NewsCloud on Lighthouse and Tender

NewsCloud, a Seattle based Knight Foundation grant project, is working to pull newspapers out of the stone age and get them into the social media game. The application provides news organizations with a way to integrate their content directly into a customized Facebook application, helping them reach new audiences.

Earlier this week, the NewsCloud crew mentioned their use of both Lighthouse and Tender Support in their blog post, Development, Outreach and Financial Tools We Use - Managing Your Grant Project Series.

Lighthouse is a bug/ticket management service which we use to track defects and feature requests and organize our work across milestones. It's a critical resource for our project management work.

Lighthouse is also integrated with TenderApp which we use for NewsCloud's online support and feedback. So, if a user reports a problem, we can easily create a new defect ticket in Lighthouse or attach it to an existing one. TenderApp has become a critical service for interfacing with our grant partners. It also offers free accounts for open source projects and has great t-shirts!

Part of the grant stipulates that the work they create with the funding must be open sourced. We were more than happy to hook them up with accounts for both Lighthouse and Tender Support. In addition, the Knight Foundation pushes grant participants to remain transparent about their process and what they have learned along the way. The NewsCloud team offers a wealth of information involving their grant work on their blog.

As most of you should already know, we're extreme advocates of the Open Source community. If you add that to the fact that I went to journalism school and remain extremely passionate about it, we're extremely stoked to see another up-and-coming project that our tools have helped.