|
[Printer Friendly Version]
Streaming Grantmaker Knowledge
A Procedure for Making a Foundation's Web Site Content Available as RSS
By Michael C. Gilbert, June 2005
This article was first published in the June issue of the Nonprofit Online News Journal.
This document describes one approach to making a foundation's content available in RSS channels, as derived from the first steps taken by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in the Fall of 2004.
What is RSS?
In
his article on the uses of RSS in education, Stephen Downes provides a short explanation:
RSS stands for "Rich Site Summary" and is a type of XML document used to share news headlines and other types of web content. Originally designed by Netscape to create content "channels" for its My Netscape pages, RSS has been adopted by news syndication services, weblogs, and other online information services. Because it is one of the simplest uses of XML, RSS has become widely distributed. Content developers use RSS to create an
XML description of their web site. The RSS file can include a logo, a site link, an input box, and multiple news items. Each news item consists of a URL, a title, and a summary.
The most common use for RSS is for the distribution of weblog content. A weblog is a simple and widespread publishing model, which has as a defining characteristic the reverse chronological listing of entries. The enormous popularity of weblogs and the fairly standard format of their entries has driven the adoption of RSS.
The typical user scenario is that someone reads several weblogs and, rather than having to check each and every web page to visually scan for whether they have been updated or not, and if so what the new entries are, they use a desktop or web based aggregator. Like an email client, the aggregator checks all the RSS versions of the weblogs, identifies new entries, and displays them in a consistent and usable format.
Why Make Content Available as RSS?
First, RSS is a widespread and growing medium for content distribution. In other words, this is how many people prefer to read regularly updated content. An owner of an RSS reader software company estimates that there are 750,000 deployed desktop RSS readers. This doesn't count the people who read syndicated content through Bloglines or other web based tools, those who use web sites that aggregate and repurpose the content, or the rapidly growing number who use RSS enabled browsers or email clients. There are probably 8 million RSS feeds available at this point, ranging from obscure news sources and personal journals, to the New York Times, to books at Amazon.com.
Second, making content available through machine readable formats creates opportunities for new services and new knowledge. Web based services such as Technorati and Delicio.us are providing people with ways to identify patterns, get well filtered recommendations, and in general become more sophisticated users and producers of information.
Finally, the decentralized and small scale nature of RSS distribution allows communities of practice, and organizations, to rapidly build inexpensive knowledge sharing and learning networks. Again, Stephen Downes explains this from the perspective of educational organizations:
RSS is the first working example of an XML data network. As such, and in this world of learning objects and metadata files, RSS is the first working example of what such a network will look like for educational designers. Just as news resources are indexed and distributed in the RSS network, so also educational resources can be indexed and distributed in a similar learning object network.
The model provided by RSS is very different from the model provided today by learning content management systems (LCMSs). In the world of the LCMS, everything is contained in one very large software application. Insofar as content is distributed at all, it is distributed in bundled content libraries. This means that educational institutions must make a major investment in software and expertise in order to access learning
content.
RSS, by contrast, is not centralized. It is distributed. Content is not distributed in bundles, it is distributed one item at a time. There is no central store, repository or library of RSS content; it is all over the internet. To access and use RSS content in a viewer or in a web page, you do not need a large software application. A simple RSS reader will do the trick.
Elsewhere, I have gone into more detail about one particular RSS channel, grants announcements, that could create substantial value across many networks of grantmakers. I wrote:
The real time flow of grantmaking decisions is the barometer of foundation activity. Program officers pay attention to the decisions of their peers. Associations of grantmakers look for evidence that their support is having an impact. And even after the fact, thousands of grantmaking professionals, grant seekers, researchers, consultants, and others look for patterns and knowledge in the archives made available by The Foundation
Center.
Certainly an individual would derive some simple benefits from subscribing to channels published by a foundation or a set of foundations whose grantmaking decisions interested them. Indeed, I think some of the value would even come from a certain simplicity of notification within a foundation itself, at least for the larger ones. But the really interesting stuff happens when associations and others start aggregating channels.
The affinity groups and regional associations would find it easy to take the pulse of their members. Grantseekers, of course, could see right away the new directions that their supporters are taking. (Upon reflection, that may or may not be a good thing.) The growing network of foundations, consultants and support organizations who are working
to help grantmakers share knowledge as easily as they share financial resources would have a powerful, almost real time data mining tool at their disposal.
