OpenBlock is a web application that lets users browse and search their local area for hyperlocal news, to see what is happening close to home. It can run as a public news site or as a service that supplies content to another website.
Brief overview: concepts and terminology
OpenBlock is a hyperlocal news platform. At its essence it is a web application and web service that stores two kinds of information:
- Local news. What is happening nearby? This can be original content or news aggregated from sources on the web.
- Local geographic data. Which places matter? Neighborhoods, ZIP codes, school districts, and police precincts are examples.
OpenBlock lets you explore that data by geographic area, by type of news, by categories that fit the news you have, by text search, or by any combination of those choices.
News is stored as NewsItems. A NewsItem is something that happened at one time and one place. Each item stores a timestamp, a geographic point, a title, a description, and a few other generic fields.
Each NewsItem also has a type, called its Schema. Schemas classify NewsItems and allow them to carry extra searchable, type specific data.
For example, an OpenBlock site might publish police reports and restaurant inspections. One schema represents police reports and stores information about the kinds of crime involved. A second schema represents inspections and records whether a restaurant passed, which violations were observed, and other details. A site administrator can configure this without writing code.
Readers can then browse only police reports, only restaurant inspections, only failed inspections, or crimes of a certain type in a certain place during a certain period.
History
OpenBlock began life as the open source code released by EveryBlock in June 2009. Originally created by Adrian Holovaty and the EveryBlock team, it was rebranded OpenBlock to avoid trademark infringement and is now developed as an open source project under the GNU General Public License.
Funding for the initial creation of EveryBlock and for ongoing OpenBlock development was provided by the Knight Foundation. The project is developed by OpenPlans.
Copyright and license
OpenBlock code is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. A few modules were borrowed from other packages under other free software licenses, such as Modified BSD style licenses, and are identified as such in the source code.
This documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons BY SA 3.0 license.
For developers
OpenBlock is a Django application, so familiarity with the Django web framework is strongly recommended. The best places to learn are the official Django documentation and the free Django Book.
Before diving in, spend some time browsing a working OpenBlock site to get a feel for what the software does. For conceptual background on the data storage model, start with ebpub.