Friday, February 04, 2005

Spec Entry: Public/Private toggle by category Objective:  Provide a way to keep the raw materials going into an unpublished story from public viewing until after the story is published. Abstract: As I said in my entry regarding the need for an RSS feed on a per editorial project basis, one reason RSS feeds would be great for media organizations is that they would allow editorial managers to track the projects that their editors and writers are working on. But, editorial organizations -- especially ones that do any investigative reporting -- probably don't want editorial projects-in-progress to be available for viewing by the public until after the story is published. After all, you don't want to show your hand to competing journalists and media organizations. So, on per category basis, you need a way to toggle the editorial project as public or private. This of course raises the issue of security which I'll try to address more in depth in another post. But, suffice to say that JOTS has to have the sort of security baked into it that gives an administrator control over users and what authority those users have. For example, who has the authority to switch an editorial project from private to public? 10:36:28 PM    comment [] RadioEdit

Spec Entry: Multiple RSS feeds for granular subscription Objective: Break a transparency channel down into sub-channels and allow people who want access to the raw materials to subscribe to the complete channel, or individual editorial projects. Abstract:  This is a pretty straightfoward part of the spec and it's why the underlying infrastructure of a blogging system may be ideal to serve as a transparency channel's infrastructure. I've already broken this transparency channel down into multiple categories, many of which are focused on a single editorial project.   The idea is that if someone wants to narrow their view down to the raw materials for one particular project, the system should make it really easy to do this.  Most blog infrastructures such as the one I'm using to prototype this channel, will automatically generate RSS feeds for each category.  With categories, the RSS feeds and the Web site provide a plethora of entry points to those interested in the raw materials.  For media organizations, RSS feeds at the editorial project level would also provide editorial managers with a great way to keep track of the stories that their staffs are working on. 10:27:00 PM    comment [] RadioEdit