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Sava Tatić, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Sourcefabric, talks to your host Vahe Arabian of State of Digital Publishing. Sava discusses the state of open-source tools for journalism. Sourcefabric is a non-profit organization that develops open-source software for independent news media organizations. Sava shares how their open-source ecosystem operates, how they are differentiated from others in their industry, and where most of the demand for their software is coming from?
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Episode Highlights:
- Sava Tatić discusses the background of himself and Sourcefabric.
- What is the difference between Sourcefabric and its competitors?
- Who was the first partner of Sourcefabric?
- How does Sourcefabric fund itself within the open-source ecosystem?
- Where does Sava see most of the demand coming from?
- How do they guild media organizations and publishers in the right direction and still cater to everyone else at the same time?
- How much time does his team spend maintaining and building on top of the products they already have as opposed to customer needs?
- When organizations come to him, how does he help them get the right brief to get their needs met?
- How can media organizations have a proper planning forecast to bring their needs to realization?
- What does their future look like in terms of software development?
- What advice would Sava give to his younger self?
3 Key Points:
- Sourcefabric’s first partner was Australian Associated Press, the main news agency that drives most of the news in Australia.
- Don’t be bound by the legacy tools that you have been using. Imagine the way that you would like to work.
- Sourcefabric doesn’t utilize a big marketing budget. They mostly reach people through word-of-mouth.
Tweetable Quotes:
- “Sourcefabric, itself, we like to call ourselves Europe’s largest developers for open-source news media, which is true, because the competition is not that fierce.” – Sava Tatić
- “We could easily develop on top of our tools a contributor handling system because we track all of the statistics we group internally in terms of production. We can marry that to output statistics.” – Sava Tatić
- “We believe that quality journalism is the lifeblood of a democratic society. Now we are trying to prove that open-source technology is the backbone for that kind of journalism” – Sava Tatić
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