Contributr is a project that is near and dear to my heart, it’s an idea that I had several months ago and me and a team of 3 developers have been working on it since then.
Monday we presented our final product to a panel of journalism industry professionals, Adobe AIR specialists, and the good people at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. And I now have some bad new to report, Contributr didn’t win the big prize. So that presents us with some options and some ideas. I’m also interested in hearing what you have to say, so comment away.
Basically Contributr is this, it’s a solution to a problem that countless news organizations have, how to accept and process citizen journalism, otherwise known as user generated content. The workflows are complex, the technology is advanced, but with Contributr, those problems are minimized.
We created what I think is a great, and effective application. The company is setup as a Software as a service/ service as a service model which is gaining steam each day.
Furthermore, there have been multiple inquiries into the availability of Contributr for use in the ‘real world’ by large and small news organizations, something that I’m very excited about.
Here’s the issue now, we’re fairly confident that the Reynolds Institute is going to want to retain us to maintain and work on Contributr (they gave us a $5,000 development fund to work with over the last few months). But, here’s the kicker, since we didn’t win the contest, do they actually own Contributr?
From my knowledge of the law, I think it’s pretty clear-cut, despite their gift of $5,000 to further the development of Contributr, since we didn’t win the ‘contest’ I don’t think they have a claim to ownership.
Now of course, if their funding and support of Contributr is generous, we’d be happy to continue working with them, and would love the backing of such great people.
On the other hand, we’ve got a great product and one that we know for a fact there is demand for, so we could also probably do some tweaking, some redesign work and continue development on our own.
It’s a pretty complex situation but one I hope to resolve fairly quickly, we’ll be meeting with the Reynolds Institute to talk about further development and consulting opportunities in the next couple of weeks.
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