A new CMS to watch?

Armstrong is a new open source CMS in development, based upon Django, and funded by the Knight Foundation.

There is a recent piece about Armstrong posted at The Nieman Journalism Lab with a good thread questioning the need and the backing technology since other options exist. I think the more experimentation in this space the better because as Rafe Colburn has rightly said, “Content management is still an unsolved problem”. Rafe ruminates that, “For some reason, finding an adequate balance between usability, flexibility, and performance is nearly impossible.”, and it can seem that way if you are shooting at a fixed target. Anyone who has worked on a CMS project has felt this way. I certainly have from time to time. The trick is to have a solution that not only meets your needs, but can evolve as those targets shift, and educating those involved that it is a part of a larger ecosystem where evolution is a feature and not a bug.

Managing development flow to go faster

Three from Jon Moore (he doesn’t post that often, but when he does, they are must reads, so subscribe!):

Jon Moore: “Managing Software Development Flow”

Jon Moore: Intuitions about Software Development Flow

Jon Moore: How to Go Faster

And one from Aaron Held that is related on the “Measurement of Awesome”: “This is kind of like gravity. Science can only measure the effects of gravity but you can’t run without it. And running beats floating back and forth aimlessly any day”

Hyper-local is about community or it fails

There have been numerous efforts at building services focused on local communities, and almost all of them, that have not had a community element to them, have failed to one degree or another.

Just being an aggregator is not enough. You need to curate. Moderate. Collate. Summarize. Connect. Most of all – communicate! Sure software helps. But it requires hands on work by people too. And it takes time. Like forming any relationship does.

GigaOm: Mathew Ingram: “Hyper-Local News: It’s About the Community or It Fails”

ReadWriteWeb: Marshall Kirkpatrick: “Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven’t Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out?”