Tag: interview

Soon I’ll be interviewing a few remaining stakeholders in the Bloomfield Information Project. I hope to interview at least one member of the BIP team, at least one representative reader of the Daily Bulletin, and one person who has provided (individually or as a part of an organization) financial support to the project.

These are the general questions I’m planning to use in those conversations; they are subject to further refinement based on feedback from my capstone advisory committee and others.

1. Tell me about your background, how you got involved with the Bloomfield Information Project and/or the Community Info Coop, and how you work with / experience it today?
2. What’s something that most excites or inspires you about the project?
3. How would you describe the audience for the BIP/CIC? What do you think the BIP/CIC audience cares most about?
4. In your mind, what does success look like for the BIP/CIC in the year ahead?
5. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges or problems facing the project right now?
6. What are some of the ways you’ve seen other news/community information organizations not be fully representative of the people they serve, and what opportunities do you see with BIP to improve upon that to be more representative and inclusive?
7. If you had complete control over how the project works, what would you change or do differently?
8. What’s something that has surprised you about the way the BIP/CIC project works?
9. Is there anything else you’d like to share about your hopes for this project?

I will also add on additional questions as needed, mostly for the internal BIP team member conversation. These could include:

• When you were first onboarded to the project, what was the most confusing or mysterious part of how it worked?
• What part of the news harvest and production workflow feels most ripe for being improved or optimized?
• What’s happening today that most helps or inhibits you in doing your work?

This post details my first stakeholder interview and conversation with project founder Simon Galperin.

I asked Simon about the evolution of their current process along with their software tools and setup.

They now scan over 200 sources per weekday to produce the Daily Bulletin. Currently a mix of RSS feeds, email newsletters, social media activity, various online websites and portals, and more. For news items they decide to include, they rewrite the headlines, do some general categorization and put them into a holding queue. This process, which they refer to as the “news harvest,” is all managed through a central Google Spreadsheet that is populated through a combination of software tools (e.g. a Chrome extension that can be opened while on a web page of interest, which in turn sends that information to Zapier, which then adds the information to the Google sheet) and manual entry.

Once the news has been harvested, they again use software tools to publish it to various distribution channels, including a WordPress-powered website, social media accounts, and an email newsletter distributed by Mailchimp.

Some additional follow-up information about news items becomes available after initial publication, such as video transcripts that come in from a third-party transcription service.

They sometimes also do original reporting which is posted on their WordPress site and then linked to in the bulletin.

Simon described the process as a prototype that is ripe for expansion and hopefully reuse in other communities. Simon emphasized that at its core, the goal of the process is to make sure the news being reported is representative of the entire community, and can be open to contributions and insights from people who may be traditionally excluded from the news gathering and community information distribution process. They also want to help people move past information overload while continuing to encourage community engagement. They make sure the sources are always cited and that they’re sharing information of practical value to residents and readers.

I asked Simon to say more about how they were exploring expansion and possible re-use of this toolset.

This effort is driven by the mission of the Community Info Coop, “making journalism and media more representative of the people it serves. We equip communities with the tools and information they need to design and sustain news and information ecosystems that strengthen democracy and increase civic engagement.”

Continue reading Stakeholder Interview: Simon Galperin