daniel sinker

Work at OpenNews: We're Hiring a Community Manager

Mon, 07 May 2012 09:23:00 -0700

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.

Fantastic talk by the LA Times’ Ben Welsh about...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:07:08 -0700

Fantastic talk by the LA Times’ Ben Welsh about algorithms, reporting, and people.

OpenNews: A Weekend of Hacking Journalism

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:02:00 -0700

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.

It’s only the start of April, and already it’s been...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 08:05:37 -0700

It’s only the start of April, and already it’s been a big year for the Knight-Mozilla Partnership: We’ve placed four fellows at the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, and Al Jazeera (a fifth fellow, at the Boston Globe, will be starting a little later this spring). We’ve renamed and refocused the Partnership under the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews name. We’ve begun sponsoring hack days around the world (in fact, two are coming up this weekend!). And we’ve started having bi-weekly open conference calls with the larger journo-code community (one is happening this Wednesday). And we’re only getting started—there is a ton more to announce, starting today with the Fellowship Application.

Just a few weeks ago, we announced the addition of four new news partners for the 2012/13 Fellowship cycle. With that, we’ve now expanded our partners to eight: The New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, Spiegel Online, the Boston Globe, ProPublica, and La Nación.

And today, as the video above explains, we’re announcing the opening of the window to apply to become one of our eight 2012/13 Knight-Mozilla Fellows. Starting today, April 9, and going until August 11, you can fill out the first round application. Borrowing from friends at the Knight News Challenge and Code for America, it’s designed to be quick to fill out, but also give us a broader sense of both your talents and your ideas.

If you’re a developer or technologist interested in helping to change the way people learn about and engage with the world around them, this is an incredible opportunity. There’s a ton more detail in the fellowships section of the entirely revamped OpenNews site, so give a gander over there and then apply today!

OpenNews: Big News in Austin!

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:12:00 -0800

This blog is being posted while I am in the air, en route to Austin Texas for SXSW Interactive. I have a bag full of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews pins (that’s them looking beautiful above), a giant list of people to meet, and some seriously exciting news to announce.

First off, there’s an OpenNews Panel at SXSW this year, on Sunday March 11 at 3:30pm: Open Web, Open News: Developers & Reporters Remix. Join myself, Andrew Leimdorfer from the BBC, Mohamed Nanabhay from Al Jazeera English, and Emily Bell from Columbia University, as we talk about the emerging role of the news developer and the growing importance of the open web in journalism’s evolution.

Next, Mozilla is co-hosting a party with the Knight Foundation and the MIT Media Lab on Saturday night. Unfortunately, the event’s already at capacity, but if you’re already coming, be sure to say hello!

Finally (and the real point of this post), Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is using SXSW to announce that we’re adding four new news partners to the 2012/13 Knight-Mozilla Fellowships. This project has always been ambitious in scope and global in scale, and this year’s news partners fit the bill:

The New York Times, in New York.
ProPublica, also in New York.
Spiegel Online, in Hamburg, Germany.
La Nación, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Our four new News Partners will also be joined by returning partners from the 2011/12 cycle that is still ongoing, bringing our total number of Knight-Mozilla Fellows to eight for 2012/13.

The Knight-Mozilla Fellowships embed developers and technologists in newsrooms for ten months to do open-source development around new and innovative solutions, tools, and ideas for news. The application process to become a 2012/13 Knight-Mozilla Fellow will go live on April 9. Sign up now to get an announcement when it’s up.

There are so many other incredible things happening down in Austin, it’s impossible to contain it all in a single post. If you’re down in Austin and looking for great panels, Poynter did a great roundup of 25 panels geared towards journalists. And if you’re looking for something incredible to eat, you can’t miss with the Korean Taco Truck.

Oh, and if you are in Austin, don’t forget to pick up a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews pin from me—I’ve got tons!

NICAR 12 Brings the Love--and the Code

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:11:00 -0800

I spent a rapid-fire 23 hours in St. Louis this weekend at the NICAR 12 conference. For those that don’t know, NICAR stands for “National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting,” and, as the slightly-antiquated name might suggest, was founded long before the commercial internet, back in 1989. Traditionally, the organization (which is run by IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors), has been about helping reporters to use computers to comb through data, but over the years, it has become the defacto organization and conference for news apps developers. And this year, it felt like the journo-coders in attendance took to it to another level.

