Civic Innovation for Community Conversation
CUNY social journalism alumnus, Pedro Burgos wrote an excellent article last year, Goodbye comments. Hello, “conversations.” that talked about two incompatible trends going on in the publishing world. On one hand, we want more engagement or conversations with our readers, while on the other, many news organizations are having to find new ways to moderate comments or have shut them down altogether due to abusive commenters, AKA “trolls.”
Pedro mentioned that for the past 15 years, there’s been little innovation in the way audience contributions/comments are handled. He talked about the importance of reimagining ways to create meaningful, true, conversations.
The Coral Project (funded by a Knight Foundation grant) is an interesting and innovative project that addresses the problems that publishers are facing in dealing with offensive internet comments such as racism, misogyny, and harassment. In Andrew Losowsky’s article “What to do with a problem like the comments,” we learn how Mozilla, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have collaborated for the purpose of building new open source tools and practices for publishers that will create better communities around their journalism.
Why “Coral?” Coral is the community that nurtures other communities. Coral is a workhorse; its intricate reef systems protect shorelines from natural disasters and give cover for nearby organisms to connect and evolve. Like coral, we aim to create the structure and provide the protection to help communities thrive.
In September, 2015, the group was trying to decide what tools to build. Using interviews and design thinking principles, they listened to the needs of different people in the news industry to create a thematic collection of products that they plan to build over the next 21 months.
One big question they set out to answer was, “What is the role of the community in our mission?”
At that time, they decided to focus on building the following products:
Identity — includes login, user profiles, privacy controls and more
Engage — includes tools for journalists including specific tools for user-generated content collection and management
Conversation — includes tools for discussion and exchange between community members
Curate — includes tools for engagement editors to manage, moderate and elevate contributions of all kinds
Admin — includes tools to install and manage Coral-compatible products
Analyze — includes algorithmic analysis including anomaly detection and comment quality
History / Logs — includes capture logs and analytics
Core — common libraries that allow Coral products to work seamlessly together or independently
Only a week ago, on April 11, 2016, the Coral Project announced a change in their focus. Andrew Losowsky said that realized their initial approach was wrong. Here is what he said:
These eight products might be clearly delineated from an engineering point of view, but for a publisher who wants to use Coral in their newsroom, it’s hard to understand.
We need to stay focused on our personas. The question we keep returning to is: What are our users trying to do?
Through that lens, the above list of products doesn’t make sense. What’s the point of a curation system if you don’t have any content to curate? What does a ‘capture log’ mean to Margaret or Larry?
With that in mind, we’ve restructured our technical road map based around three main pieces: Trust, Ask, and Talk.
The first piece, “Trust” was designed to help us to better understand our community — who they are, and how they communicate and contribute. As journalists, we need trust to find reliable sources, useful contributors, and identify the troublemakers. The design is intended to be highly flexible and it will automatically update any new contributions as they are added.
Status: Beta testing will begin May — 2016 with newsrooms. Plans for a stable release are in Q3 2016.
Here’s a demo of the Trust model:
“Ask” was created for managing “call-outs” within articles and their related responses. The system is flexible and allows journalists to manage specific contributions or crowdsourced interactions from the community such as photo, texts, video, audio, polls, surveys, etc. It uses a simple module that can be embedded into an article. It will allow a journalist to manage contributions in a quick and easy manner and they can display select contributions within the module.
Status: Currently coding. A working demo is expected Q2 2016. Beta testing planned for Q2–3. Journalists can “Share your favorite existing tools, and wishlists for future call-out tools.”
“Talk” allows community members to respond to an article and to converse with others about it in real time. Although it will be similar to the “comment” functions that currently exist, it will have many other new features that encourage deeper engagement while protecting the community from harassment.
Status: Q2 — Front-end wizard demo; Q3 — Working demo; Q4 — Beta testing. Help them out: Share your favorite comment UIs and features, as well as the features that don’t exist (but should)
So what makes the Coral Project different from other existing comment platform vendors? Here are some things that they say set them apart:
- They’re not building a platform for commenting. The tools they are creating are designed to encourage and manage contributions (including user-generated content) for communities centered around journalism. They are intending to help us to identify the knowledge and skills of frequent contributors, help users become sources for journalism, and promote more meaningful community engagement.
- They don’t touch our data. Each newsroom owns their own data and keeps it on their own server.
- Everything will be FREE and open source.
- Their structure is to build small and flexible tools that work with existing newsroom systems. They will plug into each other and newsrooms can pick and choose what they want to use. They will interact well with what newsrooms currently have (including the comment platforms in place).
- They are OPEN and all of the code is documented so newsrooms can customize their own tools. They want everyone to win as newsrooms and the community develop more open source tools.
- They have a unique FOCUS on making tools that address real needs and protect privacy without commercial incentives because they are funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
- They have a unique ORGANIZATION as a part of Mozilla OpenNews with an open-source philosophy that protects user privacy and control of data.
The Coral Project wants to openly build this with the publishing community and has invited us to participate in this collaborative effort that appears to be a game-changer for community engagement. And speaking of games, they’ve created a free card game for journalists to help us think more about the structure of online communities.
- Have you ever experienced online bullying or harassment? If so, explain what you did to resolve the problem. If not, what will you do if this happens in your community?
- What are some innovative ways that you’ve seen news organizations deal with comments so that readers are protected from harassment while still being encouraged to participate in community conversations?
- How do you plan to encourage healthy conversation in your community?
