| Mission Statement : |
Media Develoment Loan Fund (MDLF) launched the Campware initiative in March 2001 as a platform for open source solutions for independent news media organizations in emerging democracies. The initative is coordinated by MDLF's new-media arm, the Center for Advanced Media--Prague (CAMP). Campware grew out organically from the need of MDLF's CAMP to provide cost-effective, open solutions for a number of new-media projects it was pursuing. While searching for such solutions (from 1999 onwards), CAMP realized that most available software solutions for print and radio catered to commercial players in the West and were thus beyond the financial reach of independent media in emerging democracies. At the same time, open source software tended to cater to the geek/webmaster community and as such was not tremendously suitable for journalists. Mulitlinguality or Unicode-support were just an occasional afterthought. CAMP's main idea was that software developed and distributed under the Campware initiative should be user-centric, i.e. built explicitly for the end user. Our first project, Campsite, first released in March 2001, embodied such ideals. For example, we called things the way they are called: our article was an "article," not an "asset"; our images were called images not "objects"; Campsite's user interface was automatically customized to each user based on his rights, so there were almost no "You don't have the right to do this, please contact your administrator" messages. And all of this the end user could read in her very own language. Campware continues to adhere to the logic of short learning curves and non-mystifying interfaces in all its projects, from the Cream customer relationship management software for newspapers, to the emerging Campcaster radio automation solution. |