There was an incredible amount of information thrown around at NICAR 12 and Chrys Wu from Hacks/Hackers did an incredible job capturing much of it. I just want to write about a few projects that really stood out as exemplifying some of the best that the developer community within journalism can do.

PANDA

The PANDA project officially launched into Beta in St. Louis, and threw a “provisioning party” to help people get their data spelunking appliance up and running. The tool, which allows for collaborative searching and sharing of data, offers to unlock data across a newsroom, but has a ton of applicability among anyone that has a bunch of data that they want to be able to search across. Built by Christopher Groskopf, Brian Boyer (who donned a panda suit for the occasion), Joe Germuska, and Ryan Pitts, they’re looking for beta testers and collaborators, so check out the demo or grab PANDA on GitHub now.

Overview

For sheer blow-my-mind value, it didn’t get bigger than Overview, which makes the process of digging through giant piles of documents significantly easier. Creator Jonathan Stray showed Overview off throughout the conference and helped walk people through the install process to get them up and running. The project, which is super powerful, is still in early stages—Stray calls it a prototype—but he’s already used it to comb through 4500 pages of reports filed by US security contractors in Iraq. As it gets built out, it’s going to be an amazing tool for many. Stray even offers a great step-by-step for installing Overview on your machine.

Tabletop.js

Tabletop.js is one of those things that you can’t quite believe doesn’t already exist. It’s a simple tool that allows you to painlessly use a public Google Spreadsheet as the backend for web content. I spent the train ride home from St. Louis playing with it, and it does exactly what it promises on the box. It’s such a simple tool, but it has all kinds of powerful possibilities. It was built by Jonathan Soma at Balance Media with guidance by John Keefe of WNYC. Github’s got the goods.

Django Bakery

The LA Times Datadesk team gave a presentation about why turn many of their Django applications into flat HTML files before deployment. By not relying on the server to generate pages that may not need to be dynamically generated for every user, the Datadesk team is able to save a ton of headaches (not to mention money) serving up all sorts of webapps as straightforward HTML pages. Django-Bakery, their code for making this happen, is now up on GitHub.

Node Web Scraping

I missed this talk, but when I asked on Twitter for recommendations of great things from NICAR, Al Shaw’s talk on using Node.js for scraping web pages got the most recommendations. And for good reason, his straightforward presentation that steps through the process, makes it look like a data scraper’s dream come true.

Campaign Finance API

Finally, it ended up shipping a couple days after NICAR wrapped up, but it’s worth pointing out the amazing work by both Derek Willis at the New York Times and the team at ProPublica in bringing the NYT Campaign Finance API up to near-real-time speed. This kind of work is vital this election season, and it’s truly inspiring to see collaboration between two incredible news orgs. The full documentation of the API is on the NYT Developer Network.

It’s not even March yet and the amount of awesome coming out of the journalism code community is already overwhelming. Let’s keep it going.

OpenNews: We Want to Hack With You

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:42:00 -0800

Two weeks ago, I announced the rebranding and retooling of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project. Now it’s time to start delving a little deeper into some of the aspects of the project that need you to reach their full potential.

So let’s talk about OpenNews Hack Days.

Last fall, when writing about the need for hackdays in the journalism community , I wrote about some of the news hackdays that happened in 2011 and added, “I want to see more—many more.”

Well, “many more” is now a mandate in the OpenNews project. We have plans (and budget) to help sponsor, organize, or produce journalism-associated hackdays in a major way this year. We’re shooting for 15-20, but may end up able to do more. That’s a ton of hackdays. Clearly, we’re not hosting all those ourselves. Our plan is the opposite, in fact: we want to help you with your hackdays. What’s in it for us? It’s pretty simple:

We want to get more developers building around journalistic problemsets, so there needs to be a journalistic frame to your hackday. That doesn’t mean “hack the news”—a frame that’s far too generic—it means “build geolocational tools for information gathering.”
We want tangible outcomes—things should come out of this that can be shared, distributed, forked, and maybe even launched.
We’d like you to keep track of how many people were there, and have a way of getting back in touch with them.
We’re dying to hear what happened, so we’ll want a blog post that documents the day and links to the code that was made. We’d love for you to join us on the Mozilla Webmaker community call as well to talk about the day.
And, obviously, we get to get our name in as a sponsor.

