Planet MoJo (Mozilla + Journalism)

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.

February 22, 2012 03:42 PM

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.

February 07, 2012 12:55 PM

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.

December 30, 2011 11:36 PM

If you haven’t been following Dan Sinker’s posts on “Journalism in the open”, you really should. In fact, I think they’re so important for you to read that I’m going to summarize them here:

(And I was only kidding about the expletives. I can’t believe you fell for that!)

1. An intro: You get what you give — open-source journalism has to be about more than just producing code in the contact of news, it should also be about community.

2. Hard-Coding Community: Continuing with the community theme, Dan points out that there are healthy journalism communities, and some nascent programmer-journalist communities, but — largely — news organizations are still working on their code alone.

3. Are our systems for learning making the grade?: The speed of change in the academy isn’t meeting the speed of innovation on the Web. Journalism education needs to be improved, from high schools to universities and beyond. (With some commentary by Matt Waite, Derek Willis, Micheal Cory, and Greg Linch.)

4. Making a New Reality: Building on Jonthan Stray’s post “Journalism for Makers”, Dan proposes that “making” is working, but that it needs to be taken further. Specifically, he points out the need for something between one-off “hack days” and one-year fellowships.

5. The 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows: Announcing the first cohort of Knight-Mozilla fellows — Mark Boas, Cole Gillespe, Laurian Gridinoc, Nicola Hughes, and Dan Schultz. Having had the opportunity to watch these five people work towards these fellowships for the last six months, I could not be more proud. Congrats & well deserved!

Dan slipped-in a “thanks!!!” for the early work I did getting the Knight-Mozilla partnership off the ground in 2010. I’ll return the favour and say back to Dan: Starting a project is the easy part. Making it successful is hard. So, a very big thanks to you Dan for taking the wheel and driving the car in such awesome directions. :)

With the fellows announced and preparing to head to their respective newsrooms, I’m looking forward to exploring where we can take this next year.

Have ideas? Hop on the community-mojo mailing list and send us a note.

November 08, 2011 02:30 PM

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.

November 05, 2011 08:57 AM

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!

November 04, 2011 02:41 PM

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.

November 03, 2011 10:59 PM

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.

November 02, 2011 10:59 PM

[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.

November 01, 2011 06:30 PM

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.

October 31, 2011 08:53 PM

Mozilla is launching a new innovation challenge this November. The goal is to seed demand for high-speed broadband by prototyping and building bandwidth-intensive, next generation web apps.

It’ll take place over 8 months in collaboration with the National Science Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and US Ignite (a national competitiveness initiative to lay “a new foundation for America’s Broadband Future”).

As part of this project, we’ll be playing in the GENI test bed: a sandboxed network environment that offers flexible design and absolutely huge pipes. We’re talking 1 Gbps territory, up and down—about 250 times faster than average residential speeds.

I’m extremely excited to serve on this project, and proud of our contribution to a great public need: universal, high-speed connectivity, and all the economic development it enables.

The project

The theory behind US Ignite is that there are a number of “killer apps” that are impossible to build on today’s public Internet.

In the same way that email and the world wide web drove demand for our current networks, we’re looking to drive demand for next-generation networks through innovative apps and experiences that feel like they’re from the future. Stuff like (to throw out a few ideas) instantaneous streaming of the highest possible definition video; zero latency medical imaging; and the ability to render photo-realistic, constantly evolving 3D environments directly from the cloud.

These kinds of apps require sustained, ultra-high upstream and downstream speeds, and a new kind of design flexibility. Of course, these apps will run in modern web browsers, and will capitalize on all the newest open web technologies—HTML5, fast javascript, device APIs, hardware acceleration, WebRTC, WebGL, WebCL, and more.

The project is compromised of two very specific competitions:

1) an ideas challenge, where we ask participants to imagine how web apps running on next-generation networks could improve people’s everyday lives;

and

2) a development challenge, where small teams will compete for rounds of funding from a $500k prize pool, drawing from their creativity and talents to build “apps from the future.”

The first part is designed for everybody. It will scratch the same itch as the The Internet Wishlist, “a suggestion box for the future of technology.”

We want to inspire a sense of wonder and possibility, appealing to people’s wildest dreams and aspirations for the web—the kind of stuff that shows up in futurist videos, in science fiction, in dreams and flights of fancy. And then, we’ll start to build this future with the GENI community.

The second phase will require participants to have some pretty specialized skills, and will be conducted under some tight constraints (since these apps won’t be possible on today’s internet, they’ll need to be developed through proxies, as mockups, or at sites in the GENI testbed). But we will strive to make it as inclusive and approachable as possible, with regular events and consultations, community building, and developer resources.

Mozilla and innovation challenges

This project will lean on software and expertise we’ve developed in the first year of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership (MoJo).

Through MoJo, the Mozilla Foundation has developed or refined a number of capacities: things like running innovation challenges and distributed events; engaging new developer communities; and channeling the passion of Mozillians in areas where Mozilla hasn’t traditionally played.

We’ll be doing all of this and more in the Ignite project. And all the code generated by challenge participants will bear open licenses, which will support future developers in assembling ultra high-speed web apps.

The Hard Parts

Running a challenge program requires an informed balance between timing and incentives. To get to that balance, I’ll be consulting with a ton of people over the next few weeks.

As we finalize the program design, assemble a jury, build relationships with companies, researchers, agencies, developers, and users, and push out the project’s home on the web, we’ll try to stay flexible.

At its core, this program is about guiding a group of highly specialized network engineers and client-side developers through a few rounds of iterative development on their apps. We need to learn about (and speak naturally with) this constituency. At the same time, we need to bring the core Mozilla constituency—web makers, participation wonks and social entrepreneurs—into both the challenge and the broader discussion about how the web will work in the future.

That will be one of the most important things to get right: making Mozilla Labs, MDN, and Webcraft equally at home in the program with the GENI network engineers and community.

Equally important—we’ll need to pull off this big and complex program without overly exposing our process, or brow-beating people with programmatic rationales and details. I’ve already done a fair bit of that in this post!

Help!

We’re shooting for an initial launch in November. I’m working on ways for interested parties to get involved in the project planning. In the meantime, stay tuned and leave your feedback in the comments here!

October 13, 2011 05:41 PM

Last week, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership invited 20 developers, designers, and journalists to take part in a week of hacking and making in Berlin. I forget at what point in the planning one of the participants jokingly called it “Hacktoberfest,” but the name stuck. And so now that the jet lag has worn off for the most part, I thought I’d reflect on three of my standout moments of Hacktoberfest and how they’re influencing my thinking moving forward on the Knight-Mozilla project.

• Sitting in a meeting with our news partners, I got to witness a great moment. At the start of that meeting, a discussion cropped up around the Partnership’s core belief that code produced by Knight-Mozilla fellows should be open-sourced. There was hesitation on the part of some partners, worried that open-source code would reveal too much. An hour or so later, there was a discussion about possible collaborations among partners’ newsrooms, but it wasn’t making much headway, as collaboration with possible competitors is not the normal order of business. But then it dawned on everyone: open-source made that a non-issue. By working in the open, Fellows won’t simply be producing things for their host organizations, but for all any news organization that wants to use the code. You could see people linking back to the earlier conversation about open-source and realizing that it meant far more than just code—it meant a new way of working, of embracing collaboration, and of blazing a real way forward.
• Sitting in the back of our main hackspace at Betahaus, watching team after team get up and present their work, it dawned on me how awesome it was to spend four days seeing people with disparate skillsets truly collaborate around building something. Too often we orient getting people together around having a drink or listening to a speaker. “Quit yakking and start hacking” was the order of the day, and it worked. Multiple projects went from just an idea to functioning demo in a matter of days. It’s gratifying to me that there is a GitHub repo full of code from the week. Even more so that it was built through open collaboration among so many different types of people.
• After dinner one evening, we took both the Hacktoberfest participants and representatives from our news partners to Cbase, a storied (and slightly ramshackle) hacker space in Berlin. Standing at the bar next to a guy with a huge beard and a leather kilt, I looked out over the main room and was genuinely moved as I watched many from our group moving a table strewn with their laptops over to join in with a table full of German hackers. My eyes adjusted to the blacklight, and I saw hackers and journalists and developers and news partners all sitting around together, socializing and drinking and making. It was awesome—a real lasting image of a new community built in Berlin.

So what does all this mean for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership moving forward? Well, in the short term, Hacktoberfest was the last step in a lengthy process to arrive at our 2011 fellows—expect an announcement in a few weeks. But longer term, I think there are some real lessons to be learned from the event in Berlin, and some real ways those lessons will help to shape the Partnership in 2012:

• I think that the news partners really enjoyed feeling a part of the process, of meeting people and being engaged in the ideas being bandied about. Definitely getting the news partners to be partners throughout the year, instead of simply hosts for fellows at the end is a key step.
• Additionally great: More opportunities to make code. The paths blazed by the Partnership in 2011 centered around design challenges and learning labs, which I think were both successful and should be replicated, but there wasn’t anywhere near enough hacking going on, so more code in 2012 I think is a great goal.
• Finally, building community is important. It’s easy to get focused on process and look inwardly for community, but I think figuring out ways to intersect with the community around news innovation and making as well as to intersect with the many other developer communities, design communities, open gov communities and others that are thinking about areas that very much intersect with journalism is crucial.

Three moments, three lessons learned. Let’s hear it for a successful Hacktoberfest!

Some useful links from Hacktoberfest:

• The Hacktoberfest Wiki, which collected all the various info from the week
• The project page on the Wiki—what everyone worked on for the week
• The project GitHub repository, with forks of all the projects presented at Hacktoberfest

October 04, 2011 02:40 AM

I’m fresh back from two weeks of trouble-making for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership project. There are lots of big and little tidbits to report. My body is telling me that I’m still exhausted from too much time crossing the Atlantic, so I’m going to keep it short-and-sweet today:

• The adventure kicked-off with a Hacks/Hackers and Mozilla run “hack day” at the Online News Association conference. There’s a great summary of the event on the Hacks/Hackers site, and I put together a 4-minute video summary for your viewing pleasure.

• Two days later, the new Knight-Mozilla program lead, Dan Sinker, kicked off a great lunch keynote session that explored “Open source in the newsroom” with Brian Boyer, Jacqui Cox, and Al Shaw. I managed to audio capture Dan’s introductory comments, which really provide a lot of insight into Dan’s vision for the program. (Unfortunately, I also managed to leave my equipment pouch at the soundboard, containing several microphones, as I rushed to pack up to head to the airport. Ug.)

• Dan and I hit the skies to Berlin that afternoon to prepare for a week-long prototype-building event that became known as “Hacktoberfest”. I managed to get a quick post up on PBS Idealab about Hacktoberfest and how it fits into the Knight-Mozilla program, which you can find here.

• There’s lots of follow-up and wrap-up work to do from Hacktoberfest — posting photos and video from the event, etc. — which will get published as time permits in the coming weeks. If you just want a quick taste of what the Hacktoberfest participants were working on, take a look at the Hacktoberfest wiki pages or at the Github organization that links to each of the participants’ repositories.

• I also suspect that there will be more posts from the participants themselves, like this one by Trina Chiasson, and ongoing tweets with the #hacktoberfest hash tag on Twitter. There are also some posts coming out from the news partners, which we’ll also try to pull together into a bigger update in the coming weeks.

Next steps

So, what are the next steps? Well, here’s a super-quick brain dump:

• The Knight-Mozilla Fellow selection is now underway and is scheduled to be concluded in October.

• Fellows will be invited to the Mozilla Festival in November. You should come too.

On my end, I’ll be heading back to the UK to run a hack day with the Association of Online Publishers UK that will focus on HTML5 in the context of multi-platform publishing. The aim is to produce some great prototypes and convince a whole bunch of UK-based publishers that they should be joining us at the Mozilla Festival and thinking about how to introduce open-source innovation into their operations.

I’ll also be working to do a thorough post-mortem on the #MozNewsLab experiment, and — in the process — trying to sketch out some ideas for improving the next series of Knight-Mozilla learning labs.

Lots to think about. I better get to it. :)

October 03, 2011 07:17 PM

A funny thing happened on the way to the Online News Association conference. There had been a long-planned lunch-hour presentation by the Knight Foundation’s Jose Zamora and the Mozilla Foundation’s Mark Surman to talk about the project that I now head up, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. But as it turns out, both Mark and Jose had last-minute scheduling conflicts, and I was asked to step in to talk about the program.

Now I’m certainly no stranger to being up on stage, and I think the Knight-Mozilla Partnership is amazing but it seemed like there might be a better way to spend an hour at the ONA conference that would both hold true to the spirit and philosophy of the partnership, while also bringing other voices and perspectives into the mix.

And so I’m happy to announce a last-minute addition to the ONA Schedule: Knight-Mozilla Presents: Open Source in the Newsroom. I will moderate an hour-long discussion about the impact of open source code in newsrooms and what’s compelling a growing number of news apps developers to share their code back out with the community in the form of open-source projects. The Chicago Tribune’s News Apps Team put it perfectly earlier this month when they said: “Show Your Work” I truly believe that it’s through collaboration, openness, and “showing your work” that we’ll see real innovation in journalism. In fact, that’s the driving force behind the Knight-Mozilla Partership and is why I’m so excited to be able to spend an hour driving a discussion about it.

