The City of Asheville and Buncombe County recently made a request for proposals in relation to a grant of $120,000 for community media development. The grant would be used to create a project which put the new media in the hands of local citizens, and was of benefit to the community from an educational, economic, industry and workforce development standpoint.
Ponderwell submitted a proposal which is dear to our hearts. We want to make an online news outlet that will allow the people who live here in Western North Carolina to share and talk about their community through writing, photography, and videography. While there are already sites which focus on the Asheville area, none are focused on creating an interface to actively promote quality citizen journalist reporting. Our system focuses heavily on building an engine for volunteer edited, peer reviewed news and commentary about our region, in order to create a community of both readers and volunteer publishers and editors that not only consume local news and events, but become part of reporting it. You can see our full proposal here:
Download the full proposal as a pdf.
The founders of Ponderwell have been thinking about this for years. We met and formed Ponderwell as a direct result of our participation in an early community journalism site, Newsvine. One of our founders was a part of bringing the Citizen-Times online in the early 2000′s, building the publishing platform used there, and more recently we built the very successful local photographer blog, imageasheville.com, which focuses on the events and life of our city. We have the technical skills to bring this vision into reality. Apart from building complicated websites including an online music store with a catalog of 20000 products and audio and video streaming and downloads from the cloud, we’ve also found a niche as the technical people that your technical people turn to when they get in over their heads – from networks to databases to javascript to bezier paths on iPads.
We have had several requests over the last few days from community members interested in our proposal. We’ve already heard from some community leaders, and would love to hear from you. Feel free to drop us a comment below, telling us your thoughts.
Congrats on having your proposal selected as one of the finalists – your ideas are pretty exciting and I hope Asheville gets to see them built out!
Journalism is a dying art. To create a forum in which the public and especially children are allowed and encouraged to work together to see their thoughts and work come together in a constructive way is invaluable. Having a way to use music and video to express yourself is timely and inclusive of all kinds of learning. This is an important project : enriching, uplifting, creative, intelligent and fun.
As a homeschooling Mom and a writer, as well as a small business owner, I wholly support Ponderwell and their wonderful proposal. As a previous commentor wrote, journalism is a dying art, and what passes for journalism nowadays is more like thinly veiled cheerleading! I would love to be a part of this exciting and creative initiative, and hope that City of Asheville/Buncombe County are forward thinking enough to see the importance and potential of the proposal.
This looks wonderful! I love the idea of community-led journalism, and as a mom, I’m excited about the prospect of my children having access to the content…as well as having opportunities to contribute!
I like this proposal. What a great way to exercise the power of the internet and bring the children together.
This is a very exciting proposal to allow all members of the community a solid platform to share news. I know Ponderwell has the passion and the technical expertise to make this happen.