Dalian is not the easiest place to stay on top of news. National news, sure, that’s everywhere, but local news? Not so much, at least not in English. About six months ago, a few of us here started working to fix that.

The result thus far is here: DalianDalian.com. Last week I applied for a Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant to fund the project, explaining it this way:

DalianDalian.com is a hyperlocal, community-driven site that will provide news, information and ways to connect for people living in Dalian, China. The city is home to six million people and a growing foreign population, divided geographically and linguistically among an urban center, rural suburbs and special districts. DalianDalian will use geographical search and integrated social networking to build links within and among this city’s disparate communities.

China’s second-tier cities are experiencing a boom in foreign investment and becoming more attractive to expatriate communities. For newcomers, the first year is often trial and error, full of horror stories of people living on instant noodles because they can’t find decent restaurants, of missed opportunities, of wasted time and money. When people arrive, there is no easily accessible, frequently updated source of information about the city.

Much of what can be found is scattered among blogs and forums, passed haphazardly by word of mouth, or in Chinese. Large media organizations rarely noticed Dalian until a few weeks ago, when the city hosted the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos” conference, and those that did come have since disappeared. But Dalian is being discovered: Intel is moving in, and the city is already renowned as an outsourcing hub, hosting IBM, Dell, HP and local firms. There is a growing need for people here learn about their community, to connect, to find out what is going on. Nothing currently available fulfills that need.

The site is being built in Drupal and will feature databases, maps, forums, and wikis. It will host and aggregate local blogs, sharing ad revenue with contributors to give everyone who joins a stake in the site. It will integrate existing web2.0 applications to build on and localize those social networks. Wherever possible, information will be posted in English and Chinese.

Eventually, we believe this model of an online, multilingual, interactive site could be adapted to China’s other fast growing second- and third-tier cities.

Unfortunately, the Knight Foundation wasn’t as enthused about the project as the rest of us are. The upshot is that we open-source software and content aggregation technology have reached a point where it’s possible to build quite a bit with little more than knowhow and spare time (working on getting more of both). Everyone doing this is a volunteer, each with our own reasons, each bringing a different skill set. It’s a fun project, and we’re trying to keep it that way.

The crew so far: Alex of China Webmasters, Rick of Panda Passport, Patrick of Lingua Nostra.

Wanna join the party?

• Sign up as a member
• Start posting your own blog, events, listings to your favorite restaurants, whatever you like and think other Dalian folks should know about
• Jump in the forum
• Tag your Flickr photos “daliandalian” to send them to the site. (Eventually, this mechanism will change, but for now, just tag them and your set.)

Questions? Contact me (eyeseast at gmail.com) or one of the other guys listed above and we’ll help out. Promise.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 9:23 am and is filed under projects, the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.