Joining me up there will be three open-source committing, news-apps building, fire-breathing powerhouses: Brian Boyer, from the Chicago Tribune’s News Apps team; Al Shaw, news apps developer for ProPublica, and Jacqui Cox, from the Interactive News Technologies team at the New York Times. This is such an unbelievably talented panel that listing everything they’ve been a part of seems nearly impossible. Three standout projects from this year:

Fech by the New York Times, a Ruby Gem which allows for easy querying against the Federal Election Commission’s database of political action committee’s expenditures, donors, and more.

Timeline Setter by ProPublica, a great tool (another Ruby Gem, actually) that let’s a programmer or journalist build a great interactive timeline. (Timeline Setter was used to great effect recently in MinnPost’s timeline of coverage of Michelle Bachmann)

Englewood, and a host of other mapping tools, built by the Chicago Tribune, that eases the creation of dot-density maps that use census data, seen here in this map of same-sex partners in the Chicago Area.

Not only do these folks represent some of the best examples of successful adoption of open-source philosophies in the newsroom, they are also three shining examples of bringing a spirit of openness and collaboration to their work by communicating and sharing externally instead of keeping everything locked away internally. I urge you to subscribe to each team’s blogs: the Chicago Tribune’s News Apps Blog, The ProPublica Nerd Blog, and the New York Times Open Blog.

This is going to be one hell of a discussion. If you’re at the ONA conference, do come. Saturday 1-2pm, Salon F-G 110 Huntington Ave.

If you can’t make it or can and want to live tweet it, we’ll be using the hashtag #onaopen on Twitter, and I’ll post all our notes and links using that tag after it’s over.

September 22, 2011 02:41 AM

We’re just one day away from the closing registration for the Hacks/Hackers hack day at the Online News Association conference. If you’re going to be in Boston on Thursday and have not registered for the hack day yet, let this be your final reminder to go forth and register for what is sure to be one of the most exciting and wildly competitive events of the whole week.

Just to ratchet the spirit of competition up a few notches, we’ve confirmed an all-star cast of individuals who will be judging your work at the end of the day. The judging panel currently includes:

• Beth Davidz, AOL
• Mark Coatney, Tumblr
• Miranda Mulligan, Boston Globe
• Kathryn Hurley, Google
• Tyson Evans, The New York Times

And, should your team find itself in one of the top spots, you’ll also get a shout out at the Knight-Mozilla keynote lunch during the ONA conference on Saturday.

On top of great judges, and great exposure for your team, we’ve also rounded up some swag & prizes from Rovi, dotCloud, Github, Infochimps, and (of course!) Mozilla.

All are welcome

Come on out and join other hacks and hackers for this exciting day of making and building. Don’t hold back if you’re a hack, not a hacker, as there will be lots to do throughout the day for people of every skill level.

Go register now.

If that’s not enough to entice you, here are just a few of the organizations that are registered to come:

• Thompson Reuters
• The New York Times
• Ottawa Citizen
• WNYC
• Scripps Howard
• MIT
• Tableau Software
• Harvard Press
• La Nacion
• Globalnews.ca
• And many, many more…

Show us your APIs

What are your favourite APIs? Perhaps your organization has an API to offer to hack day participants? Perhaps you have your own toolbox of data feeds that you rely on every day? Either way, we’re looking for your help to compile a list of news-focused APIs that hack day participants can use to rapidly prototype their ideas.

We’ve started a public Google Doc over here. Feel free to add to it and we’ll be circulating it on Thursday morning.

Hope to see you on Thursday. It’s going to be #awesome.

September 20, 2011 02:22 PM

This summer managed to fly right by, and this fall is lining up to be pretty darn exciting too. It’ll all get kicked off with the Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 event. Together with our friends Chrys Wu of Hacks/Hackers and Matt Carrol of the Boston Globe (and one of the organizers behind The Boston Hack Day Challenge), Mozilla is helping to pull together a kick-ass day of hacking and making on September 22nd — the day before the annual Online News Association conference.

The ONA conference on its own is a not-to-be-missed event (I’ve heard it referred to as South-by-Southwest for journalism nerds) that brings together more than 900 people from news organizations across North America and around the world. I had the opportunity to attend the ONA conference in 2006 when it was in Toronto and managed to connect one-on-one with folks like Anil Dash and Rob Curley, and many other people doing incredible work in the field of journalism-meets-technology. That sold it for me.

However, you don’t need to be going to ONA11 to come to the Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 event. All are welcome. Registration is just $20.

So far we have people registered from:

• Thompson Reuters
• The New York Times
• Ottawa Citizen
• WNYC
• Scripps Howard
• MIT
• Tableau Software
• Harvard Press
• La Nacion

Don’t wait until the last minute; we only have 100 spots available! Register today.

Chrys, Matt, and I are working hard to get the word out, and to bring in a fantastic line-up of sponsors and developer/advocates from platforms like Reuters Connect and Rovi. If you can help get the word out, or you’re a news-related technology vendor in the Boston area that would like to send a developer that can help with the integration of your service or API, please get in touch.

We’ve also just confirmed that my own personal favourite Platform-as-a-Service company, dotCloud, will be joining the event as a sponsor. The other event sponsors include: Microsoft, Mozilla, Knight Foundation, and Rovi. All that to say, we should have some great food and awesome prizes.

The theme for the hack day is broadly going to be about “News APIs,” and we’re about to start collecting a large list of APIs and data sources for participants to draw from (fingers crossed that Infochimps joins as a sponsor of the event!), but you can feel free to come to the hack day and work on just about anything relating to technology & news, reporting, or journalism. Non-coders are encouraged to attend, and we’ll have lots of suggestions for what you can work on too. This is as much of a “hacking on ideas” day, as it is about building software.

So, if you’re attending ONA11, please join us on Thursday, September 22nd for what is sure to be a fast-paced, idea-packed, day of MakerCulture in action. And, if you live near Boston, please consider making the trip to the rather-awesome Microsoft Nerd Center to meet newsroom developers from around the world for a day of hands-on software building.

Drop me a line if you have quesitons, suggestions, or feedback. And, get registered!

September 08, 2011 02:45 PM

It’s been quite a year for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. So far, we invited anyone interested in tech, journalism, innovation, and information to take part in three design challenges. That call resulted in more than 300 ideas for how to bring the web and news ever closer together. From those ideas, 60 participants in a Learning Lab were pulled together, and that group got to hear from some of the best minds in journalism, programming, and the intersection of technology and information (you can hear from all of those people too, as all the lectures were recorded). It’s been a great few months—and it’s about to get even better.

From those 60 Learning Lab participants, 20 of the most promising have now been selected to travel to Berlin from September 26-30 to take part in five extraordinary days of hacking open tools for journalism. They’ll be joined by representatives from our five member newsrooms—Zeit Online, Al Jazeera, the Boston Globe, the BBC, and the Guardian—who will help with the hacking, and demo things they’ve hacked as well. Everyone’s excited—I personally can’t wait to see what we’ll all build together.

Attending in Berlin are:

• Andrew Jennings, via Boston MA
• Christopher Keller, via Madison WI
• Cody Shotwell, via Seattle, WA
• Daniel Schultz, via Boston MA
• David Bello, via Bogota, Columbia
• Jordan Wirfs-Brock, via Denver CO
• Katie Zhu, via Boston MA
• Laurian Gridinoc, via Birmingham UK
• Mark Boas, via Florence Italy
• Matthew Terenzio, via New York NY
• Cole Gillespie, via Raleigh NC
• Neil Dawson, via London UK
• Raynor Vliegendhart, via Amsterdam NL
• Rhiannon Coppin, via Vancouver Canada
• Shaminder Dulai, via San Jose CA
• Stijn Debrouwere via Brussels Belgium
• Tathagata Dasgupta, via Chicago IL
• Nicola Hughes via London UK
• Trina Chiasson, via Chicago IL
• Saleem Khan via Toronto Canada

We’ll have plenty of off-site communication channels set up as well, so you can follow along too. More info on that when it’s available!

August 30, 2011 03:15 PM

In the off chance that these ideas or these ideas didn’t get your synapses poppin’, here are fourteen more.

Today’s list starts off with Chris Keller’s ‘nwsmkr’ idea, because I accidentally missed it the first time around — sorry, Chris! :)

Here we go — fourteen fifteen more ideas aimed at news engagement, reporting or journalistic challenges by the 2011 #MozNewsLab:

1. Chris Keller’s nwsmkr
   

2. James Greenaway’s Open News Player
   

3. Jeremy Gilbert’s Newscaster

   Newscaster

   View another webinar from JeremyGilbert

4. Samuel Huron’s 4 small ideas to improve journalism (No video :( )

5. Dan Schultz’s ATTN-SPAN
   

   ATTN-SPAN Intro from Dan Schultz on Vimeo.

6. Travis Kriplean’s GrowUp
   

   Helping web commenting GrowUp by supporting listening from Travis Kriplean on Vimeo.

7. Jamie King’s SPARKD (No video :( )

8. Rhiannon Coppin’s Proof
   

9. Artem Dudarev’s Locovidi
   

10. Sedef Gavaz’s New News - creating connections
    

11. Bharath Channakeshavaiah’s Newstribute (No video :( )

12. Corbin Smith’s OpenCan
    

13. Maura Youngman’s Filter Bubble
    

14. Philipp Tsipman’s Datamapper
    

And, last but certainly not least:

1. Katie Zhu’s Roundtable
   

   Roundtable: A Web platform connecting people, news and ideas. from Katie Zhu on Vimeo.

That concludes the final project submissions from the 2011 #MozNewsLab participants. Twenty of these individuals will be invited to the next phase of the program — a five-day “code sprint” in Berlin. The sprint will bring together these individuals with Mozilla developers and our news partners with the aim of further developing software prototypes. It’s going to be an amazing week.

Invitations will be going out next week and we’ll have an announcement about who’s going to Berlin shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately (well, fortunately for me!), I’m heading off on vacation on Thursday, so you’ll want to keep your eye on Planet Mojo for updates.

August 16, 2011 02:16 PM

Here’s a great way to kick-off your Monday morning and to get your synapses popping: Twenty more software product proposals from #MozNewsLab graduates aimed at news engagement, reporting, or journalistic challenges:

(These second group of twenty submissions received, sorted by submission date. I’ll post the final batch tomorrow.)

1. Jason Spingarn-Koff’s CrowdCam
   

2. Cole Gillespie’s geo journalism
   

3. Seth Vincent’s story hub

4. Matt Terenzio’s Follow This
   

5. Michael Wells’ Discoverer
   

6. Mark Boas’ Hyperaudio Pad
   

7. Shaminder Dulai’s VidScribe
   

   Introducing VidScribe from Shaminder Dulai on Vimeo.

8. Andy Jenings’ Opine
   

9. Jordan Wirfs-Brock’s The Infinite Story
   

   MoJo Pitch: The Infinite Story from Jordan Wirfs-Brock on Vimeo.

10. Laurian Gridinoc’s PLESPER
    

    PLESPER 01 from Laurian Gridinoc on Vimeo.

11. Kabir Soorya’s Legend (video)

12. Mark James’ New ways for a news website to publish updated articles and opinion pieces
    

13. Lucas Cioffi’s QiQo: Quality In, Quality Out
    

14. Rhiannn Coppin’s Proof
    

15. Saleem Khan’s Investigate Net
    

    Investigate Net MozNewsLab proposal from Saleem Khan on Vimeo.

16. Dan Whaley’s Hypothes.is: The Internet, peer-reviewed.
    

17. Neil Dawson’s The News Tree
    

    The News Tree from Neil Dawson on Vimeo.

18. Julien Dorra’s MetaFragments
    

19. Tathagata Dasgupta’s REVEAL
    

20. Engin Erdogan’s LinkingNews
    

There you have it: twenty more software ideas aimed at news engagement, reporting or journalistic challenges by #MozNewsLab — use it as your inspiration for today. And stay tuned, there is still more to come.

August 15, 2011 01:54 PM

Here’s a great way to kick-off a Friday morning and to get your synapses popping: Twenty software product proposals from #MozNewsLab graduates aimed at news engagement, reporting, or journalistic challenges:

(These are the first twenty submissions received, sorted by submission date. I’ll post more on Monday.)

1. Juan Gonzalez’s Tribal Mix
   

2. Laura Hilliger’s Newsie
   

3. Manuel Pinto’s MyStories - News Recommendation Platform
   

4. Nicholas Doiron’s FollowFrost
   

5. John Bell’s Re:Post (video)

6. Regnard Raquedan’s Wikified News Dashboard
   

7. Nicola Hughes’ The Big Picture
   

8. Nicole Cifani’s Pop! A Metric System for the Linked Economy
   

   Sellin’ it: Pop Metrics for the New Data Economy from Nicole Cifani on Vimeo.

9. John Tynan’s Nearby News (HTML5 presentation — requires Firefox, or Chrome)

10. Cody Shotwell’s IncentivEyes (cashed version)
    

11. Miguel Garcia’s People Powered News
    

    MoJo Proposal - People powered news from Miguel García on Vimeo.

12. Trina Chiasson’s Curious (video)

13. Marian Liu’s Opinionator
    

14. Amy Zerba’s News Gist
    

15. Charlie Pinder’s Multiplicity, news simplicity – a platform for aggregating, visualising and sharing news
    

16. Kersten Riechers & Tobias Reitz’s Corrigo
    

1. Chris Keller’s nwsmkr
   

2. David Bello’s NewsApp
   

3. Stijn Debrouwere’s Squire (mock-up)

4. Raynor Vliegendhart LikeLines
   

This is the tip of the iceberg — just the first twenty submissions received. There are still thirty-five to go.Stay tuned.

