Dec 02 2009

A short time ago, the G20 came right here to Pittsburgh. With an event of such worldwide importance happening in our backyards, several people decided to document it via social media. The Mattress Factory did a site called “MyG20” and it did pretty well. Some smaller groups did their own thing. But IndyMedia did one better: http://indypgh.org/g20/

The New York Times called it “One of the best all-purpose sites with updates from the streets.” It got quite a lot of attention and hits from all over. And it was put together by a good friend of mine, @edfilo I helped a teeny tiny bit, but he (with the help of LibSyn) really did an awesome job.

So why should this matter to you? The G20 is old news by now.

He’s releasing the code for the site, making it available to anyone who wants to cover events. It’s called “Crows,” and it lives at http://crowsne.st/ . With Crows, you can quickly and easily build a site, pulling in content from Flickr, Twitter, and elsewhere, and posting it all on a geotagged Google Map.

It’s still in its rough infancy, but after the awesome role that it played during the G20, several other organizations had contacted IndyMedia about getting access to the code, and so it’s already gaining traction in the space. It’s undergoing rapid development, with new features being added quite fast. Ed really wants to make this useful for people, and I’m going to be contributing to the project in what little spare time I can as well. If you’re a coder too, you can fork crows on GitHub to contribute back to the project.

Check it out, and you can follow @crowsource on Twitter for updates, too.