Tuesday, July 10, 2007

VillageSoup.com Village Soup, or at least its free tools: Coming to a community site near you.

In May, VillageSoup (a network of popular community news sites in Knox and Waldo counties, Maine) won an $885,000 Knight News Challenge grant to remake and release the technology behind this its sites as free, open source software.

"We believe VillageSoup defines a new business category, moving from community news to community host," said VillageSoup president Richard Anderson. He believes that open source tools will encourage other companies to establish their own version of community hosting and build the credibility of this emerging sector.

Still, being a community host requires more than a software system, said Anderson. "A new culture has to be adopted wherein the site becomes thecommunity's site, not controlled by the host. We believe the passion required to properly serve a community stems from local ownership or local independence that a franchise model doesn't yield."

VillageSoup may about to give away a big part of what's made its business successful, but it isn't leaving the field.

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"One approach to assuring sustainability while maintaining local independence will be through a membership organization we call VillageSoup Common," said Anderson. "Members will share infrastructure, brand and practice to effectively disrupt the growing [media trend] toward consolidation and maximizing shareholder value at the expense of community service."

Ultimately, Anderson aims to spread local media independence and quality local content sustained by new revenue, including Internet-to-print publishing. In his News Challenge proposal, Anderson wrote that he wants to "Turn independent weekly newspaper companies and entrepreneurs into an imposing, lively, worldwide creative energy that is competitive with media company chains."

Guest contributor Benjamin Melançon is the creative mind and information architect behind Agaric Design Collective and People Who Give a Damn!

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