Grants/SocialCompare
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
We would like to build a community that creates, uploads, updates, translates and shares multilingual comparison tables. Items and criteria of existing comparisons could be reused and remixed by users to create new comparisons. The purpose is to organize and display in a meaningful and usefull way all interesting data in any domain. Data created by users are under creative commons licenses.
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
The website that provides the service to create, updates, share comparisons... is already developed, it is online in beta version and free to use. The site webdesign is currenlty on going. Now we would like to improve the existing content of the service to help the site to grow and really build and foster an user community to create and share open data. Therefore, the tangible project output, if we get the grant, will be:
- short introduction video or animation describing the innovative service to help users understand the value to create and share open content.
- new data created from scratch to motivate users to do the same thing.
- a tool to import data from external open existing databases (such as semantic open databases).
- the translations of the website interface or some open data in several languages to be used worldwide more easily.
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
The community we target is an international community that loves to share data. It could be compound of people working in educational systems, bloggers, companies, any passionate user that want to make beautiful comparisons with various criteria types (e.g: video, images, ratings, votes, texts, numeric data...).
Community will benefit from the tools we provide to organize and reuse data in a nice way, and it will benefit from the open content that they find of the website's directory. They could also use this content on their own website (embed function) spreading data easily all over internet.br />
We believe that collaboration and community are the best thing to maintain huge amount of data. We are passionate by innovation, web technologies and finding new alternatives to make things.
We have been graduated from a Top French IT Engineer school. We are professional senior developer engineers (8 years of experience), we have worked for various IT companies from small to big, before developing this service. As we have already developed the website and are ready to host as many open data as users produce, we are able to continue to lead this project to grow to the next step.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
The project's impact could be measured by internet traffic of users visiting the site and by the number of open data that are created by active members.
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
For the moment, 2 persons work for the project, and we plan to make it sustainable by generating revenues with the service.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
As the main purpose of our website is to host open structured data under creative commons in any domain (cultural, educational, scientific...), it will directly benefit positively « the commons » by adding more and more open data each day the site is used. More people join the community, and more the data will become accurate and various.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
We use opensource technologies and tools to develop the site itself such as Symfony PHP framework, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Eclipse Development Plateform, Lighttpd server, MySQL database. As we are high-skilled web engineers, we are able to develop and build an innovative service to make data more fun and easy to use by everyone. We could need semantic technical skills later or learn them.
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
Our main challenge will be all legal and spam issues that can imply the free user generated data. We try to automatize the report abuse system and be able to react quickly. We keep an history of all modified data and plan to be able to restore previous versions easily.
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
We would like to generate revenues from the website itself. It could be generated from a premium version, advertisement, affiliations... it will be adjusted during the growth of the community.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
As we target a worldwide audience, we host our service on a scalable hosting cloud solution that enables us to easily grow the servers capacity if necessary.
It could have a scalable impact as we target the same kind of knowledge website such as Wikipedia does, the main difference is that we focus more about structured data, reuse/remix of existing data, social features and matrix views...
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
Creative commons can help us attributing a grant (financial aspect), making some publicity about our service, especially at the launch (marketing aspect), sharing some open data it has, to add content to the site (data aspect) and maybe giving us legal expertise advices.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
Our site uses a blog, a twitter account, and emails to communicate for the moment.
We also plan to create a facebook fan page for the real launch of the website (beta version for the moment).
Legal
Yes
