The jury for the future12 showcase saw 12 presentations, all 12 minutes long, during the Sunday morning of the festival. We heard from both Italian and international projects, ranging from apps to journalistic startups and research projects. As the jury had to choose only one as the winner, we agreed that Sourcefabric convinced us all with their impressive open-source tools for journalists. We are happy to invite Sourcefabric back to Perugia next year!
Sourcefabric has its headquarters in Prague, branches in Berlin and Toronto, and representatives in Minsk, Guatemala, Warsaw, Belgrade and Cluj. It’s a not-for-profit company that designs software for news organisations all over the world.
“Sourcefabric hopes to answer the three challenges facing newsrooms today. Firstly, newsroom technology is expensive. Secondly, dimishing advertising revenue is forcing news organisations to do more with less. And thirdly, audiences are abandoning traditional platforms,” Douglas Arellanes of Sourcefabric said in Perugia. “Cheaper technology is now evolving to help these newsrooms.”
Newscoop (open content management for newspapers & magazines), Airtime (open source radio automation) and Booktype (open source publishing platform for print and digital books) are currently on the market. The next step up will be called Superdesk, an open source digital workflow solution for newsrooms.