Team members: Piotr Fedorczyk, Mark Boas, Laurian Gridinoc, Joanna Bogusz

Storycopter hopes to become a sophisticated set of tools to create, manage, and publish interactive documentaries on the Web. It enables journalists and storytellers to easily create, publish, and share media-rich interactive documentaries outside of the newsroom. It’s a free, open-source native app that allows you to build and manage cross-device and cross-browser responsive mini-websites that can be further forked and customised outside of the app.

The team worked under the assumption that organisations (newsrooms, NGOs, publishers) have too few in-house resources to develop sophisticated interactive documentaries. Those that do have the budget for it often rely on external software houses and creative agencies to produce such pieces, which extends the whole process. We want to provide storytellers with an easy-to-use WYSIWYG composer so they can focus on the content and worry less about the design and development aspects of creating idocs.

By launching the Storycopter app, we hope to help storytellers overcome the tech and design limitations they may face. In launching the idoc as a separate player – a stand-alone package – we want to enable publishers to make each story their own: customise its appearance, embed it easily, or entirely self-host it. By using web technologies, we want to make idocs widely available for a full range of platforms and devices. By completely open-sourcing the code, we want publishers to be able to integrate the tool within their workflow and possibly get involved in helping shape the product once it has passed the prototype phase. By releasing it for free, we want everyone to be able to create their own idocs.

The product is currently at the private pre-release prototype version stage and seeking to build up a community, secure further funding, and establish editorial partnerships.