tommeagher
commented
8 months ago Hi everyone. I wanted to circle back to this and thank everyone for sharing their needs and impressions with us. We heard from a good number of Klaxon users, and spoke with colleagues at other news organizations and nonprofit outfits who have built and supported open source software. All of those discussions were invaluable for us as we considered where Klaxon should go next. The biggest takeaway for us was that the vast majority of our users were in small organizations and didn't really need or want to run their own servers. That, coupled with changes to Heroku and Sendgrid's services that made our original free-and-easy-to-setup model untenable, convinced us another solution would be helpful, particularly for folks who want to try Klaxon for the first time. We were lucky enough to have some great conversations with the folks at Muckrock who were interested in building Klaxon's functionality into the existing DocumentCloud platform. We're excited that came to fruition. You can read all about it in our announcement here. The upshot is that for most users, Klaxon Cloud will be the best solution, and eliminate the headaches of dealing with Sendgrid or updating software. And it remains free! For everyone else who wants to continue to use original Klaxon, it remains here, free and open source. We encourage you to use it and to fork it to customize it for your organization's needs (Docker, etc). Thanks again, everyone, for answering our call here. We look forward to hearing more from you about how you use Klaxon and Klaxon Cloud in the future.
Hello fellow Klaxon users, It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us, in part because our newsroom has been growing, keeping us busier than ever with our day jobs. But we’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the future of Klaxon. (tl;dr - Help us by taking this quick survey on how you use Klaxon)
Some of the core services Klaxon was built upon — primarily Sendgrid and Heroku — have undertaken significant changes. It makes us wonder what the best path forward is for Klaxon and whether there is still a need for it. To really determine that, we need to hear from as many Klaxon users and administrators as we can. We want our plans to be informed by your needs and experiences. What is working for you, and what could be better? Are you still using Klaxon, or have you found other services that fill that need for you?
To try to learn more about how people are using Klaxon today, we’re taking two steps. We’re holding an open office hour to meet with and talk to Klaxon users, and we’re asking everyone who has used Klaxon to fill out a very short survey.
Our office hours will be at 1 pm Eastern on Friday, Oct. 28 on Zoom. (Meeting ID: 751 3871 8970. Passcode: 9aF7gt) If you aren't able to join at that time and would like to talk, email me or DM me on Twitter and we'll find another time to chat.
And please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey and to share the link with friends or colleagues who’ve used Klaxon in the past.
We are eager to hear more from all of you about what you’re doing with Klaxon these days. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.
Best, Tom and Gabe and Ryan at The Marshall Project