August 12, 2011 01:44 PM

One week ago today, the final lecture in the #MozNewsLab series was delivered by none other than Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, respected media critic, and Director of the new Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism in The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.

Two days earlier, #MozNewsLab participants heard from Evan Hansen, Editor In Chief of Wired.com.

From metrics and mobile, to the link economy and rapidly changing “atomic parts” of journalism, nothing less than the future of news and publishing itself was the focus of the fourth and final week in the lab.

In the immortal words of Internet publishing guru Gary Vaynerchuk: They crushed it.

You can find Evan’s talk here and you can find Jeff’s here.

Sadly, with those two talks delivered, the organized parts of #MozNewsLab are starting to wind down.

Fear not, followers, there’s still lots of activity on Planet MozNewsLab.

And, after the last handful of the final projects have arrived, we’ll be posting a gallery of final projects by the lab participants.

In the meantime, here are three great posts about #MozNewsLab:

• #MozNewsLab week three: Five tips on collaborating in the newsroom

• Prototypes, Visualizations Take Shape in Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab

• Transparency, iteration, standards: Knight-Mozilla’s learning lab offers journalism lessons of open source

More soon.

August 10, 2011 02:37 PM

When I’m thinking poetically, I imagine MoJo as a massive hacks and hackers mind meld. Developers and journalists working together in a gritty, real-world, open-to-the-public lab. Answering each other’s silly questions. Playing together. And making news differently.

Six months in, this melding is upon us. Or, at least, folks in the nascent MoJo community are actively trying to make the meld happen.

Example: NewsLab participant Corbin Smith wrote a great post reflecting on how to make the hacks and hackers relationship work in practice. One piece of advice from Corbin’s post:

 In the beginning of your hack/hacker relationship, explain and elaborate as much as possible. Hackers: don’t assume a hack knows what an API is or does. Hacks: say something like “media captured in the field, as opposed to in studio” when referring to EFP. You don’t have to avoid jargon – but you absolutely should carefully describe industry terms and jargon so that in the future both parties can confidently converse using the language of both industries.

In my heart of hearts, this is what I most hope for from MoJo: dozens, hundreds, thousands of developers and journalists sorting through the very practical challenges of working together.

While MoJo has had many trials and tribulations in its first six months, this hope is becoming a reality. I first saw it in the dozen+ local events during MoJo round one, although the conversation was a little more hack than hacker. With the arrival of so many big brains to the NewsLab course, it’s going further — and the hacker part is getting richer.

Example: a thing you hear a bunch from the more journalisty folks in the NewsLab: wow, my ideas about the web and open source are really shifting a bunch, so much more is possible. Great stuff!

The big challenge ahead is making sure this meld will continue — and grow — now that the NewsLab course is over. We’re in a sweet spot at the moment: a community of 60 people who have been collaborating on projects while interacting with some of the smartest hacks and hackers in the world. This connection won’t last forever.

Of course, our most immediate challenge is finding five awesome news-hacker-steins. The first round of MoJo fellows will need to exemplify this hacks and hackers mind meld within one person. As Andrew Leimdorfer of the BBC put it to me recently:

Our team focuses on client-side delivery of projects that go from brainstorm to live in a short time frame (1 day to 2 months max). If the fellows are going to be a success, they will need to be hack/hacker types, people who love finding a story and mashing up the technology at their disposal to tell it in the most engaging way possible.

As Corbin’s post says, being both hack and hacker is hard. They are different mindsets, lexicons, ways of working. But hard makes for a fun challenge, and I think NewsLab process has helped quite a number of people rise to this challenge. Warning: more mind melding ahead.

Filed under: drumbeat, mojo, mozilla

August 09, 2011 04:48 PM

In week three of the #MozNewsLab, our speakers discussed some of the many (many!) challenges they’ve faced in news environments. In particular, having to “do more with less” as newsroom budgets shrink, (cultural) resistance to change and communication barriers — like talking tech to non-techies — were but a few of the obstacles outlined in lectures by Shazna Nessa (Director of Interactive at the Associated Press), Mohamed Nanabhay (Head of Online at Al Jazeera English), and Oliver Reichenstein (designer and CEO of Information Architects).

As such, the question we put to learning lab participants picked up on these challenges:

Keeping in mind the objectives and challenges identified in this week’s presentations …how does your project take into account the need to facilitate collaboration in the newsroom (whether real or virtual), while acknowledging that team members will have varying technological skill sets?

From their responses, it’s clear many have been frustrated by these very same obstacles in trying to introduce new technologies and approaches into the newsroom:

“I keep hearing this common refrain: Cultural change within journalism institutions is the biggest barrier to adopting new technology and adapting to new and changing audiences.  And that stasis really has been the bane of my existence as a wannabe data-journalist,” says Rhiannon Coppin.

Saleem Khan links this “resistance to change” problem to competitive newsroom cultures that are arguably in conflict with the transparent, collaborative ecosystems associated with open source technologies:

“Journalists work in a competitive environment in a way that is at odds with other fields, especially open source technology and software…Deep, meaningful collaboration typically occurs only in small units, if at all.”

The underlying chicken-egg question that these responses inspire is best summed up by Katie Zhu who asks:

“If we’re building tools to change [newsroom] culture, then do we first build the tools or first change the culture?”

Reading through this week’s blog posts suggests that the answer to Katie’s question is “a bit of both.”  In looking at their projects, participants have proposed  a variety of approaches and dreamt up several different tools to overcome barriers in the newsroom.

Here are five excellent tips they share on collaborating in newsrooms:

1.   Patience!

Understand that revolutions don’t happen overnight and it probably won’t be tools that cause the sea- change to loosen rigid newsroom regimes.

Cody Shotwell notes: “Tools won’t cause the newsroom culture shift, but their creation is part of the process.”

2.  Listen and learn.

Cole Gillespie advises listening and understanding to the problem at hand before trying to help. “Really understanding the problem that someone comes to you with makes a huge difference when you are trying to solve things for others,” he says.

3.  Embrace clear communication.

Just because journalists have deadlines to meet, doesn’t mean they don’t want to learn about new tools. To the contrary, Shaminder Dulai stresses it’s important to find new ways to communicate to teach tech: “the question really is, how best to explain your complex new idea to an eager audience that may not speak tech, but speaks storytelling.”

4.  Collaborate with your colleagues.

It’s natural for developers to spend time alone working on ideas — but don’t forget to involve the people who’ll be carrying out and using the final product from start to finish, counsels Amy Zerba in her video “How to pitch an idea inside the newsroom.” In her video, she illustrates a scenario of how an idea pitch might be carried out and ultimately adopted in a newsroom.

5.  Under-promise and over-deliver.

Finally, once you’ve succeeded in introducing a new idea into the newsroom, the best strategy to win over sceptics is to make sure to “under-promise and over-deliver,”  then  “get in the trenches and get down to the job,” says Chris Keller.  “Co-workers are more likely to turn into co-conspirators if you are busting through tasks right alongside them, and whistling while you do it.”

Thanks to all of those who shared their insights. It has been (and will likely continue to be) an unpredictable time for our industry.  Those just starting out— whether in a fellowship or internship, or with their first journalism contract or job — may feel the future of journalism on their shoulders. Hopefully these reminders and new relationships developed over the weeks at the learning lab will help ease the transition into the industry, providing patience and inspiration to facilitate the changes necessary for good journalism to remain possible and relevant through this cultural shift.

On that note, the #MozNewsLab final projects are due today!! Curious about the #MozNewsLab? Take a gander at what we’ve been working on, Tweet us and read our blog posts.

August 08, 2011 07:58 PM

Week three of the #MozNewsLab is all wrapped up.

I’m almost experiencing a pang of sadness that we only have a few days to go until the lab is concluded. It really has flown by too quickly.

Of course, that sadness is offset by two things:

1. Twenty participants will be invited to the next phase of the program: a five-day event in Berlin focused on building software prototypes.

2. Having the opportunity to get out and enjoy what’s left of this amazing summer! :) My guess is that all of the people involved in #MozNewsLab — the particpants, and the faculty — are looking forward to a few days off.

First things first…

Last week we turned the corner from a focus on technology to a focus on journalism, news, and reporting. All of the guest speakers were asked to share their experiencing of where and how technology is impacting their newsrooms, or what changes are underway at news organizations today in the context of technology.

The week was kicked off by Shazna Nessa, Director of Interactive at the Associated Press in New York. Shazna shared how the AP is changing — how they are trying to break down silos and formalize technology in the newsroom, as well as introducing new skills and pushing toward new forms of interactive news presentation.

You can watch Shazna’s lecture here.

Following Shazna was Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of Online at Al Jazeera English. Mohamed delivered a mile-a-minute lecture on the speed at which Al Jazeera English has moved into our consciousness, and what that has meant for their news delivering infrastructure. Mohamed also dived into questions about sources, fact checking, verification, and the role of user-generated content in Al Jazeera English’s reporting work.

You can watch Mohamed’s lecture here.

Closing out the week’s lecture series was Oliver Reichenstein, CEO of Information Architects. Oliver delivered a 10,000 foot view of the changes underway in news organizations from the perspective of one of the world’s leading design agencies — an agency that has been responsible for some high-profile re-designs, successful software products, and innovative thinking on the future of news.

Oliver’s talk highlighted the tension between design considerations of news sites, and the business considerations that are often in contrast. You can watch Oliver’s lecture here.

We’re in the final sprint. The assignments from last week are starting to flow in to the #MozNewsLab Planet, and many of them are heading in the direction of the final project that is due on Friday.

Yesterday, we heard from Evan Hansen; Tomorrow we hear from Jeff Jarvis.

It’s been a whirlwind month. I hope you’ve enjoyed following along.

August 02, 2011 03:06 PM

“What is this thing for? What does it do? How does it fit into people’s lives?”

- Jesse James Garrett

These are just a few of the questions participants are grappling with as they develop ideas for software to change journalism – both as an industry, and an experience. At the #MozNewsLab, our second round of speakers Chris Heilmann (HTML5 evangelist at Mozilla), John Resig (JQuery creator) and Jesse James Garrett (UX design pioneer) – excited us with the potential of HTML 5,  schooled us in the principles user experience design and demonstrated to us a few different approaches to community building on the open web.

Tathagata Dasgupta provides an excellent visual synopsis of some of the themes that came out of the #MozNewsLab in week two.

The lectures inspired some thought-provoking – and very diverse – responses to these questions, including: why HTML5 alone can’t unify videos and the web, interface design trends, how programmers can help create a culture of coders and the role of gatekeepers in an ‘open ecosystem.’

They also motivated some to jump into the sandbox to get sketching and prototyping:

Inspired by Phil Gyford’s analysis of news sites (really interesting commentary on it here) Nicola Hughes takes a crack at bringing “friction, readability and finishability” to the news with “Big Picture.” In her video she explains how her project idea aims to help readers “engage, communicate and understand” the news sites they read.

Cody Shotwell hones in on many of the same shortcomings of online news that Nicola identifies. His “Streams” project invites users to personalize their experience of the news by having them following authors, topics, tags and other users.

Part wiki and part social network, Daniel Bello’s news app treats news as a conversation. On the one hand it helps journalists to organize and present additional information related with news stories, while also including readers in the conversation by sharing additional information. Daniel’s got an early demo of his app – take a look at how it works here.

How to sort through the overwhelming number of videos on sites like YouTube? Take a look at this intriguing solution: a dashboard that allows users to quickly scan through endless hours of footage to quickly locate what they need. With the abundance of video content available on the interwebs, this tool created by Juan Gonzalez shows a lot of promise.

Of course, it is not enough just to locate and organize content — in an increasingly data-saturated world, the key is to get data that is accurate. John Bell’s Re:Poste provides a crowd-sourced solution to this pressing problem. Re:Poste is a “citizen fact checker” made up of a network of “experts” who review, comment and critically examine stories produced online. Check out John’s sketches illustrating how his model works.

Once again, these are just a few of the latest projects in progress at the #MozNewsLab – and these learners are always looking for feedback!

We’re in the homestretch of the lab so don’t delay — send your thoughts, resources and greetings to us here and be sure to follow along on Twitter.

August 01, 2011 11:38 PM

“Prototyping, engaging, iterating” — as Katie Zhu aptly puts it — is exactly what we challenged participants to do in the first week of the #MozNewsLab… and we got what we asked for!

The first task was no simple endeavour. We asked participants to think back and write about the ideas presented by our first round of speakers  — Aza Raskin, Burt Herman and Amanda Cox — and apply the concepts these lecturers offered to their own projects — all in a mere 500 words. All of us on the #MozNewsLab team were extremely impressed by the quality of blog posts we received — and the comments responding to them.

Some of the most interesting posts were interactive — allowing the reader to explore the author’s ideas in a non-linear fashion  at their own pace — or used video, sketches or mock-ups to illustrate their points.

Open story telling

Others dove right into proposing  news websites, apps and tools can be more open, interactive and better at facilitating storytelling.

“What would a GitHub for storytelling look like?” asks Jordan Wirfs-Brock in her post. Through doodles and sketches, she explains her idea for a tool that would make a reporter’s notebook open and collaborative, to improve news stories and engage users.

Similarly, Mark James’ ‘wiki-journalism system’ invites participants to become part of the storytelling process, allowing them to propose changes to news and opinion pieces.

