Community Media and Grassroots Outreach With VoiceBox
3 min read
Many moons ago, we announced that our proposal for the Knight Drupal Initiative had been funded.
Yesterday, we pulled back the curtain: the alpha release of VoiceBox is now ready for download.
The site was designed to support community and grassroots media organizations. Out of the box, it supports the following features:
- Customizable user profiles;
- Discussions with embedded images, audio, and video;
- Publishing pictures, audio, and video via mobile devices and/or email;
- Content aggregation via rss;
- Remixing, curating, and republishing content within issues;
- Sharing content to external sites or via email; and
- Slideshows of featured content on the site homepage and selected landing pages.
As site members create content, they generate their own blog, and each member has a personalized dashboard that gives them an overview of the site.
While the site was designed to support community media and other grassroots organizations, the base functionality can be used in a variety of different contexts. It could easily support a school newspaper, or, with some modifications, it could work as the public-facing site of many organizations that wanted to communicate with their stakeholders and develop a community around their work. In particular, the blend of content aggregation, internal site discussions, repurposing content within issues, and sharing out to external sites via social media helps connect the smaller communities of individual organizations with larger external groups that share a common interest.
The installation profile installs like a regular Drupal install; for people with experience working with Drupal or other open source systems, you can be up and running in around 10 minutes (This video covers the initial installation and some post-installation customizations; it was shot in real time, and it runs about ten minutes).
Additionally, the site is documented, and the documentation includes a set of screencasts.
At the risk of stating the obvious:
- This project is built on Drupal; and
- All of the code you need to get started is freely available for download, use, and modification.
The development of this project would not have been possible without the generous funding of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Without their grant support, we would not have been able to devote the necessary development hours required to complete this project.
It's also worth noting that this project could not exist without the countless person-hours that have gone into building Drupal core, and the various contributed modules. In particular, the work of Development Seed deserves special mention. An incomplete list of Dev Seed-powered functionality includes Feeds, Context, and Features; this foundation made much of we built possible.
So, what are you waiting for? Grab the code and get started!
