opencan: Open, Collaborative, Annotated News

by @corbinsmith

introduction:
opencan (Open, Collaborative, Annotated News) creates an embeddable visual organization of all possible elements of information surrounding a specific news topic. Succinctly, opencan is a graphically dynamic news ecosystem. Its a visual (graphic) representation of news topics made up of all contributing elements/information concerned with that topic. (News articles, professional and citizen photo/video/audio, infographics, documents, social media posts, etc.) Its an interactive and fluid (dynamic) user experience for news readers to experience news evidence and facts in an omni-directional flow and for news writers to collect, organize, and visualize their story material throughout the news writing process. Its a collection of all newly received or noteworthy information. (Okay, so all I did was just define news here, but you get the point.) Its a community of interactive individuals (ecosystem) that collaboratively builds and annotates all elements contributing to a news story

what it does:
opencan leverages the best elements of cutting edge web applications to: streamline journalistic and editorial workflow; create deep, meaningful and highly organized information databases; encourage user interaction, participation and content generation meaningfully visualize the components which contribute to news stories to foster the audience's confidence and trust in their comprehension of news items

cultivate a culture of non-linear, omni-directional storytelling in news journalism.

Demo: Visualisation

Demo: Embedded

Benefits for Readers

Readers can access opencan via personal computer or mobile. view relevant information about a news story located on one interface. view content which is important and significant to them. quickly access the best, most credible and most relevant information; or investigate deeply into a story of interest. organise information so they see the development of a story over time. interact and engage with new stories, rather than simply read/watch them. participate in the construction of ongoing news stories by uploading or linking information. understand the larger context of specific news items. be more confident in what they know of news events as they can explore corroborative information from multiple sources.

Benefits for Journalists

opencan as a story content management application: Exists in browser and web. Syncs to web so ongoing work is always readily available. Able to upload content to projects currently being worked on from anywhere, using internet or mobile. Useful storyboarding and narrative visualization tool to help write news for print. opencan as a news ecosystem: Able to view and keep track of additional content added to their stories. Discover sources of information through assessing user uploads. Can immediately upload additional information to the story in breaking news situations via mobile.

Benefits for News Organizations

News organizations can see what information their users are seeking out, and most frequently viewing. have staff simultaneously collaborate on projects all staff working on separates elements of a story (research, illustration, photo, video, writing, infographics, editing) can all simultaneously access the platform and add or work on elements within it. enable story embedding on other sites, blogs, etc. Visualisation and relevant content is stored on local servers, so interactions with embedded opencan stories act as remote views of your organizations site. increase brand awareness as branded individual opencan stories are proliferated across the web. Opportunity for ad revenue greatly increases if ads are incorporated into the opencan platform Increased probability of greater number of unique visitors solicit citizen journalist's participation in building news stories use opencans comprehensive metadata tagging as a way to index and archive all imaginable media content. foster ad-hoc communities based on user interest in news topics. strengthen reader confidence in accuracy of stories, as users will see the different information and data reference in traditional news stories.

- 30 -