
Adrian Holovaty is a Web developer in Chicago, and he runs a site called
EveryBlock. He's co-creator and co-Benevolent Dictator for Life of the
Django Web framework for the Python programming language. Some Chicago folks might know him for his old (as in, May 2005) crime site,
chicagocrime.org, which was one of the first Google Maps mashups.
On a more personal level, He's a quasi-professional musician, in that He makes money playing gigs in Chicago, and
posts YouTube videos from time to time. More stuff about him, including a blog, is at
holovaty.com.
Knowist: Tell me a little bit about your work.Holovaty: EveryBlock is a
very, very granular local news site. We show you what's happening,
literally, right around your block. That includes stuff like newspaper
articles that mentioned something in your neighborhood, crime reports,
restaurant inspections, Flickr photos, movie filmings and all sorts of
other information, filtered by city block and updated daily. You can
sign up for e-mail alerts or RSS feeds to get notified whenever things
happen in your neighborhood, or you can just browse the wealth of
information on our site (warning: it can be addictive!). We're based
here in Chicago and cover 11 cities.
Some folks in the news industry have considered us to be the
"future of news," which I think is pushing it, but that demonstrates
the level of interest in our project.
Knowist: Everyblock has had a different funding path than most businesses. What are the ramifications of grants vs institutional for-profit funding?Holovaty: I was lucky enough to get a two-year grant from the
Knight Foundation thanks to a contest they held, called the
Knight News Challenge.
It's different from your standard VC funding in that we retain all the
equity of the company but we have a specific mission to fulfill under
the terms of the grant: namely, we have to open-source the code that
powers our site, so that other people can take it and use it to make
similar sites in their own cities. We are creating the site and code as
a public service.
Knowist: Most businesses have a very clear (and legally binding) responsibility to shareholders. What's your take on that vs a responsibility to the community? To Employees?Holovaty: First,
a preface: My background is in journalism. Before EveryBlock, I worked
as a Web developer at three mainstream newspapers (the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, the Lawrence Journal-World, and the Washington
Post), and I got an undergraduate degree in journalism. With that
background, I've always been most comfortable serving the public, as
opposed to being a cold capitalist. It sounds cheesy, but there's this
feeling of a "higher calling" when you're working as a journalist --
like you're going to change the world and do public good.
So that's the context for EveryBlock. We're a journalism
organization dedicated to providing a public service. Of course, it'd
be nice to be able to pay our rents, buy groceries and keep the servers
running, so we're now turning our attention to figuring out how to keep
our project sustainable as a business. Craigslist is very much a model
for us -- technically for-profit, but run like a non-profit.