Julia Hildebrand

Project Lead

“There is so much more potential for civic participation. Community-Journalism for me is a way, to unleash that potential and empower people to improve their own environment.”

Julia worked on community-engagement for the last 10 years. At Deutsche Welle she worked with more than 30 newsrooms on developing new social media strategies, guidelines and workflows for more user participation.

With the social startup ChangeX.org Julia developed community-software, that allows people to start their own local projects.

Julia has her roots in Duisburg, where she worked for the local newsroom of Rheinische Post. Today she is building the participation platform “You are Rheinhausen” there.

julia.hildebrand@beabee.io
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Twitter
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LinkedIn

Will Franklin

Lead Developer

“We need good quality local journalism, but too often technology is a barrier when it should be an enabler. With the right tools we can help local people come together and tell the stories that matter to their communities”

Will is a software developer who has worked at The Bristol Cable for 3 years, developing a keen insight into how technology can play a part in facilitating community journalism. He built the Cable’s membership system which they use to manage and engage more than 2,200 members.

Before that he worked at The Guardian, initially developing digital products such as their membership platform before moving into the newsroom to work with journalists to tell stories using visualisations and infographics.

will.franklin@beabee.io

Pasal Garber

Developer

„Our society and media consumption are changing rapidly due to technology. Free software and new ideas are needed to keep pace with these changes.”

Pascal studied media informatics in Wedel, started his own business during his studies and then worked as a freelance developer for several years. He has been working at beabee since November 2023.

pascal.garber@correctiv.org
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Github

Ana Isabel Carvalho

UX/Design/Frontend

“Tools and their interfaces can aid or hinder participation. A tool that is able to thoughtfully mediate that process would free up mental and practical resources in local newsrooms to focus on actual stories and meaningful community interactions.”

With a background in design Ana specialized in interface and UX, focusing on interactions between the open web, public data and design research.

She works in information design, building data visualizations and interactive web interfaces as part of the J++ international data journalism agency.

Twitter

Ricardo Lafuente

UX/Design/Frontend

“We’ve always been enthusiastic about new tactics to bring journalists and audiences closer to each other. Going beyond the figure of the passive paying customer is essential, but the challenge is to come up with the right tools to make that happen.”

Ricardo is a designer and coder focused on the crossings between design, technology, data and free/open culture.

His interest in applying software design methodologies and data architecture principles to information and interface design underlies his practice at the J++ data journalism agency, where he works as editor and data architect.

Twitter

Tobias Hauswurz

Community-Manager

“Community-Journalism really is a chance for local newsrooms. Above all, they can refocus on what once was their biggest strength: Being close to the people.”

Tobias learned local journalism from scratch. First when he studied journalism at Westfälischen Hochschule in Gelsenkirchen and later as a trainee at a local radio station.

For the last five Tobias worked as a journalist for various local radio stations and other media in the Ruhr region.

tobias.hauswurz@beabee.io

Our network

beabee is a joint project of journalism organisations from Europe with a shared mission: to make community centred journalism a success.