Montreal Tech Watch

CITIZENShift relaunches as an open publishing platform

By Heri Oct 20th 2007 in Design

citizenshiftCITIZENShift, a project by the National Film Board of Canada, is a platform where creatives and activists are invited to self-express on social issues, through pictures, text, videos and podcasts. The platform is quite successful with young creatives; and they have now a new theme every month debating social changes. Creatives would send their videos and material to a small team, which would approve and publish it on a relevant category.

Yesterday, CITIZENShift and its french version, Parole Citoyenne, relaunched, with a new graphic design, focusing on users, user contribution, and social networking features. Any citizen can register and contribute to a dossier, upload pictures and videos and comment on any content. Navigation between similar content is also easier with the introduction of tags.

citizenshift

I spoke to a member of CITIZENShift this week: previously, approving material, sorting pages, converting multimedia content, and then uploading them would take them a lot of time. This new platform is much more scalable, and hopefully, they would be able to reach more citizens. I was not using the previous platform and can’t tell then if this is better; but this current version in itself looks and works great. However, I also think that the “dossiers” and “social change” were the distinctive features of CITIZENShift, and with the current atomization of content, the new website sometimes feels as a generic social network.

The new version of CITIZENShift was undertaken by meidia, a web agency which also has its own web2.0 and blogging products, with development heavily based on drupal.

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Comments

  • Montreal Tech Watch October 20, 2007

    new post: CITIZENShift relaunches as an open publishing platform http://tinyurl.com/22az89

  • Patrick October 20, 2007

    Actually, at the top right of each content element you have the description of the dossier it’s in and all the browsing blocks below that in the right column let you browse the content of the dossier, not the whole site, so you are within the dossier context at all times.

  • Heri October 21, 2007

    hey patrick, you are right, mea culpa, that’s an error of mine. I somehow thought that the previous interface focused more on the dossier than the content

  • Chris Car October 22, 2007

    May I add something? ;-) People can upload videos, audio files, PDF documents, etc. to contribute to a dossier (or they suggest a new dossier). The videos which are uploaded are automatically converted into Flash video format. So the editorial team does not have to deal with video formats anymore since the platform is taking care of it (more than 50 differrent video and audio formats are supported by the platform). So previewing of submitted videos should be more fun for the editorial team from now on. ;-)

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