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Six reasons to choose Citizen Desk

Screenshot of Live Blog input and edit
Screenshot of Live Blog input and edit

This month we’re asking our community for support in our efforts to build Citizen Desk 2.0 for @Verdade.

@Verdade is one of Africa’s most innovative news organizations. A few years ago, they asked us to build a tool to help them turn their readers into reporters. The result was Citizen Desk, an open source platform for citizen journalism that @Verdade has used successfully in their coverage of two elections.

We built Citizen Desk for @Verdade. But because it is open source, anyone can download it, use it and distribute — with no license fees or forced upgrade costs. Likewise, the added functionality and improvements we make to Citizen Desk 2.0 now and in the future are free to any news organization that wants more from citizen journalism.

Here are six more ways Citizen Desk is different from other citizen journalism platforms:

  1. Citizen Desk lets editors work with citizen reports from social media and SMS just as easily as wire services and RSS.

  2. Citizen Desk to help you track sources' accuracy with an activity log. So when news breaks, you can quickly go to your most reliable citizen journalists.

  3. Citizen Desk is easy to use. Citizen journalists need no technical training, and the user interface is so intuitive your editorial staff can master it in minutes.

  4. The platform is extensible, so you can easily add input channels — even new SMS networks — as you need them. Other platforms don't give you that flexibility.

  5. The REST API gives you the flexibility to build your own output using any JS library and without affecting the back end. Grab any stream of data and do with it whatever you want to create a better user experience.

  6. Your data always belongs to you. Other hosting services make you forfeit your rights. If you ever decide to leave Sourcefabric, we will even export your data for you in whatever format you need.

Time runs out January 23, and we have a long way to go to reach our $40,000 target. Please visit the Citizen Desk page on IndieVoices today to learn how you can help.

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