daniel sinker • Journalism at the Mozilla Festival: Saturday

Journalism at the Mozilla Festival: Saturday

Hello from London, and the Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom, and the Web! After yesterday’s kickoff, and the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows, we’re settling in for the first full day of the Mozilla Festival. It’s a packed schedule, and so I thought I’d take a moment and highlight some of the journalism-related design challenges, learning labs, and fireside chats happening today.

Saturday Morning

Design Challenges

Touch the News is a six-hour challenge that looks at the possibilities of HTML5 to create a media-rich touch-based interface for news, run in partnership with our friends at the Boston Globe. This morning focuses around designing the UI.

Data Journalism Handbook is a Festival-spanning effort to create a guide to data journalism basics. This morning session kicks off a weekend-long effort.

Learning Labs

Hyperaudio: Text Edit Your Audio is a peek into Knight-Mozilla Fellow’s Hyperaudio Pad software and is being run in partnership with our friends at the BBC.

Fireside Chats

There are two incredible Fireside chats this morning, both of which tee up a larger design challenge this afternoon. First, Alastair Dant from the Guardian talks about the potential and challenges in “Timeline Journalism.” He’s followed in the second slot of the morning by Bilal Randeree from Al Jazeera who is discussing Al Jazeera’s approach to covering the Arab Spring.

Lunch includes a special Discussion with myself and Michael Maness, VP of Journalism for the Knight Foundation, where we’ll be talking about the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, the future of the Knight News Challenge, opportunities around open innovation in news, and much more.

Saturday Afternoon

Design Challenges

Flow Media: Real Time Reporting this design challenge (which I’m helping to run along with Alastair from the Guardian and Bilal from Al Jazeera) takes a deep dive into the possibilities around real-time information streams and the myriad of ways they can be harnessed for journalism.

Hyperaudio: Text Editor Your Audio Growing out of the morning’s learning lab, Mark Boas’s innovative Hyperaudio project goes into a deep-dive of hacking.

Touch The News continues in the afternoon with the focus on hacking and making HTML5 touched-based interfaces.

Learning Labs

Refine, Reuse, Request Data with ScraperWiki this learning lab teaches attendees how to make open-data scrapers using the amazing ScraperWiki software.

There are, of course, a million other incredible things happening at the Festival. If you’re here, have a great time. If you’re not, be very jealous.