Comments on: Visual Explanatory Illustrations: “Back of a Napkin” methodology https://partnews.mit.edu/2017/02/14/visual-explanatory-illustrations-back-of-a-napkin-methodology/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 15 Feb 2017 02:54:48 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: Anne Crosby https://partnews.mit.edu/2017/02/14/visual-explanatory-illustrations-back-of-a-napkin-methodology/#comment-209576 Wed, 15 Feb 2017 02:54:48 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=8837#comment-209576 Kickstarter campaign
Indivisible Guide
Indivisible Labs
Ghost’s journalism program
PGP and usability
GitHub DDoS update
DDoS cause

]]> By: Anne Crosby https://partnews.mit.edu/2017/02/14/visual-explanatory-illustrations-back-of-a-napkin-methodology/#comment-209574 Wed, 15 Feb 2017 02:46:43 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=8837#comment-209574 Ghost is an open source web publishing platform first launched in 2012 and funded as a Kickstarter campaign. Indivisible Somerville, a loosely organized advocacy group based on the Indivisible Guide, launched an “Indivisible Labs” blog on this using Ghost, which is how I found out about the platform. The company maintains its non-profit status and discloses its finances in an effort to maintain transparency. The lowest priced plan $19.00/month for 50,000 page views, which is more expensive than some other platforms. The company is attempting to identify revenue models that might assist content writers in funding their work and is also funding promising new publications via its journalism program.

One frequent criticism of open source tools is that they “work” but many of them are not user friendly. Ghost avoids this pitfall. It would be nice to see this kind of intuitive usability in other tools such as PGP encryption products. Because the platform is open source, its code can altered (and scutinized) by users and programmers. It appears to be a stable, well-maintained publication system. In 2015, GitHub was targeted with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, presumably by a state actor, seeking to force GitHub to remove certain content related to censorship from its servers. Ghost, while not intended to subvert internet censorship efforts, does provide a flexible platform that users can customize. It will be interesting to see what they rollout over the next year or so.

http://www.ghost.org/

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