daniel sinker

My favorite moments in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are are not the beautiful scenes of the wild rumpus, so vivid and alive. Instead, I’ve always been partial to the quiet moments at the start of the book, where Max’s room slowly transforms into the jungle and endless sea that leads him to the land of the monsters.

That image above, of Max’s bedroom, is the one that I immediately thought about this morning, when I learned of Sendak’s passing. Your most personal and private space as a child—turning into a place of endless wonder, challenges, fears, and hopes. That right there, is everything.

It was a similar image, but one far more personal, that I thought of when I found out about the Beastie Boy’s Adam Yauch’s untimely death this weekend from cancer: that of a boy discovering an entirely new world in a bedroom that seemed to disappear into somewhere else entirely.

You see, I kept a copy of the cassette of License to Ill hidden in my sock drawer. It had been banned in my house—this was the height of the PMRC hysteria, and I think Newsweek had written a story about the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy (I’d fall hard for them a few years later), and it was announced that I could NOT buy their album.

So, of course, I did (hi mom), and I’d listen to it every day on my cassette boombox, volume turned down to almost nothing, my ear pressed against the speaker, mouthing the lyrics as my bedroom turned into a jungle and a sea and a land full of monsters and I was their king.

As the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews program reaches its 2012 stride, it’s time to grow the team to help achieve the scale we’re looking for. So we’re hiring a Community Manager.

The entire job listing is here on the Mozilla Jobvite page, but I wanted to give a little background on the person we’re looking for that doesn’t break down as easily into bullet points.

At its core, the OpenNews program is about community: specifically around growing and strengthening the community of people making code for journalism. That’s what our fellowship program is about: sending individuals into newsrooms for ten months to create kick-ass journalism code. That’s what our hackdays are about: building momentum around code through events. That’s what our upcoming website Source is about: creating a central place to learn about the code being made and the motivations behind it. All of these pieces (with more to come soon) add up to helping foster a vibrant, growing community. But that’s a big goal, and it’s not going to happen without some help.

The Community Manager is what it says on the box: a person who can help to manage, foster, and grow the community around open-source code in journalism. It’s a unique person: Someone who’s outgoing, both in the world and online; someone who’s familiar with journalism, sure, but even more so someone who understands open-source communities and can communicate effectively with them; someone who’s well organized, and able to keep an eye on a lot of different, disparate balls at once; and finally, someone who’s able to collaborate effectively and efficiently.

Maybe you’re that person? If so, you should totally apply. We’re trying to fill this position as soon as possible, so no better time to get your application in than right now.

Oh, and you don’t have to move: we love remote workers.

photo by Aspiration Tech

There’s no better example of the global scale of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project than the dualing hack days we sponsored this weekend, in New York City and Buenos Aires.

In New York, we gave money for travel scholarships to bring top-notch developers to town to take part in the Wall Street Journal’s Data Transparency Weekend, which brought over 100 developers and privacy experts to town to create tools to “help people see and control their personal data online.” The hackathon grew out of the Wall Street Journal’s excellent ongoing series that looks at how your online footprint is being used by corporations.

The three-day event (documented extensively here, here, and here) resulted in code for almost 30 different projects with winners in “Scanning,” “Education,” and “Control” tracks.

photo from Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires

Five-thousand miles to the south, we sponsored the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires ShowTimeLine Hackathon, which brought 45 developers together to work on making new time-line based visualization tools. The OpenNews sponsorship went to hosting the hack day, as well as a small amount of seed money to keep projects going afterwards.

The team of developers and journalists in Buenos Aires took a series of different approaches to displaying data over time, from automatic data-and-date extraction from documents to translating preexisting timeline libraries into Spanish, and more.

These are exactly the kind of topic-driven code-based events that we’re looking to help sponsor at OpenNews. If you’ve got an idea brewing for a journalism hack day, we’d love to hear about it. Let’s work together to make this year the year of journalism code.

I was lucky enough to interview him a few times, including one that appears in the Punk Planet book. There’s an exchange in that interview that, as I get older, I think about often:

I was cleaning my room once and I was listening to Led Zeppelin. Robert Plant was going on and on about all of these seemingly adult kind of things and I realized he was eighteen when he did that record—I was probably twenty-nine years old at the time—and I just thought, “Oh my god, I’m twenty-nine years old and I never became an adult.” Here’s Robert Plant and he’s eighteen and he’s singing about having his own apartment and running around town. To me, he seemed so adult. I called my dad and I said, “Dad, I’m kinda freaking out over here. I’m twenty-nine years old and I’m starting to realize that I’m a man, but I never made that transition.” And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you two things. First off, I see you as a man, as an adult man. You’re not a kid. And the second thing is that I can’t see myself as a man.” He was sixty at the time and he hadn’t come to terms with it either. It was nice and terrible at the same time to realize that that transition is a difficult one.

Happy Birthday, Ian.

The above photo of Ian and his son, Carmine, is (cc) Nick Helderman

@MayorEmanuel on #NATOSummit: “We are fighting below our weight in tourism… Conferences like this are economic engines.”

— WBEZ (@WBEZ) March 12, 2012

@WBEZ uh… Check your twitter ID

— dansinker (@dansinker) March 12, 2012

@WBEZ @dansinker These things happen.

— ChicagoMayorsOffice (@ChicagosMayor) March 12, 2012