That’s not much. In fact, it’s designed to be as straightforward as possible: you want to hack, we want to help.

Here’s a great example of how this flows:

This weekend in Chicago, the Code for America fellows will host the Chicago Civic IdeaHack a hack day dedicated to develop tools for accessing civic data. The CfA fellows that are working with the City of Chicago this year organized the hackday, but needed help covering the costs associated with the day. Enter OpenNews: There’s tons of overlap between the civic data and journo-hacker community. In reality, they are two sides of the same coin. Getting developers interesting in working with civic datasets and building tools that help inform a community is, at its essence, getting them interested in journalism. The journalistic frame was there, so we reached out and offered to cover the costs for the day. And, boom, a better hack day was had for everyone.

We want to do this again and again and again this year. Each one will be different; each one will be awesome.

We’ve been talking with people from Hacks/Hackers, from various news organizations, from universities, and others about helping out on hackdays. But, we also want to hear from you. Really. We’ve set up a form so you can let us know what you’re thinking and we can talk about how we can most effectively help. Maybe you’ve already got something in the works, but you want to have a two-day hackfest instead of one. Maybe you’ve got everything lined up, but you want to offer travel grants to your event. Maybe you need help getting organized. Maybe you want to bring us in to do something from scratch. There are any number of variations on how this can work—the key element is that it brings awesome hacking into the journalism community.

That’s the best thing about our hackday plan is that it’s scalable: we want to work with you the way you want to work with us. So let’s do this.

PS. If you’re going to be at the NICAR conference in St. Louis this weekend, I’ll be hosting a Q&A session about the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project on Saturday morning. Come and let’s talk about hackdays, fellowships, deploying code in the newsroom and more.

The Knight-Mozilla Partnership Evolves

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:55:00 -0800

Change is awesome—it’s a necessary component to anything remaining vital and a required ingredient to facilitate organic growth. And so it’s with real excitement that today I’m announcing changes to the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership.

Before we get to the changes, some quick background: Conversations around the original Partnership began in 2010, with the program launching at the start of 2011. That means that the program design, by necessity, reflected 2010’s problem-sets. Two years is an eternity on the internet—it was time to rethink and retool for today.

The community around code in journalism is vastly different today than in 2010: There are a number of app teams in some of the world’s best news organizations that embrace the “show your work” philosophy of open-source; organizations like Hacks/Hackers, NICAR, the Online News Association, and others are embracing the idea of hackfests and code-driven collaboration; and independent developers are starting to become interested in hacking journalism in earnest. These are awesome developments—this community is vital and growing.

The changes to the Knight-Mozilla Partnership for 2012 engage this larger community in meaningful ways:

We’re helping to sponsor and organize more than a dozen hackdays around the world this year. Hackdays are one of the best ways to get developers from all over to experiment with the idea of coding for journalism, and a great way to get some open-source code back into the community.
We’ll be increasing the opportunities for online learning that address the needs of the high-end developers we want to get interested in journalism, as well as a separate track for journalists who want to start becoming webmakers.
We’re also developing a stand-alone site, Source, dedicated to shining a spotlight on the vital work going on in the journalism code community through case studies, walkthroughs, tutorials, code snippets, and much more.
Of course, the biggest element of the Partnership, our Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, stays a vital center to the program. And in 2012 it grows—from five year-long fellowships to eight. There are some other changes in store for the Fellowships as well—that’ll be a topic for a blog post of its own soon.

These aren’t small changes—they alter what we’re doing in a lot of exciting ways. In fact, they’re big enough that we decided a new name and identity was in order. So the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, also known as MoJo, is no longer—welcome to Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. A new year starts right now.

Hacker-Journalism 2011: A year of "show your work"

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:36:00 -0800

It has been exciting to be both a witness to and a participant in the growing movement towards open web development in journalism. 2011 is one of those years that it’s amazing to sit back, here on one of its last days, and look back at just how much has been accomplished.

