This grant is part of the Knight Drupal Initiative, a contest tapping computer programming skills to create new software that speeds media innovation. Facebook is one of the world's fastest-growing web sites, a social networking site with scores of millions of users. This experiment allows Knight Foundation to help create a free and easy-to-use online news area that is integrated into Facebook. It would allow any of the millions of Drupal-software users to create their own easy-to-use news site that can be shared via Facebook. The new software also would allow Facebook profiles to be imported into the Drupal news sites, making it easy for the news site users to create their own communities.

This grant will create an open, free, useful and reliable integration between Drupal and Facebook, along with a ready-to-use structure for an online news site. It is expected that by the end of 2009 at least 50 web sites or Facebook applications will be based on the software package developed by this project. We also expect that by July 2010 at least 50 additional news sites will be using this free Drupal news-site platform to distribute their news. Ultimately this grant will lower the barriers to the digital square by creating a free news-site platform and allowing Drupal users to latch on to Facebook's booming social network.

Part of Knight Drupal Initiative