-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
Architecture draft
This solution we are building here is addressing a generic need for information management. Content curation and linking is a big part of the traffic on twitter, facebook and other social networks. There is so much information out there that we need more ways to sort bits and create reliable collection of thematic links to emerging content online.
By working on the Green Ruby News I went through the path of the news gardener. There is a bunch of sources, and I want to distillate a condensed elixir out of it to share it with my network, or simply for reference i9n close future. The lifetime of such information is short but can last one or two years before obsolescence.
I had occasion to work on an automatic feed gathering and merging for a digital signage company last year and it felt appropriate to think about the same kind of tool for helping my news curation initiative.
A collection of agents is in charge of gathering news from various sources, reproducing what an informaed human would spend hours to do. There are tools used by such human to ease the task, namely rss readers, google alerts, twitter timelines, and others. The purpose of the collection of agents is to predigest that gathering work and store in the central database the pieces of relevant information.
The datbase fed by the agents then is a tool usable by a community of trusted users to sort and categorize the content. Some automation can be done there, but typically when I'm searching for what news to include in Green Ruby, I use newsblur and check the feeds, and I save the ones I consider of interest. Then when preparing the newsletter, I check my saved news and evaluate which ones I will include. But this is very basic and could be more elaborate, that's what the purpose of this project is.
The application for sorting the news makes possible to add tags, to put items in categories, to flag an item as a possible candidate to publication, etc.
The initial setup of the application will decide what are the possible tags and categories, and what are the publications that the item candidate can be included in. The first version of the solution will have this configuration in a file but this can be interfaced later on.
For preparing a collection of content, the editor needs to be able to quickly browse what items where extracted from the flow and select which ones are going to be included. Then the generation of the collection can be done according to the configuration of the application. In the first instance we will focus on the newsletter publication using mailchimp and the generation of a static website.
The public website is the publication part of the solution. There are various examples of what we want to achieve here:
On those websites the base idea is the same, there is a selection made out of the flow and the attention given to the focus of the content attracts attention if there is a consistency. Then people can gain time by referring to those sources rather than wasting too much time following all the sources that they cover.
The concierge
This is the role in charge of maintaining the system and managing the access to the application, as well as helping new users to interact with the system. This role is often called admin, but concierge conveys a concept of service and neutrality in regard of the activity that takes place in the area he supervises.
The Editor
This role is holding the responsibility of the publication. He selects the items to be published, handles the general layout of the publication, and guards the consistency of the curated flow.
The Contributor
This is a more general purpose profile that gathers various type of people. The contributor can provide new sources of feed, can help triage the items, provide feedback on the published items or the ones to be published. It's a way to engage the people that benefit from a curation even before the publication is made. Such role can be punctual and inconsistent. The editor needs to be on the bridge constantly, the contributor can be active one week and have 3 month of silence.