Meanwhile,  Corbin Smith links to his ‘people-powered news’ — proposing a platform that engages users to help analyze and collaboratively fact check evidence and source material for a story.

‘Gamifying’ the news

Both Katie Zhu and the team behind Headliner, together with Amy Zerba, identified a similar problem:  people find reading the news a chore.  Yet each blog described very different ways to solve this very real problem.

In Headliner, the news is presented as a game, enticing audiences to “tune in” by making news consumption fun. Zhu describes her team’s approach as one that engages readers in friendly competition, rewarding news literacy.

In contrast, Amy Zerba suggests that part of the reason why young readers are put off by news is that there’s too much to keep track of and not enough socializing.  Zerba ponders whether having social and news sites, applications and windows all together in one space could help resolve this issue, and make the news more social.

Crowdsourced information sharing was proposed as a means to invite audiences into the news production process, thereby engaging them.

Trina Chiasson suggested geotagging might be one way citizens can help inform journalists of stories happening locally.

Jason Spingarn-Koff ‘s Crowdcam project addresses the necessity for free-flowing information through networks of video-enabled cellphone cameras. Through on the ground “Cam” operators, news organizations around the world can access raw footage to supplement their own reporters’ analyses.

A proposal allowing news readers to help curate news stories was pitched by Laura Hilliger.  For Hilliger, reader curation could permit readers to socialize while storytelling, becoming engaged with how news stories are told.

The above are but a small sampling of concepts being explored by #MozNewsLab participants.  With the first two weeks of the #MozNewsLab now behind us, we encourage you to keep thinking, practicing and interacting with lab participants in the weeks to come.

Not a formal participant in the #MozNewsLab, but nonetheless interested in collaborating on one of these projects? Drop participants a line here or on Twitter. And…there’s still time to send a ‘message in a bottle’ to the lab.

The next round of blog posts are trickling in right now — read them as they come in at Planet Mojo (where they are being aggregated)…and look for another post round-up, next week!

July 25, 2011 09:45 PM

The #MozNewsLab is hurtling toward the grand finale on August 5th. We’re past the half-way mark, and it feels like time is compressing each day into a New York minute.

We wrapped up week two of the lab last Friday. Here’s a quick recap:

The first lecture last week was a shot-in-the-arm of open-Web goodness: The Mozilla Foundation’s Executive Director Mark Surman talked about the broader Mozilla + Journalism initiative, touched on Why Mozilla cares about news, and introduced out guest speaker, Christian Heilmann.

From there, Heilmann — a developer ‘evangelist’ at Mozilla — took participants on a whirlwind tour of the State of the Browser in 2011. HTML5, CSS3, new APIs, WebGL — you name it, he covered it. You can find the lecture online here: recording, notes, and slides.

Next up was none other than John Resig. Resig is implicated in more successful open-source software projects that you can shake a stick at. He’s been leading the jQuery project for more than five years now, and has learned a lot about the ‘Open Source Process’: the ins-and-outs of building great software and a great community that supports it. John shared those learnings with the lab — it was an incredibly insightful voyage through the history of jQuery, and John’s tips on creating successful open-source software community.

You can find the lecture online here: recording, notes, and slides.

Jesse James Garrett — the ‘Father of AJAX’ — joined us on Friday to deliver the final lecture of the week. His talk focused on the conceptual model for thinking about successful interactive experiences, what he calls the ‘Elements of User Experience’. I must admit, I was quite excited to hear Jesse speak, as I’ve been a big fan ever since reading his book many, many years ago. Jesse expanded quite a bit on the early models of user experience that he pioneered and ofter many insightful new ideas about how to approach the experience of a software project or product.

You can find the lecture online here: recording, notes, and slides.

We’ve just kicked off week three. Hope you’re following along. There’s still time to send a ‘message in a bottle’ to the lab.

Last but not least, Mozilla’s Media, Freedom and the Web festival is really starting to come together. If you’re interested in the nexus of the open Web and media production, you may want to mark your calendar.

July 25, 2011 04:31 PM

I’m excited beyond belief to announce that I’m joining Mozilla as the head of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. It’s an incredible opportunity to help build discussions, communities, and tools to drive innovation in journalism.

The partnership is funded by the Knight Foundation, the folks that created the Knight News Challenge (which I was a reviewer for this year), and is run by Mozilla, the folks that bring you the Firefox web browser. The idea of the partnership is to help to facilitate further collaboration between technologists and journalists through a series of design challenges, learning labs, and culminating in a fellowship program that places developers in residence in newsrooms around the globe. The partner newsrooms for 2011’s fellows are Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Guardian, Die Zeit, and the Boston Globe. It’s an amazing group of people that I am excited to collaborate with.

For those of you that know me, you know that bringing innovation to journalism and storytelling is my driving passion. This new job lets me fuel that passion on a global scale. I can not wait to begin this new challenge.

Of course, beginnings are also endings and it’s with quite a bit of sadness that I will be leaving my position as a member of the full-time faculty of Columbia College Chicago. My three years there were amazing, and the students that I got to work with still leave me in awe.

Some things will stay the same, of course. I still have the @MayorEmanuel book coming out on September 13, I am still building web projects of my own, and I’m still staying in Chicago. And of course, I will still be engaging in conversations about journalism and tech, but now will be doing so on a much bigger stage.

Let’s get to work!

July 22, 2011 07:37 PM

I’m excited to announce that Dan Sinker will soon be joining us to lead the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Challenge (MoJo). MoJo is already kicking butt. It’s about to kick even more.

I knew Dan was the right guy for this gig when I learned that he a) taught web dev to journalists at Columbia College for 3 years and b) successfully ran Punk Planet magazine for 13 years. Web dev, journalism and gritty business chops to boot. Exactly the sort of things MoJo is about.

Dan’s other claims to fame include: a year as a Knight Fellow at Stanford; entertainingly imitating the Mayor of Chicago on Twitter; and belonging to a secret mailing list of menschy hipster dads with young children.

Of course, it’s what Dan is about to do with MoJo that has me most excited. When we first met over tap water in an AirBNB’d living room, we jumped right onto the topic of ‘wow we could build a huge and really awesome news innovation community‘. We’re still talking about this today. Dan wants to make it happen.

Dan is going to do an excellent job running the MoJo fellowship, for sure. I also believe he has the chops and vision to turn MoJo into something much bigger.

Welcome, Dan. See you on August 8th.

Filed under: drumbeat, mfw, mojo, mozilla

July 22, 2011 07:36 PM

The participants in the #MozNewsLab are kicking-up such an amazing storm of ideas, that I’m finding it hard to concentrate long enough to put my own thoughts to keyboard this week.

So, in lieu of some suitably witty update, here’s a quick re-cap of the first week’s lectures:

The week kicked off with a lecture by the renowned interface designer, Aza Raskin. Aza recently held the position of Creative Lead for Firefox, and he’s now working on a start-up called Massive Health.

Aza’s lecture focused on designing in the open and rapid prototyping. You can find the slides here, or watch the recorded lecture (with synced slides) here. The #MozNewsLab participants also took great notes here.

On Wednesday, the lab heard from journalist-entrepreneur Burt Herman. Burt shared his life experiences — from his time as journalist with the Associated Press, to his current adventures as co-founder of the award-winning journalism tech start-up, Storify.com

These two lectures dovetailed perfectly together: both focused on the strategy of rapidly iterating software product ideas, being willing to kill early ideas if necessary, and incorporating user input into the development & design process.

You can find Burt’s slides here, and his recorded lecture here. (Notes here.)

We closed out the week on Friday with a mind-expanding, 1000 mile-per-hour, lecture by Amanda Cox. Amanda Cox is a graphics editor at the New York Times, where she creates charts and maps for the print and web versions of the paper.

Amanda’s lecture was the perfect finale for the week — it provided a whirlwind tour of how the New York Times graphics desk thinks about the data that it presents online. Slides here, lecture here, and notes here.

Week two is already off to a great start. John Resig is scheduled to present later today. It’s an exciting week in the #MozNewsLab.

July 20, 2011 04:36 PM

This past week saw the launch of the learning lab — the outcome of a series of innovation challenges organized through the Knight-Mozilla partnership. I joined Mozilla’s News Innovation Specialist Phillip Smith to co-lead the four-week online course (woot!).  We are supported by a dream team of advisors:  Emily Bell, Director of Digital Journalism at Columbia U and former Director of Digital Content Director at The Guardian;  Sarah Cohen, Knight Chair in Computational Journalism at Duke U; and Rich Gordon, Professor and Director of Digital Innovation, at Northwestern U.

Like the innovation challenges which took place over the last several months, the focus of the course is to get developers and journalists to think outside the proverbial box when it comes to journalism and communications technologies.  To that end, the lab brings together technology and news visionaries who have been changing the face of the industry.

In addition to lectures and dialogues with these thought leaders, course participants are developing their own projects and pitching these as part of the final outcome of the lab. Then, Mozilla will be shortlisting 20 of these folks for a four day hackfest in Berlin.

The first week of the course featured renowned interface designer Aza Raskin,  and Burt Herman, CEO of Storify.com and founder of Hacks/Hackers,  providing tips and insight on the early stages of launching a project; then, New York Times Graphics Editor, Amanda Cox,  showed us how to creatively identify and express hidden information in large datasets, and convey it in a visually compelling way.

We’ve got 60 really outstanding participants from around the world taking part in the lab; over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging about their projects and progress, both here on my blog and on Planet MoJo.

Interested in following the course and tracking the thoughts and ideas of our bevy of brilliants? No problem! Start an account with P2PU.org and join us! All lectures are recorded and archived there.

And, you can also follow us at your favourite social sites via #MozNewsLab…we love feedback!

July 18, 2011 09:08 PM

So, we’re five days into the #MozNewsLab experiment and things are exploding (in a good way, of course).

But we’re not in the clear yet…

In the development of this entire Knight-Mozilla program, we received a lot of great feedback from people working in newsrooms — both news-app developers and editorial staff. Some voices were louder than other (coughDerek Williscough), but we heard those voices loud-and-clear and want to work to address as many of the concerns as possible, such as:

• The challenge of incremental change vs. wholesale change in established news organization;

• The idea that ‘news apps’ are not just about technology, they are pieces of journalism too (and what that means practically);

• How does a new software product or tool make its way into a newsroom? What are the entry points?

• Where are the opportunities to ‘Hack at the core’ of news.

I want to inject as many of these ideas into the thinking that is happening in the #MozNewsLab, but I need your help to make that happen (and it’s in your interest to help!).

So, I had an idea the other day about how to do this, and I would like to try it out on all of you, if you’re willing.

I wrote about the lab’s objectives earlier this week on PBS MediaShift Idealab — and in that post I referenced the idea of a “message in a bottle.”

Well, I’d like you to give it a shot. :)

The concept is simple: people working in newsrooms, or with newsrooms, or who have worked in newsrooms (you get the point), send a short video message into our learning lab. Once received, Alex and I will assign it as “homework.”

These video messages should try to communicate:

• The realities of working in a busy news environment, i.e., the hurdles that fellows might face when they arrive at Al Jazeera English, BBC, Boston.com, Guardian, or Zeit Online this year (and perhaps your news organization next year);

• The challenges that reporters are facing today, i.e., tools they really wish they had to report or present news;

• The challenges that news users are facing today, i.e., how news could be better delivered to people who read, use, and re-mix it;

• The failed state of corporate IT, and corporate CMSs, in many large newsrooms, and how to route around that;

… And so on.

Basically, these would be a reality check from those people “in the know” — like you.

So, your mission — should you choose to accept it — would be to:

1. Create a short (~3 minute) web-cam video that boils down your experience into one clear call-to-action for our lab participants, e.g.: “If you’re going to know one thing about trying to work with reporters, and editors, and technology it’s ….” and one clear question for participants, e.g.: “So, given what I’ve just told you, how will you work around that?”

2. Upload that video to YouTube and tag it with #MozNewsLab (or upload it anywhere and send me a link; YouTube just saves me a step or two.)

3. Keep your eye on your Twitter @ replies, and — as time permits — engage with the participants that respond.

This is your chance to get your idea, experience, and opinion in front of sixty-three smart people that are hurtling toward the opportunity to spend one year building software in a newsroom.

Let’s not let the #MozNewsLab particiapnts go in blind! :)

July 15, 2011 02:27 PM

Cross-posted from the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab.

Over the next four weeks, a very interesting experiment is going to unfold. The most exciting part about it is that it’s entirely open source: You can observe it, interact with it, and improve it.

We’re calling this experiment the “learning lab.” It’s the second stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, which kicked off in May with an online competition that solicited 300 news innovation ideas from people around the globe.

With the competition complete, it’s time put on our mad scientist lab coats and start mixing things up. Our aim is to find an antidote to “yammering” about the future of online news — instead, we want to start building that future today.

Let the experiment begin

At its core, the first learning lab sets out to:

• Build an online “maker space”: Create a place where people can start hammering out software ideas that could be part of tomorrow’s online news experience.

• Put our foot on the accelerator: Taking a cue from Mozilla’s Web FWD initiative, we want to dramatically speed up the process of taking ideas “from concept-to-code” by bringing smart people together with other intelligent folks.

• Demonstrate how to “work open”: Actually showing how the idea of working quickly, iteratively, and in the open can lead to better ideas, improved software and collaboration.