There was incredible work happening among news apps teams and individual developers around the internet that it’s impossible to capture it all here. Here are a few standouts from both myself and from a callout I put on Twitter:

The Guardian did unbelievable work sifting through 2.6 million London Riot-related tweets to create both compelling reporting and some jaw-dropping big-data visualizations.
My hometown pride, the Chicago Tribune News Apps team, did incredible work on maps this year. Team member emeritus Christopher Groskopf put it well when he said “I find it hard to talk about the last year without talking about maps. This was the year cartography arrived on the internet.” Among all the great tools they released, to me most notable is the team’s incredible six-part tutorial for rolling your own—the kind of hyper-useful knowledge sharing that this team really excels in.
The Boston Globe released their beautiful HTML5-native BostonGlobe.com webapp, a gorgeous example of responsive web design (load up their page and resize your browser screen to see it in action). My favorite part though: to ensure that their design worked seamlessly on multiple devices, the team developed an amazing tool called Shim that syncs browsing across devices for testing. It is nerd-tastic.
Speaking of nerds, the proud ones at ProPublica did incredible work this year, both sharing the code to incredibly useful tools like Timeline Setter and using their development chops to do great reporting on projects like their “Opportunity Gap” schools explorer, and their amazing new “explore sources” tool.
The New York Times has always had one of the best news apps teams, and this year was no exception. I could fill this entire blog post with examples of their stuff. But I want to highlight something they’re doing that doesn’t reside in github: They’re doing an incredible job of embracing developer events and hack days to help spread the gospel of news apps development (and, of course, their own excellent open code). More of these from all corners in 2012, please.
Also in New York, WNYC’s John Keefe has been cranking out awesome maps all year long—and going through a very public learning process as he taught himself how to code. He’s not at the scale of a full dev-team, but his wins this year have been amazing—including producing a map for the Hurricane Irene evacuation of the city that saw a 57x increase in traffic to their site. He’s been so successful that he’s now building out a dev team for WNYC. Yes!
I was incredibly inspired by the coming together of app developers from the Tribune, the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the Spokesman-Review, and others to create the incredible Census.Ire.org, an incredible census explorer built in partnership with the Investigative Reporters & Editors’ National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. A great example of how working in the open and collaboration can move the entire industry forward. (Census data was a great place to be hacking this year, as the New York Times and Spokesman-Review’s own explorers show.)
And of course I can’t not call out the work that we’re doing with the Knight-Mozilla Partnership in 2011—hosting more than a dozen design and hack events that produced 300+ prototypes, an online learning lab about news innovation, the “hacktoberfest” hackfest in Berlin, and of course the announcement of our five 2011/12 fellows at the Mozilla Festival in London. It’s been a crazy busy year on that front.

But perhaps the biggest thing to affect journalism development was the embracing of the credo of “show your work,” first exemplified in a blog post by the Tribune’s Christopher Groskopf and later picked up on a panel I hosted at ONA, and it has rapidly spun from there.

It’s spun so fast, in fact—the philosophy of working in the open and the realization that Code Matters in journalism—that there’s now an entire site devoted to listing the journalism coding jobs available. A development so important that ProPublica’s Scott Klein calls it the “story of the year.”

It’s for all these reasons and many, many more that, from where I’m sitting (my inlaws’ basement, with Happy Feet playing on the TV across the room), 2011 is just a preamble. 2012 is going to be incredible—the year that journalism code really starts to scale and where you begin to see impact throughout the industry. I’m going all-in. You should too. Let’s do this.

PS. Thanks to Zach Seward, Jeff Jarvis, Al Shaw, Matt Waite, Christopher Groskopf, Josh Stearns, Scott Klein, Chrys Wu, and many many others for helping out on Twitter. There were a bazillion incredible examples not cited in this blog post. If I had the time, I’d collect the last 45 minutes of Tweets, but Happy Feet is (mercifully) coming to an end.

Journalism at the Mozilla Festival: Saturday

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 01:57:19 -0700

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.

Journalism in the Open: the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:41:00 -0700

This is the last in a series of five blog posts this week dedicated to thinking out loud about the opportunities for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership in 2012.

This week I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the opportunities that lie at the intersection of open-source philosophies and journalism. Today the “thinking out loud” stops and the “making it happen” begins. And that begins with the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows.