What Conditions are Needed for an RSS Initiative?
What this question really means is: Are there requirements that need to be met before a grantmaker considers implementing the use of RSS in their organization?
My answer to this question is that there are no technical reasons why any grantmaker cannot make use of some form of RSS. RSS is technically simple and is implemented in a wide variety of software, both free and commercial, whether desktop, client-server, or web based.
The likely barriers to implementation are either organizational or content related.
Organizational barriers include too many other conflicting (rather than synergistic) projects for communication or technical staff to be able to consider new channels, or a lack of control over important aspects of technology (such as when those are all outsourced or handled by an umbrella organization). Content barriers would be rare, but might include organizations that have no communication program at all or those whose only content would be costly to repurpose or translate into RSS channels.
It's likely that there are some times that are better than others for moving toward the use of RSS. Times when communication systems and procedures are already undergoing changes -- and therefore "unfrozen" in classic change management term -- might be the easiest time to add a new way of distributing certain information. The Kellogg Foundation chose to use the context of an overhaul of their wkkf.org web site as the opportune moment.
A certain disciplined approach to adopting RSS is invaluable. The Kellogg Foundation chose to operate with a premise of no new content and no new areas of work responsibility. In other words, the goal was strictly to take existing flows of content and make changes to their content management systems that allowed for the automatic publishing of RSS channels for that content.
Six Steps
Step 1: Establish Objectives
In order to succeed in both selection of RSS channels and implementation process, it will be important to have clear objectives up front.
The following five objectives are by no means exclusive, but are definitely a good starting point: (1) Specify the technical underpinnings of RSS distribution. (2) Implement those
technical underpinnings. (3) Introduce the foundation staff to RSS as a distribution option. (4) Introduce web site visitors to RSS as a distribution option. (5) Lay the groundwork for further use of RSS in the future. These were the five objectives used by the Kellogg Foundation in its initial RSS launch.
Step 2: Inventory of Content Channels
To follow a disciplined approach of only translating existing content into RSS, I recommend an abbreviated process of communication centered technology planning: Start with an inventory of existing online communication flow that is likely to fit the RSS data model of small, frequently updated content. Obvious places to look include: email newsletters, new content on web sites, calendars, new content on intranets, and anything tied to a date.
In the Kellogg Foundation process, we identified: regular web based news for program areas and initiatives, Encompass (Program Management System) tasks for staff members, existing email newsletters, grants made in each program area, and new publications on the wkkf.org web site.
Step 3: Identifying the Technical Requirements of RSS
In parallel with the inventory of suitable communication flows, technical staff need to be informed about the format of RSS so that they can consider (1) what data will go in which parts of the RSS channel and (2) how to deliver that with their technology platform.
The vast array of possible combinations of taxonomies and technologies is beyond the scope of this report, but there are some key resources that would be of value at this stage of any RSS project.
There is an enormous amount of material available online about RSS. The most important reading is the RSS 2.0 Specification, now managed and hosted by the Berkman Center at Harvard University. I recommend testing RSS channels against this specification.
Once feeds are being generated, they can be checked with a validator.
Aaron Swartz maintains a list of RSS related software tools. This is useful to see if you want to integrate off-the-shelf RSS generation into your existing tool set.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't point to O'Reilly's resources on the subject. They have been both full speed adopters of the technology and good documenters. They have an up to date list of articles on RSS, most of them with a technical perspective. Their book, "Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom", by Ben Hammersley, is also an excellent resource.
Step 4: Looking for Low Hanging Fruit
The key to a successful initial RSS launch is to "think big and start small".
The "think big" part is achieved by (1) conducting the wide scale inventory of communication flows and (2) having a timeline for consideration of the larger communication implications of RSS and related tools, such as weblogs. The Kellogg Foundation conducted its initial launch of RSS channels as the first phase of a project in
which the second phase was a more thorough review of new communication opportunities.
The key to the "start small" part is to identify the candidates for feeds that are the easiest to launch, are most likely to be part of a larger plan for RSS, and have obvious value, in other words the "low hanging fruit".
Options for taking nominations for the low hanging fruit include: recommendations of the committee leading the project (hopefully an interdisciplinary committee with both communication and technology staff), recommendations of either the technology or communication staffs as a whole (or both), and a review of the site map and content taxonomies by a qualified consultant. In the case of the Kellogg Foundation, we used the first and the third option to gather candidates for the initial launch.
