Release Date: May 14, 2008
PRESS RELEASE
Knight Foundation awards $327,000.00 grant to Quiddities to develop open source website and content management tool for KUSP as a model for public radio stations nationwide.
Santa Cruz, CA--Quiddities and KUSP Public Radio announce a grant award from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for RadioEngage, a software application using Drupal which is an open source social publishing platform. Out of over 3,000 applications received, 64 projects made it to the final review and 16 projects were chosen as winners. The winners were announced on May 14, 2008, at the Editor & Publisher Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas. Margaret Rosas, Quiddities CEO, accepted the award.
RadioEngage will provide a comprehensive public radio station website and content management tools. This software will facilitate the creation, management and output of all public radio station’s web content. The tool will be developed by engineers at Quiddites for KUSP. Once the software is created, it will be shared with other public radio stations. The software will be developed with input from a community of KUSP staff, volunteers and advisors from the wider public radio community.
There is a major transformation in the way people use media. Traditional media are struggling with this change, but public radio seems to be weathering the storm. While newspaper
readership and commercial radio listening has been in decline, the audiences for public radio are stable, and in some areas growing. The reason, many believe, is based on a couple of general principles: public radio is a trusted source of news and information, and radio is a natural ally to online communications.
The software will allow for deeper community participation and engagement by allowing more communication between the contributors, producers and listeners of news, information and music. As an open source platform, it will allow future development to be created collectively by public radio stationsnationwide. This partnership will contribute to the growing collaborative spirit of public radio technology development and will help these stations serve the public with local, independent news, information and culture.