But before I get to that, a quick background:

In 2011, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership’s pilot year, the goal was to place five technologists in partner newsrooms through a selection process that included an open-call design challenge that received over 300 applicants, a 60-person learning lab, and a 20 person hackfest in Berlin. At each step along that route we met excellent people with compelling ideas for open-source news innovation. A lot of those ideas have been documented nicely by Phillip Smith, who helped to shepherd this project in its formative stages (thanks!!!).

Getting to these final five was done in consultation with our five news partners for 2011/12: Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, and Zeit Online. I could not ask for a more incredible group of news organizations to be able to work with. All of them joined us in Berlin for the “Hacktoberfest” hack days, and were able to meet all of the participants. They went back and submitted a “wish list” of people and things they’d want them to work on and we matched accordingly.

The thing that’s most thrilling to me about the matches is that each organization wanted something different and, as a result, the Fellows are a diverse lot in terms of backgrounds and talents. It is my great pleasure to introduce them to you:

Mark Boas | Al Jazeera
Mark makes, teaches, writes about and promotes new and open web technologies. Co-founder of Happyworm, a tiny entrepreneurial web agency and makers of the jPlayer media framework, Mark enjoys pushing the limits of the browser with HTML5 and JavaScript. Though a generalist at heart, Mark spends much of his time playing with web based media and real-time communications. A lover of all things audio, his passion often drives his work and is currently enjoying the challenge of taking audio ‘somewhere new’ with his Hyperaudio experiments.

Cole Gillespe | Zeit Online
Cole Gillespie is a JavaScript developer originating from deep within the North Carolina Appalachians. In recent years he has spent his time in Raleigh, North Carolina, working with various companies including Project Mastermind, National Geographic, CNN and IBM. He spends most of his free time playing music, hacking open source projects or trolling in IRC trying to keep up with the web’s rapid evolution.

Laurian Gridinoc | BBC
While studying medicine, Laurian co-founded a brand strategy and interactive consultancy in Romania. In the meantime, Laurian followed his interest in the semantic web through a master in Computational Linguistics and several years of research into semantic navigation at Knowledge Media Institute (The Open University). For the past year, Laurian has been implementing applications using semantic web technologies at the technology innovation company Talis.

Nicola Hughes | Guardian
After academic excursions in the fields of Physics, Zoology, Anthropology and Journalism, Nicola started her media career at CNN in London. Whilst working as a Digital Media Producer, she started blogging and tweeting about data journalism (@DataMinerUK). She left CNN to join a data scraping start up, ScraperWiki, and to gain coding skills. She is now taking her skills, perspectives and start-up mojo into the newsroom for testing.

Dan Schultz | Boston Globe
Dan Schultz is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab studying in the Information Ecology group. At the Lab he is a Research Associate at the Center for Civic Media and has learned how to make almost anything. Before coming to MIT Dan received a B.S. in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about “Connecting People, Content, and Community.”

So what now? Now the fun begins. All five fellows have been tasked with three things:

To embed themselves within their partner newsrooms so that they become intimately familiar with the daily ebb and flow of some of the best newsrooms in the world—because without understanding real context, needs, and uses innovation ends up happening in a vacuum.
To work in the open, in the spirit of Mozilla and the open-source community. That means blogging regularly about what they’re working on (respecting the sanctity of investigations in-process, naturally), the learning they’re doing, the things they’re building. It means being active and engaged in communities outside their host newsroom as an advocate for open innovation.
To release the code they create into the larger open-source and journalism communities. Because the goal is not to benefit only their host newsrooms but to make tools that benefit all of journalism (and beyond).

We’re still a couple months away from fellows getting their boots on the ground—most will start after the new year—but we will have set up a space that you can find their blogs, their code, and more by the time they’re ready to share.

I’ve spent the last week talking about how exciting a time this is for journalism, how many opportunities there are for building a coding community, for doing peer-to-peer learning, and for making new things. It’s about to get even better.

PS. If you’re going to be at the Mozilla Festival this weekend, do say hi!

Journalism in the Open: Making a New Reality

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:59:00 -0700

This is the fourth in a series of five blog posts this week dedicated to thinking out loud about the opportunities for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership in 2012. It will culminate in Friday’s post announcing the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows. Yesterday’s post dealt with the the possibility of peer-to-peer learning to advance journalistics skillsets.