Into the glass beakers and test tubes, we are also going to mix:

• Sixty-three lab participants who’ve made a very real commitment to learn, and to work hard;

• Eleven lectures that will set the stage for their work over the next four weeks;

• A six-person-strong lab faculty team to keep things on track;

• Three curriculum advisers who’ve helped to get us here;

• And you.

Put on your lab coat and help make something

One of the most valuable parts of the Knight-Mozilla partnership is the community that is growing around it — well over 500 people at last count. Bringing that community into the lab is something that we’re striving to do — but we could really use your help here.

Here are just a few of the ways that you can jump in:

• Compile resources, readings, and follow lists for each weeks’ topics, simply by editing one of the course Etherpads. You’ll find them listed under ‘External links’ on the P2PU course page.

• Respond to questions from the participants, by keeping an eye on #MozNewsLab on Twitter or Identi.ca.

• Comment on participants’ weekly assignment to ‘think out loud’ about the ideas they are developing

• Send a ‘message-in-a-bottle’ from your newsroom into the lab: simply shoot a short video (less than 3-minutes, please!) and post it to YouTube tagged with #MozNewsLab and we’ll make sure they see it. Here’s a great example from Jacob, one of the members of our lab faculty team.

Each week we’ll also be profiling the best thinking from the lab on Planet Mojo. We’ll also be posting the lectures — three each week — to the P2PU course page, so you can follow along at home.

We’re working hard to create a MakerCulture in the news production, reporting, and journalism space — so, why don’t you put on your mad scientist lab coat too? All you have to do is suspend your disbelief for the next four weeks, commit to put no limits on your imagination, then pick up a hammer and start hammering.

Cross-posted from the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. Feel free to comment over on the original post.

July 12, 2011 02:00 PM

Day one of the Knight-Mozilla learning lab is already off to a great start. Many of the participants are already hammering … putting together maps, YouTube introductions, and much more.

Given the caliber of the people involved, the hammering is only going to get louder.

So, to kick things off, let me introduce our participants. You can find them listed below, or on a map, in a Google Fusion table, or listed on Twitter.

First Name:	Last Name:	Twitter	Website	Image
Alan	Haburchak	Twitter	Website
Amy	Zerba	Twitter	Website
Andrew	Jennings	Twitter	Website
Artem	Dudarev	Twitter	Website
Bello	David	Twitter	Website
Bharath	Channakeshavaiah	Twitter	Website
brian	chirls	Twitter	Website
charlie	pinder	Twitter	Website
Chris	Keller	Twitter	Website
Cody	Shotwell	Twitter	Website
Cole	Gillespie	Twitter	Website
Corbin	Smith	Twitter	Website
Dan	Whaley	Twitter	Website
Daniel	Walmsley	Twitter	Website
Daniel	Schultz	Twitter	Website
Engin	Erdogan	Twitter	Website
Ersun	Warncke
James	Greenaway	Twitter	Website
Jamie	King	Twitter	Website
Jason	Spingarn-Koff	Twitter	Website
Jeremy	Gilbert
John	Tynan	Twitter	Website
John	Bell	Twitter	Website
Jordan	Wirfs-Brock	Twitter	Website
Juan	Gonzalez	Twitter	Website
Julien	Dorra	Twitter	Website
Kabir	Soorya
Katie	Zhu	Twitter	Website
Kersten A.	Riechers	Twitter	Website
Laura	Hilliger	Twitter	Website
Laurian	Gridinoc	Twitter	Website
Lucas	Cioffi	Twitter	Website
manuel	pinto		Website
Marian	Liu	Twitter	Website
Mark	Boas	Twitter	Website
Mark	James		Website
Matt	Terenzio	Twitter	Website
Maura	Youngman
Michael	Wells	Twitter	Website
Miguel Angel	García Ramírez		Website
Neil	Dawson	Twitter	Website
Nicholas	Doiron		Website
Nicola	Hughes	Twitter	Website
Nicole	Cifani	Twitter	Website
Noah	Echols	Twitter	Website
Philipp	Tsipman	Twitter	Website
Raynor	Vliegendhart	Twitter	Website
Regnard Kreisler	Raquedan	Twitter	Website
Rhiannon	Coppin	Twitter	Website
Saleem	Khan
Samuel	Huron	Twitter	Website
Sedef	Gavaz	Twitter	Website
Seth	Vincent	Twitter	Website
Shaminder	Dulai	Twitter	Website
Shaun	McWhinnie	Twitter	Website
Stijn	Debrouwere		Website
Tathagata	Dasgupta	Twitter	Website
Ted	Han	Twitter	Website
Tobias	Reitz	Twitter	Website
Travis	Kriplean	Twitter	Website
Trina	Chiasson	Twitter	Website
Zoltán	Varjú	Twitter	Website

Be sure to check out the first YouTube introduction from one of our lab faculty, Jacob Caggiano. That will be hard to beat.

July 11, 2011 02:26 PM

First the great news, then the good news. (FYI: There is no bad news in MoJo-ville.)

I’m excited to let you know that we’ve confirmed that Oliver Reichenstein, CEO of iA Inc, will deliver a lecture for the lab in July.

For those who are not familiar with iA (Information Architects, Inc.), let me just say this: very few organizations have had as much impact when it comes to modern-day information design. Not only is iA “one of the best-known design agencies in the world,” but it is also an organization that is not afraid to take some risks by developing its own products — from the ubiquitous iA³ Template for WordPress, to ultra-minimalist writing software iA Writer for the Mac and iPad.

I should also note that iA worked with our news parter Zeit Online to produce the innovative HTML5, tablet-friendly, version of zeit.de — if you have a tablet (or know how to change your User Agent settings), you should take a moment to check it out.

Welcome aboard, Oliver.

Learning lab schedule

Now the good news. After months of hard work — planning, organizing, and cajoling — I’m happy to be able to unveil the (almost final) schedule for the learning lab (all times are listed in Pacific Time):

Week 1 - Design thinking and product development

July 11 - 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Speaker: Aza Raskin is a renowned interface designer who recently held the position of Creative Lead for Firefox.

July 13 - 9:00 to 10:30 a.m.

Speaker: Burt Herman is an entrepreneurial journalist. He is the CEO of Storify and a co-founder of Hacks/Hackers.

July 15 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Special guest: To be announced. Topic: Data visualization.

Week 2 - New capabilities in the browser and new ways of building community

July 18 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: Chris Heilmann is a geek and hacker by heart. In a previous life, he was responsible for delivering Yahoo Maps Europe and Yahoo Answers. He’s currently a Mozilla Developer Evangelist, focusing on all things open web, HTML5, and working open.

July 20 - 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.

Speaker: John Resig is a programmer and entrepreneur. He’s the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, and has had his hands in more interesting open source projects that you can shake a stick at. Until recently, John was the JavaScript Evangelist at Mozilla. He’s currently the Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development at Khan Academy.

July 22 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Special guest: Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, is one of the world’s most widely recognized technology product designers. Topic: Focusing on the users.

Week 3 - Technology meets news production: new challenges in the newsroom

July 25 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: To be announced.

July 27 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: Mohamed Nanabhay, is Head of Online at Al Jazeera Egnlish based in Doha, Qatar.

July 29 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Special guest: Oliver Reichenstein, CEO Information Architects Inc.

Week 4 - The future of journalism

August 1 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: Evan Hansen is the Editor In Chief of Wired.com.

August 3 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.

Speaker: Jeff Jarvis is the author of What Would Google Do? He blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

August 5 - Time TBD

Speaker: You! Participants will present their final projects.

There you have it, in all it’s shining glory. Let me know if you have any questions about the speakers, the format, or the topics to be covered.

July 07, 2011 01:04 PM

We’re in the final days leading up to the learning lab. We currently have more than fifty-five people registered and expect the last few registrations to come in today and tomorrow.

Alex is hard at work setting up the course on P2PU and putting the finishing touches on the first assignments.

If you are registered for the learning lab, keep your eye out for a welcome e-mail on Friday that will provide instructions on how to join the live lecture and your first assignment.

With roughly sixty participants attending lectures and submitting assignments, there are going to be a lots to review each week. To make sure that every participant’s work is read and to ensure that quality feedback is provided, and — generally — to help make things go smoothly, I’m excited to announce the following additions to the learning lab team:

• Kate Hudson is a Toronto graphic designer, managing editor of York University’s student newspaper, violist, and co-founder of www.openjournalism.ca. From data visualization to live studio recordings, she’s thinking big about making unlikely connections between design and other creative fields.

• Lingsha Hu is a second year business student at Schulich School of Business, York University. As a newbie to the world of journalism, she is interested in entrepreneurship, design and technology.

• Pippin Lee is making ideas click as photo editor of Excalibur Publications by day. Long distance runner, app-developer-in-training by night. Co-founder of www.openjournalism.ca (@openjo on Twitter)

I met this power trio at a local Hacks/Hakcers meet-up, and was taken with their passion for the idea of reinventing student journalism. They’re putting that passion into practice through the www.openjournalism.ca project:

“OpenJournalism.ca was created to help bridge a growing gap we saw between potential and practise in online student journalism. Most of us know that the online newsroom is changing the way people tell stories, but we’ve encountered many barriers to being able to innovate. Our goal is to create a platform that encourages discussion and idea sharing between students, professionals, and educators, so that every student journalism organization around the world will be able to work in an environment that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The first version of OpenJournalism will be launched in the coming weeks, but in the mean time, check out OpenJournalism.ca to see a little more about our vision, or tweet @OpenJo to get involved in our research.”

I’m excited that Kate, Lingsha, and Pippin have agreed to join the team as ‘lab shepherds’ — if you’re in the lab, you’ll be meeting them on P2PU, so please take a moment to say “hello.”

That’s it for today.

P.S. Please bug @benrito if you have any questions about the conclusions of the challenges, or the invitations process — both of which should be wrapped up today, or tomorrow at the latest.

July 06, 2011 01:15 PM

There are only seven days until the first Knight-Mozilla learning lab kicks-off.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s going to happen this week:

• As of this morning, there are 55 participants registered for the learning lab. Later today Tomorrow, invitations will go out to five people who are on the waiting list to fill those spots.

• Once those last five spots are confirmed, a final list of learning lab participants will be published.

• Starting Wednesday, the preliminary course content will be uploaded onto the new P2PU.org platform, which includes a curriculum overview, lecture dates & times, assignment outline & schedule, and so on. The material will be accessible to anyone.

• Starting Thursday, we’ll be asking the P2PU team to create accounts for each of the lab participants, and registering those accounts with the course. If you’re in the lab, you should expect a password reminder e-mail that you can use to log-in to P2PU.

• On Friday, lab participants will receive the first welcome e-mail. It will include all the details for the lecture on Monday, July 11th, and a number of logistical details. If you’re in the lab, keep your eye out for that e-mail.

On Monday, July 11th, the lab will kick-off at 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern, 6PM British Summer Time, 7PM Central European Summer Time (if you live in another time zone, you can use this handy time-zone converter). Most lectures will be 2-hours earlier (8AM PT, 11 ET, 4 BST, 5 CEST), but we’ll start a bit later on the 11th to ease into things.

Before you ask, let me provide a few quick answers to questions that we’ve been receiving:

• Access to lecture material: All lectures will be recorded and available on P2PU publicly (to everyone on the Internet) as soon as we can get them posted. We’re hoping for video, audio, and slides, but it may just be audio with a link to the visual information that was presented. If you’re in the lab, you’ll be expected to attend the live lecture (unless you live very, very far east).

• Waiting list: If you haven’t received an invitation to the lab yet, you should keep an eye on your Inbox today. As mentioned, at some point today we’ll be inviting five more participants to the lab.

• Process: For the one or two that asked about process, it’s quite simple … there’s a process overview here. The lab is the second part of this year’s program. Twenty participants in the lab will be invited to go to Berlin in September to build working software prototypes. Five of the people that attend the Berlin event will be invited to become Knight-Mozilla fellows.

Finally, I just want to publicly thank all of the individuals and teams that submitted entries to the challenge. If you weren’t one of the people that made it through to the lab, you should know two things:

1. The competition was very stiff for the top sixty positions in the list.

2. There will be another challenge next year. Start brainstorming early.

That’s it for today. More updates to come. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: My apologies, I forgot it was a holiday in the US today. The remaining invites will go out tomorrow.

July 04, 2011 12:48 PM

Yesterday, the first round of invitations to the Knight-Mozilla learning lab went out. The invitations went out to the sixty entrants whose submissions were ranked the highest by the panel of reviewers.

We’ve asked those invited to respond by 5PM ET on Friday, July 1st. And we’ve also asked those invited to let us know if they are not able to make the time commitment (or are simply not interested) so we can offer those spots to the next people in line.

Just to make it clear: if you didn’t receive an invitation yet — fear not — you’re automatically on the waiting list. As we hear back from people this week, we’ll be extending more invitations.

Once the lab is completely full, we’ll let everyone know. So hang tight until then.

Preliminary schedule & format

Many folks have asked about the schedule for the learning labs. While it’s still under active development, with the help of my colleague Alexandra and our curriculum advisers, here’s what I can tell you today:

• The two mandatory lectures will be on Monday and Wednesday morning, and the optional lecture will be on Friday morning. We’re trying to schedule the lectures for roughly 8AM Pacific Time, 11AM Eastern Time, 4PM British Standard Time, 5PM Central European Time. If you want to check what that is in your local time zone, you may find this site useful. Some lectures will start a bit later to accommodate speakers who live on the west coast of North America and who are not early risers.

