There is no shortage of citizen powered news sites. By aggregating ground reports from citizen journalists, these sites provide raw and timely views of current events. But according to Jeff Reifman at NewsCloud, “none of the latest Web 2.0 generation so far are licensed to the open source community to inspect, re-purpose and improve.”

The key to gathering and sharing citizen reports has been a rapid proliferation in technology, so NewsCloud, which broke the Comedy Central YouTube takedown story, has opened up its operating code to the open source community with a GPL license. This means other organizations can incorporate parts of NewsCloud into their platform or coders can hack aspects of NewsCloud’s site, written in PHP and MySQL, that they think could be improved. (download the code here)

For obvious reasons open source journalism tends to focus on text and content. The long term goal, however, isn’t just to create individual articles or investigations, but develop a method for citizen journalists to collaborate online. Having an open codebase like NewsCloud’s, with customizable reader pages and nightly autoposting to blogs, will benefit the efforts of anyone trying to create a citizen journalism site. Sharing information, of all kinds, can only help the practice move forward.