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Stray wrote an incredible blog post called “Journalism for Makers” in it, he made an impassioned case for why makers, tinkerers, hackers, and all-round DIY folks, should be intersted in working in the journalism space. It’s an argument not too different than the one I wrote yesterday about the need to engage technically-minded people and communities in the creation of journalism. In this piece, Stray writes:

Where is the journalism for the idealist doer with a burning curiosity? I don’t think we have much right now, but we can imagine what it could be. The journalism of makers aligns itself with the tiny hotbeds of knowledge and practice where great things emerge, the nascent communities of change.

And he’s right—in fact, he’s hitting on the very themes I’ve touched on this week as well. But I want to reverse it: I want to talk about what journalism can learn from maker culture. I want to talk about creating a culture that’s fertile for the growth of journalism-makers.

Like many, I believe that experiments are crucial to new paths forward for journalism—that trying new ideas, making prototypes, embracing failure as an option (and learning tool), and iterating on experience are key. And so we need to try things, we need to build, Journalism needs to make.

There’s momentum growing around this idea—hackfests around journalism are starting to grow. The New York Times is hosting a hack day in December, the Guardian just held one in the UK. Mark Briggs, the guy who literally wrote the book on digital journalism, hosted one at the Seattle TV station KING-5 just a few weeks ago. They’re cropping up all over, and I want to see more—many more.

Because hack days don’t just produce hacks, it produces excitement. I’m convinced that a lot of the development community that has formed around the open gov movement is thanks to the many hackfests and app challenges that have surrounded the launch of civic datasets. That same kind of excitement can be built around journalism by other news organizations following the lead of the Times, the Guardian, and KING-5 and hosting their own hack days, helping to frame problemsets for people to build around. It can be done individually too, the Hacks/Hackers network, for instance, or independent developers wanting to pull together around news. Momentum builds on itself, and if we can start making at scale, we’ll really have something.

But hack days only go so far, so we also need to think about how to scale up making longer-term projects.

Obviously one answer to that one is the one that I’ll be announcing tomorrow: The placement of five technologist-fellows in newsrooms, as the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows are announced. They are charged with doing long-term, open-source work in newsrooms for the year. If all goes well (and knowing who we’re announcing tomorrow, I think it will), there should be plenty of code made.

But there’s still more, I think. There are a myriad of projects that need more attention than a hack day might provide, but that a year is overkill. A great example would be something like the Look at Cook project, an amazing data-visualization of almost 20 years of county budgets. This kind of mid-range project—something that requires a dedicated time committment of only a few weeks or months—how do we support that? Because I think that may be the lynchpin for some really vital making.

Because there are so many great things to make in journalism. And making, in my opinion, is the best way to learn. It’s also—if we look at the massive size of the open-source world—a great way to build community. Maybe making is the key to all this? If so, we’d better go big.

What about you? Do you think there’s a potential for fostering a culture of making in journalism? And where do you see it moving us?

Tomorrow: This week of blogging is capped by the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows. Get excited.

Journalism in the Open: Are our systems for learning making the grade?

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:59:00 -0700

This is the third in a series of five blog posts this week dedicated to thinking out loud about the opportunities for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership in 2012. It will culminate in Friday’s post announcing the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows. Yesterday’s post dealt with the the need to build community around the open-source code being written in journalism.

I had a brief exchange on Twitter yesterday, with ProPublica’s Scott Klein, about how high school poets end up as journalists and how he hopes that high school mathletes start to follow the same path. The basic idea was that kids are turned on to something at a young age and then search for viable career paths to follow. So for a high-school poet, they look around and think “I like to write, what professions are going to let me become a kick-ass writer.” Traditionally, journalism has absorbed a lot of those folks and has been stronger for it. Now, posited Klein, with the ascendancy of data journalism and the growing need for high-level developers to break news by crunching numbers, the hope is that kids that are switched on to math will draw the same conclusion and wind up revolutionizing journalism. But, I countered, how many high school newspapers are doing data journalism right now? Because that’s the first step. My guess? Not many—and that’s a loss.