• All lectures will be held online using the rather fantastic Big Blue Button platform — an open-source video conferencing system that will be hosted and managed for the labs by our friends at Blindside Networks Inc.. There will be local telephone dial-in numbers for every country where participants live (to ensure that it’s easy to listen), and — obviously — participants can also connect using a Web browser for the full video experience.

• The course material, assignments, and class discussions will be hosted on the new Peer-to-peer University platform. We may also use a handful of Etherpads as a course wiki of sorts.

• If I ever hear back from the folks at IRCCloud, we will try to integrate an ‘office hours’ via live chat. (Hint-hint, Wink-wink, Nudge-nudge, to the folks at IRCCloud) If that comes to fruition, the live chat drop-in time will likely be scheduled for Thursday, or Friday morning.

• Assignments will be given out each Monday, and will be due on Friday afternoon. The assignments will be thinking assignments, and can be submitted in any open-Web form: text, audio, video, images, code or a combination of them all. Participants should expect to spend 1-2 hours on the assignment each week.

• Throughout the entire four weeks, participants will be required to work on their final project. Final projects will be presented the week of August 1st. Alex and I are currently working through the requirements, but participants should expect to spend 2-3 hours a week on research and preparation for the final project presentation.

• There will likely be readings. They will likely be optional.

So, there you have it, the quick overview of the learning lab schedule and format. We’ll be finalizing everything over the coming week, and we will start posting the course outline and schedule to P2PU. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments, or find us on Twitter at @asamur and @phillipadsmith.

June 29, 2011 02:35 PM

Yes, you heard that right: I was able to corner both user-experience pioneer Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path and Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of Online for Al Jazeera English, at the Civic Media conference last week, and both have agreed to deliver a lecture for the first Knight-Mozilla learning lab.

Who’s working hard for you? :)

Okay, now that I’ve got your attention, here’s a quick update on our progress toward concluding the challenge phase of the program, and moving into the learning lab phase:

• Roughly 300 submissions were received during the challenge. It was a bit more than we were expecting. The quality of many of the submissions was quite high. Generally speaking, we wanted to ensure that each submission was reviewed thoroughly, and that each entry was seen by two pairs of eyes.

• We expanded the review team and extended the review period by several days to ensure that each reviewer had enough time to read and comment on each entry. (Not a small amount of work, I assure you.)

• That work is now complete. Ben and Jacob are going to send out invitations to the learning lab this week. I’m hoping the invitations go out tomorrow morning — fingers crossed! — but there are some remaining technical hurdles to get past before they can go out.

• If you don’t receive an invitation tomorrow — fear not — you’ll be automatically added to a waiting list. We’ll be inviting people from the waiting list as we hear back from the first group of invitees. We’re aiming to have the process completed by Friday, July 1st.

I’ll post further updates on the invitation process and progress here throughout week.

Now, on to the learning lab itself. You may be asking: What should I expect if I’m a learning lab participant? Well, here’s a preview.

• Just a reminder, the Knight-Mozilla learning lab will run from July 11th - August 5th, 2011. Those that receive an invitation will be expected to commit at least 10 hours a week to the lab.

• The lab will focus on four key themes, one each week, which will be roughly: How to work open: the secret sauce of Mozilla’s software and community; How to take an idea from concept to product; Challenges that newsrooms and news users face today; and News is evolving: What journalism might look like tomorrow.

• To explore those themes, each week will include two mandatory lectures — Monday and Wednesday at roughly 8AM Pacific Time, 11AM Eastern Time, 4PM British Standard Time, and 5PM Central European Summer Time — and one optional lecture the same time on Friday. Each lecture will be approximately 30 minutes, with 30 minutes for Q&A.

• The optional lectures will be just as amazing as the mandatory lectures, but will focus a bit more on practical skills and understanding vs. the big picture of the mandatory lectures. For example, if you arrive at the lab as a programmer with lots of product development experience, but little or no understanding of what a journalist actually does, we’ll have a lecture for you. And vice-versa: if you arrive as a tech-savvy journalist but with little experience building software, we’ll have a lecture for you too.

• Each week participants will be asked to complete an assignment that builds on the information from the lectures. Participants will submit assignments by publishing it on their own blog. So, if you don’t have one yet, get moving. ;)

• Last but not least will be your lab project. The lab project is the ‘big idea’ that you’re working on — perhaps your challenge submission; perhaps something new — throughout the four week lab. You’ll present your personal project for review at the conclusion of the lab.

The lab will be delivered entirely online. We’ll be using the Peer-to-Peer University platform for course material, assignments, and discussions. The lectures will be delivered synchronously (and attendance will be taken!) using the rather awesome Big Blue Button platform.

Your ship’s crew for the lab will be Alex and yours truly, and four excellent course shepherds that I’ll be introducing over the coming days.

I’ll be posting updates as we confirm the remaining lecture spots, and as we make progress with getting the invitations out. Stay tuned and let me know if you have any questions.

June 27, 2011 02:04 PM

A really quick note today from the #civicmedia conference to announce the latest addition to the Knight-Mozilla learning lab team: Alexandra Samur.

Alexandra Samur is a Vancouver-based writer, editor and journalism instructor. She is the managing editor of the Canadian independent news site rabble.ca, and teaches online journalism at Vancouver’s Langara College and citizen journalism at SFU-Woodwards. Her career in independent media includes stints at Ricepaper and Adbusters magazines, and service as a media trainer at alternative media hubs in Cambodia and Palestine. Her work has appeared on The Tyee, Torontoist.com, in New York Magazine and on CBC Radio One. Alex holds an MA in Communication from York University. Follow her on Twitter: @asamur

Alex will be working with closely with me and our incredible curriculum advisers over the coming weeks to plan, produce, and deliver the upcoming learning lab.

Already, just two days into the position, she’s made some incredible suggestions that are going to make the lab a 100% better experience for the wide range of participants that we’re expecting.

Thanks Alex! And welcome to the team. :)

June 22, 2011 09:46 PM

A serendipitous start to the week: I tuned into CBC’s Q today in time to catch Jian Ghomeshi interviewing Jeff Jarvis on why long-form reporting is a luxury in the age of twitter.

Jeff Jarvis is also speaking later this week at the MIT - Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston.

And, because good things always come in threes, I’m also happy to announce Jeff Jarvis has agreed to become a lecturer for the upcoming Knight-Mozilla learning lab.

Learning lab

The Knight-Mozilla learning lab will run from July 11th - August 5th, 2011. The lab will bring together sixty participants, two course leaders (including yours truly), three incredible curriculum advisors, several course shepherds, and an amazing line-up of mind-bending lectures from individuals that are pushing the boundaries of the Web and journalism.

The lab will generate a fire hose of new thinking about the nexus of software, journalism, and news — and it will graduate a cohort of individuals who will be better prepared to head out into the world and innovate.

The coursework will be anchored by the live lectures, and our lecture team is starting to heat up.

Confirmed lectures

Over the four weeks, we’re aiming to coordinate up to twelve lectures. Today, as the voting period for the challenge comes to a close, I’m excited to announce the individuals that have agreed to join the line-up so far (roughly in the order that they will be lecturing):

• Aza Raskin is a renowned interface designer who recently held the position of Creative Lead for Firefox. He is currently the co-founder of Massive Health, and probably up to many other design-meets-entrepreneurial things.

• Burt Herman is an entrepreneurial journalist. He is the CEO of Storify and a co-founder of Hacks/Hackers.

• John Resig is a programmer and entrepreneur. He’s the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, and has had his hands in more interesting open source projects that you can shake a stick at. Until recently, John was the JavaScript Evangelist at Mozilla. He’s currently the Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development at Khan Academy.

• Chris Heilmann is a geek and hacker by heart. In a previous life, he was responsible for delivering Yahoo Maps Europe and Yahoo Answers. He’s currently a Mozilla Developer Evangelist, focusing on all things open web, HTML5, and working open.

• Jeff Jarvis is the author of What Would Google Do? He blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

• Evan Hansen is the Editor In Chief of Wired.com. Under his stewardship, Wired.com’s traffic has grown fourfold, reaching more than 10 million unique visitors a month. Hansen has won numerous awards for technology reporting and writing. Prior to joining Wired.com, Evan worked at CNET News.com.

Other lectures will be added over the coming days and weeks, and I’ll be sharing a bit more about the lab format, objectives, and assignments, so stay tuned.

June 20, 2011 03:50 PM

Not surprisingly, there were dozens of submissions that suggested a way to “wikify” something, but I was a bit curious to find that only three of the entire three hundred proposals actually contained the word “dashboard.”

The idea of a breaking news dashboard is not entirely unique in itself, but it is still lacking on the web in a truly rich collaborative fashion. We’ve seen individual news outlets themselves provide a one stop shop type experience for breaking stories (i.e. The Guardian during the Copenhagen climate talks, The Huffington Post during the Tucson Shootings) but it only contains their selective coverage rather than a cross network experience.

Breaking news populates pretty quick on Wikipedia, but the experience is limited to the capabilities of the MediaWiki platform, and only those who are willing and capable of using the MediaWiki syntax to create it. Not to mention the lack of streaming tweets, images, video, maps, and all other forms of real time interaction.

There are many flavors of individual news dashboards (iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, My Yahoo), but they are still missing true community features. These services do offer various levels of collaboration, but they all require a lot of moderation and are not anywhere near scalable for millions of people to contribute.

So how do we fix this?

Regnard Raquedan’s idea is to come up with a ranking system that determines a piece of media’s ability to make it to the front page of the dashboard, known as an REP (rich event page). That way editorial decisions are truly in the hands of the crowd and the dashboard is simply a window into what their seeing, or should be seeing, via REPRank. As you see by his mockup sketch, he’s thought of a useful layout to take in the information and keep tabs on what’s happening as it happens.

It’s tempting to debate the metrics and criteria for the REPRank system, but that will have to be a conversation for another day. Let’s just assume it works swimmingly, there is still one issue to overcome.

The much talked about filter bubble syndrome.

The problem with the old school media was that it acted as an authority and left out less popular, yet important voices. While intelligently crowdsourced media may offer more depth, how will it cover breadth?

Here’s an idea. What about two tabs at the top, one displaying a page with all the highest ranked materials nicely laid out, and another “waiting room” page that uses a list display, which anyone can add to. To avoid overload you could still sort it by date/time added, or with tags, and watch it work its way to the main page.

A commenter on Regnard’s submission page took the liberty to ask the platform question, just as he did for Chris Keller’s somewhat similar “living topic page” idea, and I think Regnard gave the correct answer, which is no platform. If the REP system were built, it would display natively in the web browser using HTML5, with a possible Android companion app to make it more mobile friendly. This lives a very wide open challenge to come up with a universal ranking system that can pick up media published from a diverse set of tools, but we enjoy challenges here, and I wish Regnard the best of luck in his pursuit.

June 20, 2011 03:38 AM

It goes without saying that the best part of being involved with the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Challenge (voting ends June 19th, come out and play!) is the opportunity to interact with brilliant people.

Ted Han holds one of those fantastic hybrid minds that not only can chew on a batch of code and spit out something shiny, but also thinks outside of the box that the code has to live in. Ted sent in a number of proposals across the board covering all thee challenges. The two entries I’m particularly fond of demonstrate not only technical chops, but fresh ways of thinking about the news process as a whole. Here’s why they speak to me:

What can Journalism learn from Text-based Adventures?

I’m a sucker for the classics, and all of us who’ve been on computers long enough have a soft spot for text based adventure games (no graphics, just a written story that respond to commands that the player types in). Ever since a friend informed me of the underground resurgence of interactive fiction, I couldn’t help but wonder how we can harness the power and purity of text to become interactive non-fiction.

Regardless of the new storytelling methods and sensory experiences that the future brings, it will be a long time before we come up with something that is truly as accessible and adaptable as good old fashioned text.

People who are interested in making their own interactive stories have more options than ever, with new programming languages such as Inform7 that are designed to be used by people who only know plain English. With the steady ubiquity of personal reading devices on the market, there’s a great opportunity to communicate rich experiences using a simple medium that we all can understand. Ted has a lot of interesting observations on the similarities between TbA games and the journalistic process, as well the transformative potential that TbA games hold. As he notes,

“The key narrative feature that both news pieces and TbAs share is an anticipation of what users know and wish to know. However, where Journalism simply attempts to target a safe lowest common denominator which presumes only what all users know in an attempt to cover the broadest swath of readership, TbAs offer users the ability to discover and investigate narrative elements in further depth, should they so choose.”

But like I said, Ted doesn’t just lay down obscure gonzo theory, he likes to deal with the nuts and bolts as well. Through another submission he asks:

Why isn’t there a visual web scraper builder?

Good question. Let’s bring scraping to the masses! As he notes in the comments:

“Turns out there are a few visual web scrapers, none of which are free unfortunately. http://www.needlebase.com/ does some cool things, but unfortunately limits it’s utility unless you pay for an account. And i’m still exploring http://www.outwit.com/“

I’m sure there’s a lot that can be done with those tools, but there will always be a lot more that can be done when we’re building them together and keeping them free.
Now that we all make data like bees make honey, Journalists need to be ready and willing to harvest it without fear of getting stung by technology.

This entry is also a great testament to the support of the Drumbeat community, as another commenter suggested

“It’d be interesting to see if you could partner up with http://scraperwiki.com/, who are already doing some pretty good work in trying to make scraping more non-programmer-friendly.”

