Participata is a "Web 2.0" software licensing company with products that help people in niche communities find and interact with each other.
How We Got Started
Our roots are in the New Products division of The Bakersfield Californian, a newspaper in central California that has been independently owned for 140 years. Bakersfield is a city of 330,000 people and growing. While things may move a little slower in Bakersfield compared to larger American cities, technology has still caused fundamental changes in how people live their lives.
We have observed firsthand how less idle time and an explosion in media options -- the Web and mobile being just two examples -- were changing how people in Bakersfield were relating to media, and this was only going to accelerate over time. The newspaper, once the only definitive source of information in town, was becoming just one of many ways that people were receiving news and information.
Community to the Rescue!
Rather than wait idly as the world changed around us, we chose to follow the audience and create multiple products targeted to individuals and businesses whose needs were unmet by traditional media channels. Serving niche communities required a completely different approach that had interactivity and personal expression (persona) at its core. After exploring several technology options, we realized that nobody was doing what we knew we had to start doing now in order to be relevant in our community 30 years hence.
This set us on the path to build our own community publishing and social networking platform, which we call "Bakomatic" (pronounced bake-oh-matic). The first site to launch on Bakomatic was Bakotopia.com, a participatory web site for young adults in Bakersfield. Separate from the newspaper, Bakotopia has a distinctly underground flavor to its look and content.
Bakotopia was a recipient of the Newspaper Association of America's Digital Edge Award in 2006 for Most Innovative Visitor Participation.
The platform we developed allowed us to quickly and easily expand our offerings in Kern County, where we now have seven different sites at this time, each serving a different audience. Among them are Northwestvoice.com, the first print-online implementation of "Citizen Media" in the United States; and the registration system, user profiles and user blogs on Bakersfield.com. These products are also covered in more detail in Case Studies.
Bakomatic has proven itself to be an audience aggregation machine. After just 18 months, Bakomatic sites make up more than 30 percent of the total pageviews of all of The Bakersfield Californian's web properties.
In the summer of 2006, Bakomatic was given a Knight Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. Learn more about Bakotopia in the Case Studies section.
How It Can Help You
Realizing that this technology has great value for others in our industry and beyond, Participata was formed in 2006 as a vehicle to offer our platform to businesses wishing to add community publishing and social networking to their offerings. Our platform has been thoroughly tested and well received by the communities which it currently serves. We hope that others can benefit from the significant investment in time and money we have put into it, and that it will help them get a head-start in adapting to this brave new world.
Bakomatic is currently available as an Enterprise solution which must be installed and supported by your own technical staff. If you already have a staff that is knowledgeable about open-source platforms such as PHP and MySQL, you have your own Web servers and support, it's a perfect way for you to get a jumpstart on the future.
If you're looking for a complete end-to-end solution that includes hosting and customer service, we would be happy to refer you to others who may be able to help you out. However, we are not pursuing a hosted "ASP" solution at this time.