Because Klein is right: there is ample space for math geeks, stats nerds, number-crunchers and many more in journalism. It’s a place they should be playing. And you can see, with each stat-heavy report, with each number-savvy data visualization, that some are starting to. But nowhere near enough.

So how do we get them interested? I think we do it in two ways: By leading by example—doing kick-ass, math-heavy journalism (of course)—but also by creating opportunities for learning. Because it’s really by demonstrating that the problem sets in journalism are compelling ones, and offering avenues to learn more about them, that we’re going to start to attract the talent that we need.

But as someone who spent the last three years in journalism education, our J-schools aren’t currently tooled to work with those problem sets. They are, by and large, teaching the other side of the equation: the writers.

Yet even on the writer’s side we need to be teaching beyond the now accepted j-school norms of Soundslides, iMovie, and maybe a little (shudder) Flash. We need to be building out more fully-realized skillsets that include basic coding, an understanding of editorial UX, working with data, and a lot more contextual understanding of storyelling and reporting that is of the web, and not simply an extension of print.

But again, the speed of change in the academy isn’t meeting the speed of innovation on the web.

And this is true well beyond the high-school and college level—journalists at all levels are hungry to retool. We need to rethink how we approach these things: How can we do learning at scale that can speak fluently to these different constituencies (and there are plenty more beyond the two examples above), while also bringing them closer together—not so that one can become the other (because, believe me, in the Hacks/Hackers equation, it’s a much quicker route for the hacker to become the hack than vice versa), but because the two need to understand just how powerful they can be when they collaborate together?

Of course, at the end of the day, we’re fostering different skillsets that compliment each other in the way that the best multidisciplinary teams can. And so one thing to think about is what the baselines for those skillsets are. The math geek doesn’t need a primer on statistics, but may need to know how a FOIA request works, or how to interpret census data, for instance. While the reporter may need to learn how to extend her database skills beyond Excel or how to take a map beyond Google MyMaps. These are simple examples—the bare minimum of a bare minimum: What do you think the baseline of learning for these (and other) constituencies should be?

Because that’s where we need to start: We need to start figuring out how engage different groups of people that are crucial to the advancement of journalism at their level, in their language, and then move them beyond. And I think that we can’t wait for the institutions to catch up, I think that we have to actively recruit each other to do it. Because as individuals, we are brilliant, and we have the ability to share that brilliance with others.

That’s a lot, to be sure, and there are plenty that are taking a stab at it (it was exciting to read just today that Poynter’s NewsU passed its 200,000 registered user mark), but I think that there are real strides possible at the peer-to-peer level, at journalistic learning that’s driven by people excited about sharing their own knowledge to the types of folks that they’re already comfortable speaking to. I want to see a ton of amazing classes bloom, and the outputs of those classes be new people in the journalism community.

There are a lot of different directions to take this: Where do you want to see learning go in journalism?

Tomorrow: We’re all makers now.

note: in a jetlag-induced editing frenzy, I brought this down in length a bit from the original posting.

Journalism in the Open: Hard-Coding Community

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:30:00 -0700

[This is the second in a series of five blog posts this week dedicated to thinking out loud about the opportunities for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership in 2012. It will culminate in Friday’s post announcing the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows. Yesterday’s post dealt with the growing momentum around open-source in journalism.]

Journalism is big on community: There are 84 different US-based Journalism organizations listed on the website of the American Journalism Review. From the Association of Food Journalists to the US Basketball Writer’s Association, if you’ve got a specialized role, niche, or interest, there’s probably a community for you.

But how do we build community around the code that journalism is producing? Because community also plays an role in open-source software—in fact, it plays the key role: without it, you’re just some person writing code alone. And so throughout the open-source world, you see communities grow around code. For some of the fundamental open source projects, those communities are enormous: Mozilla, for instance, tries to keep a thanks list of their contributors—it’s quite long.

Successful open source projects do far more than simply stick code up on a publicly-accessible repository—the projects that gain momentum are the ones that foster a community around their code by documenting their work, engaging users, trumpeting successes outside of their own, and much more. Like tending a garden, tending your code and the community around it takes both patience and effort.