This reminds me of two things:

1. It’s important that we have a grasp of who’s doing what already, and I actually had a chance to introduce myself to Ted while we were jamming on this EtherPad, which has some great examples of groundbreaking projects entering the news innovation arena. Feel free to add some stuff there that we missed so we can get them over to the MoJo Wiki
2. Leaving comments are really helpful! The review team will be looking at them while selecting the “MoJo 60″ who will be moving on to the Learning Lab (which we’ll get to a bit later…), and more importantly, the idea creators will be reading them and will warmly appreciate you stopping by.

You have only until June 19th to vote for your favorite submissions, so check ‘em out and support the brave pioneers who made their brains sweat in hopes of building something to benefit us all.

Also check out my previous knight-mozilla highlight on Dan Schultz’s C-SPAN makeover, titled “ATTN-SPAN“

June 17, 2011 04:58 AM

For the last couple of months, I’ve been quietly whittling away at the master plan for the first “learning lab” of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership.

Without a doubt, this is the most personally exciting aspect of my involvement with the project: starting in July, I will lead a group of sixty smart individuals through an intense four-week online learning experience.

During the lab we will unleash a fire hose of thinking about the collision of technology and journalism, about working open, and the process of taking software from idea to product.

We have big ambitions for these learning labs, obviously. So, to ensure that the curriculum meets those ambitions and has tangible learning objectives, I reached out for help from some of the smartest people I know who are already teaching at the nexus of technology, journalism, and news.

Incredibly, they said yes!

So, I’m very excited to announce that Emily Bell, Sarah Cohen, and Rich Gordon have agreed to make some personal time available to help out as curriculum advisers:

• Emily Bell: Emily Bell is director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. She previously worked for the Observer and then the Guardian for 18 years, setting up MediaGuardian.co.uk in 2000 and becoming editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited in 2001. In September 2006, she was promoted to director of digital content for Guardian News & Media.

• Sarah Cohen: Sarah Cohen directs the newly-launched ReportersLab.org and is the Knight Professor of the Practice at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. She was a reporter and editor at The Washington Post for more than 10 years, working for investigative teams and projects across departments. Her journalism awards include most major national prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

• Rich Gordon: Rich Gordon is a professor and director of digital innovation at Medill School Northwestern University. At Medill, he launched the school’s graduate program in new media journalism. He has spent most of his career exploring the areas where journalism and technology intersect. At The Miami Herald, he was among the first generation of journalists to lead online publishing efforts at newspapers.

Next week we start the hard work of determining what homework to assign. Yes, that’s right, there will be homework … and required reading … and mandatory lectures.

Just because it’s online, doesn’t mean it’s not going to kick your ass, and blow your mind.

P.S. We’ve been lining up some incredible lectures, and I’ll be announcing some new additions in the coming days. Stay tuned! :)

June 14, 2011 03:14 PM

For the last couple of months, I’ve been quietly whittling away at the master plan for the first “learning lab” of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership.

Without a doubt, this is the most personally exciting aspect of my involvement with the project: starting in July, I will lead a group of sixty smart individuals through an intense four-week online learning experience.

During the lab we will unleash a fire hose of thinking about the collision of technology and journalism, about working open, and the process of taking software from idea to product.

We have big ambitions for these learning labs, obviously. So, to ensure that the curriculum meets those ambitions and tangible learning objectives, I reached out for help from some of the smartest people I know who are already teaching at the nexus of technology, journalism, and news.

Incredibly, they said yes!

So, I’m very excited to announce that Emily Bell, Sarah Cohen, and Rich Gordon have agreed to make some personal time available to help out as curriculum advisers:

• Emily Bell: Emily Bell is director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. She previously worked for the Observer and then the Guardian for 18 years, setting up MediaGuardian.co.uk in 2000 and becoming editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited in 2001. In September 2006, she was promoted to director of digital content for Guardian News & Media.

• Sarah Cohen: Sarah Cohen directs the newly-launched ReportersLab.org and is the Knight Professor of the Practice at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. She was a reporter and editor at The Washington Post for more than 10 years, working for investigative teams and projects across departments. Her journalism awards include most major national prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

• Rich Gordon: Rich Gordon is a professor and director of digital innovation at Medill School Northwestern University. At Medill, he launched the school’s graduate program in new media journalism. He has spent most of his career exploring the areas where journalism and technology intersect. At The Miami Herald, he was among the first generation of journalists to lead online publishing efforts at newspapers.

Next week we start the hard work of determining what homework to assign. Yes, that’s right, there will be homework … and required reading … and mandatory lectures.

Just because it’s online, doesn’t mean it’s not going to kick your ass, and blow your mind.

P.S. We’ve been lining up some incredible lectures, and I’ll be announcing some new additions in the coming days. Stay tuned! :)

June 14, 2011 03:14 PM

Now that the 2011 submissions for the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation challenge are officially closed until next season, the team is going to be highlighting some of the more intriguing ideas that made our eyebrows dance.

Note that this is just an exercise to generate discussion, and all opinions are my own and have no effect on the results of the challenge. It’ll be up to our stellar review panel to decide who advances to the Learning Lab and gets a shot at the full salary fellowship.

Please allow me to raise my first glass to Dan Schultz, who’s proposing to give C-SPAN a civic facelift and harvest the juice out of what appears to be boring (yet influential) humans talking too close into a microphone. C-SPAN is a non-profit organization funded by affiliate fees that the cable and satellite networks have to pony up, and it’s a shame that the content isn’t being delivered in a more relevant and engaging way. Not yet at least.

Dan would like to see personalized syndication channels that only show you the stuff that matters to you, as well as the ability to highlight, flag, and discuss certain clips that are important, and see how they compare with the selections of others.

This idea has a lot of great elements folded into it that all work together to make his entry shine. Dan wants to take an existing public service and make it better, so rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, he’s grabbing a few and building a hot rod on top of them. He’s looking to incorporate other baseline technologies into the works, particularly MetaVid, which uses open video technology to match government transcriptions to C-SPAN footage of the people speaking them. Lastly, his submission lays a foundation for amazing possibilities down the road, such as adding in government data (like stuff from the Sunlight APIs) and citizen shot footage (The Uptake anyone!?) that could potentially make this project breathe sweet knowledge for generations to come.

Also, quick random note, I remember seeing some interesting C-SPAN clips getting passed around the net a while back from the eccentric fellow at cspanjunkie.org, so I decided to pay him a visit and discovered that the 6,400 C-SPAN clips he had uploaded to YouTube were taken down by Google, presumably due to copyright complaints (?). So as we currently stand, if you want to share public footage of our own government’s deliberations, your best option is to buy a cable subscription and babysit a DVR all day, transcode, tag, and upload the footage to a youtube account that ends up being terminated into thin air for history to forget.

This is why Mozilla’s commitment to a free and open web will remain critical for a long time to come.

What do you think? Leave your comments here, or go to Dan’s submission page to vote and give him some feedback!

Depressed that you missed the deadline for this year’s innovation challenge? Do not fret, you have a chance to redeem yourself, we’re doing it all again in 2012!

June 10, 2011 06:53 AM

Voting is now open

Submissions for the 2011 challenge cycle are closed. Welcome to crowd evaluation. You can vote up your favorite ideas and leave comments. What do you like about these ideas? What would make them better?

Your feedback, along with our review board, determines who advances to the next stage of the program.

In case you missed it in yesterday’s post, the public voting period for the Knight-Mozilla news innovation challenge is underway.

Voting ends June 16th. That’s just one week from today.

To get started, all you need to do is:

1. Create an account on drumbeat.org (it’s fast, free, and easy)
2. Visit the challenge home page at drumbeat.org/journalism
3. Choose a category of entries to read and vote on: People powered news, Beyond comments, or Unlocking video.

You’ll be presented with four random entries to review.

Dig-in and review a few.

All we’re looking for at this stage is the seed of a good idea, or a demonstration of novel, new, or innovative thinking.

Like what you see? Give it a thumbs up!

It won’t take you much time at all. And it’s a big help.

Just think: you could help send a talented person to our learning lab — putting them one step closer to an invitation to our ‘hackfest’ in Berlin, and possibly a year-long paid fellowship in one of the world’s top newsrooms.

Do it for the kids. :)

June 09, 2011 01:36 PM

I’m fresh back (barely!) from a house move and a nasty cold. (Nothing worse than a summer cold, if you ask me.)

Sniffles aside, my first task was to read through submissions from the recently concluded news innovation challenge.

Thankfully, I was not alone in this task as there are a lot of entries and some of them are quite lengthy. The initial lift was done by Mozilla’s media lead Ben Mozkowitz and Jacob Caggiano. Mark Surman and I then dug-in and gave the entries another review.

Here are the latest numbers, tallied just after the submission period closed at 11:59PM on June 6th:

• 298 submissions to the challenge
• From roughly 200 individual entrants

(The number of entrants is harder to determine because some entries were submitted by teams at Knight-Mozilla events.)

Our mission over the last two days was to prepare these entries to be delivered to our fearless review panel. Speaking of which, the number of entries received required that we increase the number of reviewers — so please welcome to the review panel:

• Jeff Moriarty, Vice President, Digital Products at Boston.com / The Boston Globe
• Tracy Van Slyke, Author of Beyond The Echo Chamber
• Andrew Leimdorfer from the BBC News Specials team

Over the next two weeks, entries will be reviewed by the review panel and by you through the public voting system.

Sixty individuals will be invited to the next phase of the program: a four-week online learning lab with sessions by Chris Heilmann, Burt Herman, Aza Raskin, John Resig and many other inspiring hackers and hacks. (I’ll be sharing more details about the learning lab in the coming days.)

If you haven’t taken a moment to review and vote on some entries, don’t miss the opportunity.

After several hours reviewing submissions, I can honestly say that it’s going to be hard to invite just sixty people to the next phase.

My deepest gratitude goes out to each and every one of you who took the time to get involved. :)

June 08, 2011 02:36 PM

Over the last week and a bit, Michelle Thorne (@thornet) and myself have been on a bit of a road-trip — up, down and around the UK (Dundee, London & Manchester), promoting the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. These physical events formed part of the whirlwind worldwide schedule and related specifically to the x3 #MoJo challenges.

The Quest: ‘Hack the Future of Journalism Online.’

Take a room full of designers, developers and journalists — add Beer, Pizza & Fun — team them up with innovative peers and brainstorm ideas that help journalists take advantage of the open web and engage with citizens in new ways.

Along the way any entrants have the opportunity to directly qualify for a yearlong paid fellowship at The Guardian, BBC, Zeit Online, Al Jazeera English, Boston Globe by entering their ideas during or after the jam to the online challenge platform.

The Challenges

The focus of the events centered around three specific challenges:

• Unlocking Video: Tell stories better w/ video online
• Beyond Comment Threads: Re-invent commenting and discussion
• People-Powered News: What would you build to make news better for the people who create and read it?

Event #1: Dundee

Supported by Mozilla, Knight Foundation & Product Design Dundee — over 100 enthusiastic, albeit bleary-eyed jammers, led by Jon Rogers attended.

After dragging ourselves out of bed for a 9:30am start, we made our way to the Student Union to kick-off this fun, intense & action-packed day fueled by Irn Bru. We were also joined by Devon Walshe (Hacks/Hackers Edinburgh) & Paul Egglestone (University of Central Lancashire).

Video Highlight

One of the days highlights was this hilarious sketch ‘Anatomy of a Comment Thread‘:

Coverage

Some of the coverage on the blogosphere included:

• ‘Mojo Dundee Roundup‘ (Devon Walshe)
• ‘Jute[bar], [Ideas] Jam, and Journalism – #ProductDundee finds its #MoJo‘ (Jon Rogers)
• ‘Knight-Mozilla Ideas Jam‘ (iGiveADamn)
• ‘Mozilla Mojo Liveblog‘ (Ryan Cormack)
• ‘Edinburgh hacks and hackers teaming up for news innovation day‘ (Michael MacLeod)

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Event #2: London

Supported by Mozilla, Knight Foundation & The Guardian — 75 enthusiastic folk from various disciplines & backgrounds came together to jam, last Saturday.

The day kick-started with a few ice-breakers followed by talks from Mark Surman (Mozilla Foundation), Paul Lewis (Guardian), Alastair Dant (Guardian), Jonathan Austin (BBC). Joining us were also two Hacks/Hackers chapters represented by Joanna Geary (Hacks/Hackers London) & Jennifer Lee (Hacks/Hackers NYC).

Video Highlight

One of the days highlights was the slightly oddball ‘Badger Project‘ featuring Voldemort as an expert!:

Coverage

Some of the coverage on the blogosphere included:

• ‘Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam‘ (Martin Belam)
• ‘A Bit of NewsJam MoJo – SocialGeo Twitter Map‘ (Tony Hirst)
• ‘Typical f***in’ hack – brings a pen to a laser fight‘ (John Paul Simpson)
• ‘Paul Lewis, Alastair Dant & Jonathan Austin at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam‘ (Martin Belam)

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Event #3: Manchester

Although our batteries were running low — we recharged, boarded a Virgin tilt train up north, and headed to the BBC Manchester Club. It was a small, intimate crowd of about 20 jammers who spent around 3 hours powering their way through multiple ideas.

In attendance was Andrew Leimdorfer from the BBC Specials Team — the team within which one of the lucky fellows will find themselves placed. We were also privileged to be joined by Ian Forrester — a BBC stalwart that shared some of the thinking from the BBC R&D team.

