Photo by Flickr user Marc Wathieu. 

The Coral Project, a collaboration by Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post, is creating an online community platform where readers can participate in conversations about stories and topical issues. Knight Foundation supported this project in June 2014.

The Coral Project is building an open-source content and commenting platform. It will allow audiences to more deeply engage with media coverage and help news organizations everywhere better manage user comments and contributions.

The project was announced in June 2014. It is being created by a new group made up of staff from Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Since the announcement, exciting things have been happening at The Coral Project (now tweeting @coralproject), and we thought you should know about them.

> Introducing our Project Lead: Andrew Losowsky

We’re excited today to announce our first dedicated Coral Project hire, Andrew Losowsky. Andrew ensures that everything we make is focused on the needs of publishers and audiences. He will be working closely with our development team to maintain the vision and the integrity of the project.

We have to do more than build a better comment box. The Coral Project needs to be free to think big, to experiment, and to learn as we go. Andrew’s previous work shows that he isn’t afraid of ambition and innovation.

Andrew’s background is in both editorial and product. He’s worked on new content and data visualization projects at News Corp, developed journalism and strategy at The Huffington Post, and in 2013 was awarded a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. He has written for The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times of London among many other publications. For four years, he was Editorial Director of le cool, a publishing start up based in Barcelona, Spain, and has written and edited books on editorial design, independent magazines, infographics, and doorbells.

He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Journalism+Design program at The New School in New York City, where he teaches Stealth Journalism.

You can email him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter.

> We’re hiring.

The Coral Project seeks creative people to reinvent how we engage on the internet. Want to join us? Here are some roles we’ve got open:

• Lead Engineer: Help shape what we build and guide our technology team.
• UX Strategist: Create the look and feel of tools for digital community.
• Developers: Build this thing. We’re still figuring out exactly which roles we need to fill, but if you’re interested in joining us, drop us a line here and tell us what you’d bring to the table.

We are dedicated to hiring a culturally diverse and pluralistic team. We strongly encourage applications from women, minorities, individuals with disabilities, and covered veterans, including from people with non-traditional backgrounds.

> We’re researching.

Tara Adiseshan and Francis Tseng, our Knight-Mozilla Fellows, joined us in March. They’re investigating topics including contribution quality and the impact of emotion on conversation.

You can follow Francis and Tara on Twitter, and learn more about them and the rest of the year’s Knight-Mozilla Fellows here.

> We’re on the road.

In the coming months, you can catch the Coral team at several events including Digital Journalism World in Singapore; the WAN-IFRA World Editors Forum in Washington, D.C.; Reporter-Workshop in Hamburg, Germany, and SRCCON in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We talked about comments and community at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, earlier this month.

Keep up with our travels by following Greg Barber on Twitter or emailing him at [email protected]. If there is an event that you’d like us to attend, please let Greg know.

> We want to hear from you.

Conversations with publishers, contributors, researchers, and others are crucial to the success of the Coral Project. We’ll be making some of these conversations public as we move forward. We’d love for you to be involved.

Please use our form or tweet at us and tell us what digital community means to you, what problems you’ve faced in online interactions, what your favorite online interactions have been, and how you think digital communities should look and function.

We want to reimagine engagement between publishers and their audience.

More soon.