Step 5: Making Content Recommendations
Whoever is responsible for making the final recommendations will need to take into account the objectives established for the launch of RSS channels in the first place (as
discussed in step 1), in addition to the criteria laid out in the previous section for high quality candidate channels.
In the case of the Kellogg Foundation project, this responsibility fell to me. Based upon the project goals, those five objectives, and my own expertise, I looked over the site map and a memo on low hanging fruit (with suggestions from technology staff) and developed following suggestions for three initial channels. In my memo on those recommendations, I wrote:
Program Area News: The idea here is for their to be a single RSS channel that aggregates all 14 of the program area news streams. My reasoning is that (a) it will guarantee a vibrant RSS stream in which everyone could find some value, (b) it will, in effect, serve as an invitation to each program area to request their own RSS channel, and (c) even later, when there are many more channels, it will serve as a one stop shop for program
news.
Web Site Updates: I recognize that this may overlap with program area news in some cases. I also recognize that the workflow and data path for this news might be different than that provided by communication staff in the program area news. The idea here is that every time a new page, section, or document is added to the WKKF.org site, metadata from that update is used to form a news item.
Grants Made: My third and final recommendation for an initial RSS channel relies on yet another data flow. The idea here is that when grants are made and can be publicly announced, a news item about the grant is generated from existing metadata. Given the popularity of grants research services like the Foundation Center databases, I am fairly
confident that this would be a popular channel. There are some very interesting long term aggregation opportunities, if other grantmakers pick up on this (see my article on RSS Grants Channels), but for the time being I am recommending it as a stand alone thing.
I am laying out all three of these specific recommendations here because I think they are likely to be useful as candidate RSS channels to most grantmakers. Almost every grantmaker is likely to have news related to their program areas. Every grantmaker will have web site updates, if they have a web site at all. And certainly every grantmaker makes
grants. Given the ways in which internal and external stakeholders are organized around issues and grants, it's likely that any one of these channels would fit well into existing communication patterns.
Looking over these recommendations, there are four specific criteria that also played a role. They have been alluded to earlier in this report, but I want to call them out here: (1) Is
there content available? (2) Is the content in the right format or can it easily be converted into the right format? (3) Is there readership interest? (4) Would the channel be updated often enough to maintain interest?
Step 6: Implementation
Technical implementation is beyond the scope of this report, but the rough steps for deployment of the initial channels include: (1) selection of a location for publishing the RSS channels online, (2) automation of the creation of those channels from existing data flow, (3) deployment and testing of a single channel, (4) final deployment of that and other channels, (5) and web page updates related to launch.
The latter requires more description. Without updates to the web site, readers will not subscribe to new channels because they won't be able to find them. In my recommendations to the Kellogg Foundation, I included the following components that would need to be generated by the web site database and served via HTTP. They are all
visible elements of the web site itself. Again, I believe these are all likely components in any grantmaker launch of RSS.
RSS Channels: These are the three initial news channels, produced in accordance
with RSS 2.0 standards.
RSS Links: I recommend plain text links to the RSS channels. The standards are not entirely settled, but many sites use a simple ?RSS' as the link and others say 'Syndicate this page'. Please feel free to offer alternatives, but I think 'Subscribe to RSS' would work well. It's more explanatory than just 'RSS', but it still allows the visitor to search for the string and find the feed on the page. As for placement on the page, I recommend a place
"above the fold" in one of the margins of the page. The Kellogg Foundation elected to go with a combination of text and an image.
Corresponding Weblogs: For clarity's sake, I recommend that every RSS feed have its corresponding weblog (just a web based representation of the channel). In many cases, these weblog like pages will already exist, if the project focuses on repurposing existing content.
RSS FAQ Page: This would be a one stop shop for people who want to know what this is all about. Initially, it should be linked to near the links to the RSS channels themselves. I would recommend that this page answer a few basic questions about the
foundation's use of RSS and then link to a few key, well maintained pages that explain RSS, link to newsreaders, and so on.
RSS Channels Page: It would be good to start a page that lists and describes all
of the RSS channels. If the foundation has email newsletters or a site map, this page should be as easy to find.
If you found this article interesting or helpful,
please consider making a donation to Nonprofit Online News.
It will probably feel good!
|