There are a lot of great examples of this kind of community engagement happening in news development teams. The very best of the teams have active and engaged blogs talking about what they’re up to, how to implement concepts, and ways they’re engaging the community. The New York Times and the Guardian both host developer events in-house to help developers implement their code and advocate for their methods. The Hacks/Hackers organization hosts meetups around the globe that pair journalists and developers in discussion. The NICAR mailing list (thats the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) is an active info-sharing list for journalists and news developers. This is an incomplete list, and is all awesome stuff.

So there is a growing community and there is a growing momentum, and what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how we harness that to benefit the code that’s being produced. Because I think the code we’re making in journalism is amazing, and I think that’s only going to continue. But the real adoption from the larger development community—adoption that means the pool of contributors grows and, as a result, the community around that code grows—is pretty small. Sure, there are exceptions to that rule (as I pointed out yesterday, the DocumentCloud project has been successful in getting adoption around some of its code, and the Tribune team has had success with CSVkit, among others). But by and large, we’re all still working on our code alone.

I think that there’s real work to be done in advocating for, shining a spotlight on, and helping to generate community around the code that’s being written in journalism. Because the more community that can be built, the better the code is and the better off journalism is because of it. Kick-ass news code leads to kick-ass news.

So how do we do it? I have my ideas—but I’d love to hear yours.

Tomorrow: the potential in peer-to-peer learning.

Thinking about Journalism in the Open: An intro

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:53:00 -0700

It’s a handy bit of timing that next week’s Mozilla Festival will nicely mark the end of my third month heading up the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. The Festival marks the culmination of both Mozilla’s year and the Partnership’s as well, with the announcement of the five Knight-Mozilla Fellows for 2011/12.

It also marks the start of a sprint toward the 2012 iteration of the Partnership, which I’ve been thinking about pretty much since my first day of work (actually, since my second day—my first day of work was thinking about how the hell to deal with Bugzilla). Over the next few days, I’m going to be blogging about some of that thinking, mainly around the themes and opportunities in which I think Mozilla can play a role in helping to move journalism into an exciting, dynamic, and sustainable future.

From today to Friday, I’m going to share thoughts around the hacker-journalist community, around peer-to-peer teaching and learning of journalistic tools, around the role of making and building in journalism’s future, and finally about the five fellows that will be announced on Friday.

But I wanted to tee things off today with a brief look at growing excitement around open-source code and how it can help produce kick-ass journalism and how that can, in turn, help produce kick-ass open-source code—full circle.

Last week Matt Thompson wrote a great piece for Poynter that looked at “the somewhat sudden and very public uptick” in journalists sharing their code with others. It followed a piece in Nieman Lab a few weeks ago that in turn grew out of a panel I put together at ONA that was itself influenced heavily by a post by Chris Groskopf. In Thompson’s piece, he hits on some of the best reasons for doing open-source work in the journalism community. Hometown pride makes me glow that much of his attention centers around the excellent work being done by the Chicago-based Tribune News Apps team, but there’s incredible work being done with an ear towards openness by teams around the world.

But it’s not just about creating libraries and code to help do great journalism, it’s also about putting those libraries and code back into the larger open-source community and seeing where they go. While some of the tools we create may be very journo-specific, there are plenty of other bits and pieces (and whole chunks of codes and projects) which can be integrated into all sorts of development projects. An example I learned about during the panel I put together for ONA, “Open Source in the Newsroom” is that super-useful and highly-adopted javascript libraries backbone.js and underscore.js both are components of the Knight-funded Document Cloud project, which allows newsrooms to upload, analyze, and publish documents. It’s a perfect example of how working in the open can have unintended, positive, consequences: The work to create a specific (and awesome) journalistic project spun out general-purpose code that’s helped to build all sorts of things on the web.

That’s the real opportunity here: Not only do we strengthen the coding community inside journalism when we build open projects, but we also help strengthen the larger open-source community as well by putting valuable code out there, committing to other open-source projects, and generally being open and awesome.

It’s that philosophy of open-source being a two-way street (you get and you give while you influence and are influenced) that I think the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership holds at its core. Espousing that philosophy at scale is the real challenge for the program in 2012. I’m so excited to take it on.

Your thoughts, ideas, etc, are most welcome. Tomorrow: Building a community around code.

PS. This series of blog posts is very much inspired by Mark Surman’s writing about the opportunity he sees for Mozilla to help create a “web-literate planet,”. They’re a great read.