corp's funds

As described above, this is where we make the step to community governance. Although the exact timing of this may vary, it is likely worthwhile to have such oversight in place long before we are handing any significant amount of money (though then again, it may be worth waiting until after our first crowd-sourcing campaign. TBD)

Define a framework for which original content will be used on SoylentNews

I've touched on this aspect before, but it bears repeating. We need a clear, defined interface between the site and independent authors/journalists. This involves the following aspects:

  • Identifying and proving a mechanism for prospective writers to step forward
  • Identify a method of trial and confirmation, allowing new authors to "cut their teeth" so to speak
  • Define a method of compensation; likely starting on a per-article basis, and perhaps migrating to salaried depending on available assets + long term contribution
  • Modification of SN itself to better accommodate original articles (clearer integration of media, easier to use admin tools, etc.)

This framework will become the basis of how we generate original content, and from here, work on moving to an actual news organization.

Identify people with journalistic experience to act as an overseer/guide/guru

The fact of the matter is though, at the end of the day, none of us are journalists. There are standards held to members of the associated press, and other media organizations, and if we're going to be seen as a serious attempt in not-for-profit journalism, we need to meet and exceed these standards; what we need is someone who knows this field to help us get the rest of our groundwork in place, and who we can hand "this is what we've done, how do we take it that final step".

Our guru (for want of a better term) should be able to go through our now-compiled policy manual, perhaps interview some of our early picks for paid writers, and help get things rolling in reporting news and information from around the world.

An important aspect here, though, is figuring out what we're covering in tight detail. I recommend we start with a narrowish focus, starting in tech news, and then bubbling out, using the advantage of the nexus feature to subdivide the site on a topic basis. With a tighter focus on original content, we should be able to limit costs and keep things tight and on track. If we're successful in this, on future crowd-funding campaigns, we can slowly begin to expand the focus of original content. Our initial funding goals should allow us to send one individual to a few conferences (perhaps linux.com.au, etc), while others can attend and report on local events in the tech world.

I'll admit, this one might be the most difficult item on this list, but I'm in it to win it, and I know that none of us have the necessary experience on the media side of things to succeed here. We've already had some impressive contact with folks from around the world, so I'm certain we can at least get advice if nothing else, but we need to learn everything we can.

With the framework in place, fundraise

Within the next six months, by having fulfilled our goals and thus proved we know what we're doing, we go forth to the world, and ask for funding. By this time, we should have a reasonable idea of what expenses and goals w.r.t. original content will be, and thus know what dollar amount we have to hit to succeed.

With that in mind, we set our goals, run the campaign, and see if we can raise enough money to change history. Or in other words, profit.

Original Content (Officially) Launch

Exactly what it says on the tin.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Comments have just ben enabled for this story. Also added the missing revenue figure. Sorry for any inconvenience.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by frojack on Monday September 15 2014, @08:07PM

    by frojack (1554) on Monday September 15 2014, @08:07PM (#93601) Journal

    I think the season you were looking for is Spelled Oktoberfest.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Funny=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 15 2014, @08:15PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday September 15 2014, @08:15PM (#93606) Homepage Journal

    Nah, my mom collects the things. I figured I'd get her one for Christmas and whined and complained until the guys in charge gave in.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.