Development Seed

This week the Knight Foundation launched its latest Drupal project Knight Pulse. The Knight Foundation works on a broad range of issues related to innovative media work and improving access to information for people and communities. Knight Pulse is a new community site designed to bring everyone involved in the work Knight sponsors together to talk and learn from each other.

Building a new community site can be hard to do. Everyone already has their preferred venues where they go to blog and network, and adding a new one to the mix successfully is a challenge. Rather than trying to build the next Facebook, Kristen Taylor and Marc Fest from Knight’s communications team decided to take an iterative approach and start small with a core feature set, experiment with some ideas, and measure their results and feedback to see what works well. The Knight Foundation loves Drupal, and in this case they’re relying on the modularity and extensibility of Drupal to carry out this process so they can learn as the site grows and expand it later to meet demand and respond to community requests.  (This is why they’re currently calling the Pulse site a “beta” release – it’s going to continue to grow and evolve.)

We love this strategy, and we often encourage our clients to take an iterative approach on projects since there’s no better way to test the value of new tools than letting people use them in the real world. For the launch, we helped the Knight Pulse team narrow in on a core feature set that is a safe bet and provides high value to users, and we also helped identify some possible areas for experimentation that could inform future growth. 

Based on their target audiences (current partners and grantees, staff, and the wider sphere of people who care about these issues – potentially a bunch of folks), the Knight Pulse team landed on the following primary content features:

• Video blog: This was the core feature that the Knight Foundation knew they wanted for facilitating conversations. The Knight Pulse team will experiment with a couple different video mediums, including Vimeo and Seesmic. If you have thoughts on online video, here’s a thread where you can give input and let the Pulse team know.

• Project Profiles: These give the Knight Foundation an opportunity to showcase their projects, and they also givea their grantees an opportunity to communicate with an audience beyond their own websites and existing communities. Project leaders can blog about their projects and add their feeds to these pages so they can engage new audiences when they’re testing out ideas and looking for beta users.

• Opportunities: So many NGO’s that we talk to have a common experience – their “Jobs” page on their website gets more traffic than their core content. Since Knight is a foundation that funds projects, this site is guaranteed to get traffic from people looking for a way to get grants. The opportunities section lets anyone who’s part of the community submit their opportunities, which means Knight Pulse will give them broader exposure since users looking for Knight funding will also see options from other organizations.

Along with these core features, there’s one experiment that will be familiar to Drupal users – the Feeds section, modeled after Drupal Planet.  For the sake of bringing together a broad community, particularly a shrewd technology community, we’ve seen the Drupal Planet (and other communities’ planet feeds) yield great results.  The Feeds section is a great compliment to the content that will be chosen by Knight Pulse editors for the main blog, and it will let the community express itself and let the conversation develop organically on Knight Pulse. Another benefit is that it will create an archive of content for Knight Pulse that they’ll be able to use in the future.

I know that Kristen has great plans for the blog and will be featuring some big names in the web 2.0/new media space in the coming weeks. So far over 200 people have joined the site, and I encourage you to check it out and consider creating an account so you can participate in what will be a valuable and interesting new blog.