My virtual friend, Cynthia Kurtz (about whom I’ve blogged here and here and who will be the subject of a Q&A in December), is heading a team that prepared a grant application directed at the Knight News Challenge for a project to develop open-source software to support community storytelling. Says Cynthia: “It has been shaping up into a really exciting project with the potential to help change the world with storytelling, and we’ve got a great group of people involved in supporting it.”

Apparently the grant-application process, which ends Nov. 1, is open to the public for reviewing, and public rating is important. Cynthia encourages those interested in seeing this software developed to add a rating by going here.

Here’s a little more about the software:

We are building a free and open source software package called Rakontu (“tell a story” in Esperanto) to help communities share and work with raw stories of personal experience for mutual understanding, conflict resolution and decision support. …

Rakontu will help communities tell, annotate and connect stories; discover insight-creating patterns in them; and use stories to resolve conflicts and make decisions together. This degree of support is only available today through the help of experienced narrative practitioners. Rakontu will embody understandings about narrative in communities so that people will not have to know anything about narrative to benefit from its use. Some possible outcomes are better understandings of opposing perspectives, a greater diversity of voices being heard, better consensus on tough choices, more problems dealt with before they get worse, safer streets, fewer footholds for extremism and paranoia, and greater common strength in times of crisis.

Stories told in natural conversation are richly associated with socially relevant context, organized in multiple meaningful ways, and linked with other stories to form webs of resonant meaning. But stories on the web today are devoid of context, poorly organized, and isolated. Rakontu will help people preserve context and organize and link stories in meaningful ways.

Rakontu will help communities tell, annotate and connect stories; discover insight-creating patterns in them; and use stories to resolve conflicts and make decisions together. … Rakontu will embody understandings about narrative in communities so that people will not have to know anything about narrative to benefit from its use. Some possible outcomes are better understandings of opposing perspectives, a greater diversity of voices being heard, better consensus on tough choices, more problems dealt with before they get worse, safer streets, fewer footholds for extremism and paranoia, and greater common strength in times of crisis.