Green Media Toolshed Media Contact Database

Regional Environmental Groups

Seattle/Washington, DC, United States of America

Carl Coryell-Martin
carl@greenmediatoolshed.org
Martin Kearns
kearns@greenmediatoolshed.org
Bobbi Russel
bobbi@greenmediatoolshed.org

 

Description

We would like to partner with you building a first release of a media contact database for the environmental movement.

Green Media Toolshed is a non-profit environmental organization that is dedicated to helping environmental advocacy groups gain access to communication tools needed to work with the media. (a list of our members can be found at http://www.greenmediatoolshed.org/aboutus/currentmembers.acs ) The primary tool these groups need is a media database. Who are the journalists, editors and contacts in the press that groups will need to work with to get a story distributed and covered? How can the groups contact them? Check data and track results?

Effective communications takes people, training and tools. We need your help to complete a shared media contact database. The goal is to provide quality media contact information and contact tracking to small and regional environmental groups.

While applications of this nature exists in the commercial sector (see http://www.vocus.com/), as a non-profit we can take advantage of sharing and collaboration in a way not available to private companies. We wish to use technology to coordinate and share the maintenance labor among our users and people willing to contribute to the environmental movement to lower the cost of this data.

Phase 1:

Build a prototype application for maintaining a media contact list for the environmental non-profit groups in a single state, probably Washington, perhaps Maryland. This prototype will be a test bed for new ideas and the foundation for national rollout.

This application will maintain a list of ~90k media contacts and help groups track their contacts with the media. We will help groups send press releases and keep notes on pitching information. Further it will support statistics on data quality and help people check and verify information in the system.


Background Information:
The mission of Green Media Toolshed is to help non-profit environmental groups of all sizes to get their message into the media more effectively. We do this by providing educational materials, stock photography and access to powerful media relations tools (Tools tour
http://www.greenmediatoolshed.org/projectbrief/index.acs). This year we hope to lead the development of an open source media relation manager appropriate for small regional and grassroots groups.

Media contact data is currently very expensive ($100s per printed directory) and often require expensive tools to use effectively (bulk emailers, bulk faxes). Most small group lack staff and hardware needed to effectively broadcast stories through the media. We hope to make it cheaper by sharing the effort of maintaining the information across member groups in a novel way and providing shared access to hardware and software tools. We hope to make it easier to use by focusing development on the narrow feature set appropriate for smaller groups.

Technology:
The first phase will probably be deployed as a central database application with GMT acting as an Application Service Provider(ASP). Our current technology is built on the OpenACS (http://www.openacs.org) toolkit which provides core community services. It in turn is built on (Postgres, Aolserver and usually Linux). For this application we are open to other toolsets, and possibly other architectures.

Expectations

Realistic:
o Build a working proof of concept that serves a regional community in
a single state.
o Learn important lessons about what is important and un-important in a
community media database.
o Release alpha code licensed under the GPL that can form the core of a
source-forge based development project.

Long Range:

o Give every group working on the environment access to high quality
information about how to get their story into the media, who to call,
how to pitch to them and what their organization or partner
organizations have done in the past.

What proposer can provide for Evergreen

o Access to production development environments and real community
of users.
o Real world experience working for actual users.
o Project management and leadership
o A dataset of 90k National media contacts.
o Relationships with many regional environmental groups.

Reasons to collaborate

o We believe in the opensource model for software development and
would enjoy working with a team of students.
o Our Technical Development is done is Seattle by Carl Coryell-Martin
who is familiar with TESC's values and goals.
o As a non-profit, we would benefit from the additional development
resources.
o We look forward to new ideas and perspectives from Evergreen
students.
o We think our project will be relevant and interesting for your students.
This is an opportunity to make a concrete contribution to the national
environmental movement.