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What is the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership?

The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership (aka “MoJo”) is a three-year partnership between the Knight Foundation and Mozilla to harness open Web innovation for journalism. Through a series of innovation challenges and community events, we will identity 15 fellows that will be embedded in leading newsrooms around the world. These fellows will create new tools, ideas, and news experiences that benefit both readers and newsmakers—all using open technologies. Learn more.

To stay informed follow @knightmozilla on Twitter and sign up for our community list to stay up to date with the challenges.

How to Enter

To enter, simply submit a rough idea or napkin sketch. You can do this however you see fit. For this first stage, we’re interested in learning how you would tackle the problem. We can work together to advance your ideas.

You have until June 5th at 11:59 ET (GMT -5) to make your submission. Good luck!

June 03, 2011 11:05 AM

Last week was a bit of a blur: after meeting with the Chicago Tribune News Applications team, and descending into the Tribune dungeon for an evening of brainstorming with the local Hacks/Hackers chapter, I was off to New York for the “Beyond Comments: Discuss, brainstorm with Shirky, Michel, Gupta” event at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts (home of the ITP program).

Sadly, I didn’t manage to capture Clay Shirky’s talk where he touched on some of his recent research into online conversations. (If you recorded it, or have links to his recent writings on the topic, please pop a note into the comments below!)

By the time that Ro Gupta of Disqus took the stage, I was able to get my act together and start recording. His talk in two parts is here:

Next up was Amanda Michel of ProPublica who spoke to her experiences in online community organizing, and how those skills translate into the new kinds of journalism being pioneered at ProPublica. Her talk is here:

Having absorbed some pretty smart thinking about the evolution of online comments, discussion and debate in the context of news, the hacks and hackers in the room broke into groups to brainstorm their own innovations. Sixty-minutes later, they returned and presented their ideas to the group. You can watch all six pitches here:

I received this note from Hacks/Hackers NYC organizer, Chrys Wu, on my way back to Toronto:

Anecdotally, last night’s Beyond Comments discussion is one of our most successful events to date. — Chrys Wu

It’s pretty amazing what can happen when you bring together a room full of smart people and ask them to problem solve, no?

There are a handful more Knight-Mozilla & Hacks/Hackers meet-ups scheduled before the end of the challenge (June 6th — don’t forget). If you’re close to one, I recommend trying to make it out.

After that, keep your eyes on @KnightMozilla for more event announcements in the coming weeks and months.

May 31, 2011 02:54 PM

After peeking inside the Chicago Tribune’s news apps team last week, I descended deep, deep into the Tribune’s basement. Once home to printing presses, the lower levels of the Tribune tower were about to host a conversation about the future of news, courtesy of Hacks/Hackers Chicago and the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership.

Fueled only by pizza and sugary sodas, and a mercilessly-short presentation, these brave hacks and hackers put pen to paper and brainstormed how to improve news experiences on the open Web.

A mere thirty minutes later, they were asked to present those ideas back to the group. Here they are:

I’m excited about what the MoJo team has been able to do via these ‘design jam’ events with the Hacks/Hackers community and our news partners. It’s more than just getting the word out about the innovation challenges: we’re helping to build community and conversations around the field of news innovation that will have impact for years to come.

A big thanks is due to Trib staffers Joe Germuska and Chris Groskopf, and Medill’s Rich Gordon for organizing this event. And to the following folks who made the event possible by showing up and really participating:

• Katie Zhu
• Jeffrey Long
• 1537 News
• Geoff Hing
• Kent Heberling
• Andrew Klein
• Julie Moffitt
• Jasna Delic
• Mark Roth
• Bethany Chambers
• Daniel X. O’Neil
• Alison Sherwood
• Chris Keller
• Trina Chiasson
• Sharif Durhams
• Tathagata Dasgupta
• Jose Villalobos
• Matthew Kemp
• Juan-Pablo Velez
• Mike Ewing
• And a bunch of folks from the Milwuakee Journal Sentinel

Thanks again, folks. If I missed your name, please let me know.

May 30, 2011 04:07 PM

I asked open internet activist Susan Crawford what is blowing her mind in the world of online journalism. Continuing on a theme, she said:”"I love the way Andy Carvin is serving as a one man band covering the Middle East,” she said. “He’s got video coming in. He’s got people acting as his producers, editors and commentators. That’s blowing my mind.” I asked her to say more:

Susan is also well known as loud and articulate voice for the open internet. I asked her what the open internet has to offer journalism: “The openness of the internet is the rescue of journalism. The idea that you can speak to audiences without an enormous printing press is the whole point of the internet.”

If you are interested in the connection between the open internet and journalism, you should enter the MoJo challenge. All you have to do to get started is submit your idea.

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This is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge.

Filed under: drumbeat, mojo, mozilla

May 27, 2011 02:13 AM

Open-Web innovation appears to be the name of the game in the Chicago Tribune’s News Applications department. I had a chance to sit down with Joe Germuska, Christopher Groskopf, and Brian Boyer from the @TribApps team yesterday in Chicago, and I had a few questions on my mind:

• What is the scope of their work? What do they work on day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-over-month?
• How does the news apps team interface with the editorial and other departments?
• What is the experience of being an island inside a ‘traditional’ or ‘legacy’ news organization?

The scope of this team’s work is nothing short of awe-inspiring. They’re responsible for a wide range of projects: from classic ‘news apps’ like the 2010 Illinois School Report Cards to the unlikely job of deploying a massive number of Wordpress sites to power the TribLocal.com network.

Nonetheless, they still have the time and opportunity to work on forward-thinking initiatives like the Chicago Breaking News Live Web app, and to release tools like the The Newsapps Boundary Service for other newsrooms to build on.

Through all of these varying demands, open-web thinking seems to permeate everything they do. For example:

• Chris shares his experiences building news apps with big data for other organizations to learn from;
• Joe is collaborating with other newsrooms and news apps developers to build tools that will make it easier for reporters to explore and make sense of census data (Joe, do you have a link for me?)
• The whole team is focused on releasing re-usable code and building a body of knowledge about how to handle the unique needs of a newsroom.

As for the advantages of working in a nimble team like this, Brian put it succinctly when he said “we can roll a new rig every day to improve how we do our development.” Translation: even in the real-world environment of a newsroom, with deadlines and deliverables looming, and despite the challenges of IT departments, this team is able to rapidly experiment and test new ideas.

Interestingly — and even though the team was started by individuals with a journalism-first background — new team members have come to the job with more technology and computer science experience, than traditional journalism chops.

I was curious about this from the perspective of the Knight-Mozilla fellows that will be heading into newsrooms this fall, and how they might have similar backgrounds.

If the @TribApps team is any indication, I think our fellows will have a fighting chance at survival.

May 25, 2011 03:42 PM

Here’s a mental exercise: Let’s brainstorm a list of the changes that define what journalism will look like tomorrow, or — better yet — let’s answer the question ‘what is journalism on the open Web?’

Below are six ideas to start the exercise with. None are original or entirely new. Many are stolen from people much smarter than I am about such things. Each idea speaks to a shift that is underway already, or about to begin, in most professional news organizations.

Maybe you’re experiencing one of these shifts? Perhaps you have your own to share? I hope that you’ll add to the list, or the conversation in some way: maybe we can build a comprehensive definition of ‘journalism on the open Web’ and share it with the world.

Journalism today            -->  Journalism tomorrow
-------------------------------------------------------------
Publishing is the end       -->  Publishing is the beginning
Reporter talks to sources   -->  Sources go direct
Markets are conversations   -->  Journalism is a conversation
Curate the Web              -->  Re-mix the Web
The perfect CMS             -->  The Web *is* the CMS
Thinking about the Web      -->  Web thinking

Publishing is the beginning: On the open Web, the act of publishing something is the beginning of the conversation. It’s the first step toward creating a community, engaging with ideas in the open, and providing a platform for others to build on top of. It isn’t a simple act of Rinse. Wash. Repeat. on a never-ending 24-hour cycle that starts and stops when the words go to print.

Sources go direct: This is a phrase coined by the ‘irascible gadfly’ Dave Winer to document the disintermediation of journalists and news organizations in the conversation between those with information and those who want the information. This disintermediation is made possible by the open Web and the open-source software that powers it, and it’s a trend that is only going to continue.

Journalism is a conversation: More than ten years ago, David Weinberger wrote that “markets are conversations” in the Cluetrain Manifesto, a statement which predicted that walls would be torn down between the people inside of organizations, and those outside. Perhaps it has taken longer for the message to penetrate the thick walls of the Daily Bugle, but the day has come to accept that journalism is also a conversation and those walls will come down too.

Re-mix the Web: Today it is possible for those with limited technical skills to curate the Web. Curation is just starting to be seen as something that journalism professionals need to learn how to do. Tomorrow, however, it will be possible to re-mix the Web: to create entirely new experiences from the component parts. That is what the Hackasaurus project is teaching kids today. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s news users — be ready.

The Web is the CMS: NPR’s Middle East uprising super-star journalist Andy Carvin doesn’t need a better content-management system to make better journalism. On the contrary, the Web is his content-management system. Re-tooling the back-office IT in news organizations is the wrong problem to focus on — those systems were not designed for rapid change — a complete re-boot is necessary, and the new ‘back office’ will use the open Web as the kernel, operating system, and publishing tool.

Web thinking: Emily Bell calls it “being of the Web, not just on the Web,” but — taking a phrase from the ten-year-old Web of Change community — I like to call it Web Thinking. This isn’t just about being ‘digital first.’ It’s about looking outside the newsroom, relinquishing some control, playing some new roles — like convener and connector — and moving at Internet speed. There’s so much more, but that’s a whole post of its own.

Those are the six changes that are on my mind today. How about you: What changes and shifts are you experiencing?

May 24, 2011 02:55 PM

Head to Manchester and join the BBC — in collaboration with Mozilla & Knight Foundation .

• Do you have ideas for how news and journalism can be edgier, cooler, and more interactive online?
• Are you a web developer, designer or just a news junkie with a hankering to hack?

An evening of brainstorming over beers & pizza awaits — ultimately helping journalists take advantage of the open web and engage with citizens in new ways.

Event Details

When: Wednesday 1st June, 2011 (17.00 – 19.00 with Beer & Pizza included)
Where: BBC Club, New Broadcasting House, Oxford Rd, M60 1SJ (map)
Tickets: FREE! Now available on Eventbrite

Also, be sure to check out the full agenda & follow @KnightMozilla on Twitter for the latest news and updates.

Brainstorming

Team up with innovative peers and brainstorm & sketch ideas that help journalists take advantage of the open web and engage with citizens in new ways.

At the same time, qualify directly for a yearlong paid fellowship at the BBC, the Guardian and other major news outlets by entering your ideas for any of these #MoJo challenges.

• Unlocking Video: Tell stories better w/ video online
• Beyond Comment Threads: Re-invent commenting and discussion
• People-Powered News: What would you build to make news better for the people who create and read it?

May 24, 2011 10:59 AM

Over the past few weeks, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla have been running a series of news innovation challenges. The goal: get the world’s smartest hackers, designers, and tech-savvy journalists thinking about how news organizations can harness the open web.

Today, submissions are open for the final news innovation challenge. The topic: ‘People-Powered News‘ — harnessing the power of the web to make news better for the people who create and read it. Of course, there’s a twist — you can only use open web technologies. That means no Flash, iOS, or any other proprietary SDKs.

People-Powered News

How do we get data, reporting and local knowledge into the hands of users, wherever they are, no matter what devices and platforms they’re using? This is an open-ended opportunity to share your world-shattering news innovation concept.

Remember, you could end up with a paid fellowship to work on this problem inside Al Jazeera English, the BBC, Boston.com, the Guardian, or Zeit Online.

The Open Web Opportunity

For this challenge, we’re looking for your most revolutionary ideas. How can we harness the open web—the technologies, the connections, and the people—to make news better for the people who create and read it? What should a news website look like in 2011 and beyond?

We’re not talking about infographics, mashups, or interface tweaks. We’re not talking about solving corporate IT problems. We’re talking about reaching right into the core of journalistic endeavors and hacking the system.

How to Enter

To enter, simply submit a rough idea or napkin sketch. You can do this however you see fit. For this first stage, we’re interested in learning how you would tackle the problem. We can work together to advance your ideas.

For the final MoJo challenge, we’re looking to you for this kind of radical thinking. We want to work with you to develop new technologies to inform, educate, and enlighten. We think that participation is the key. And we think journalism can learn a lot from the open web here.

For some inspiration, check out the full challenge brief, which includes links to some interesting ideas and technologies.

Winners of the first round go on to build prototypes, attend a news innovation workshop in Berlin, and may even take on a one-year paid fellowship to build their apps.

You have until June 5th at 11:59 ET (GMT -5) to make your submission. Good luck!

May 23, 2011 05:06 PM

There has been alot of talk on the MoJo list about whether Knight Mozilla fellows will really be able to innovate inside large news orgs. I asked Jeff Moriarty what kind of environment fellows will be landing in at the Boston Globe: “We have reporters and developers working across desks from each other. Everybody is now involved in every platform.” As VP Digital, Jeff has really pushed the integration of journalists and developers. I asked him to say more about how this works:

When I visited the Globe a few weeks back, I saw two things that really impressed me. The first was the prototype of a fully cross platform HTML5 version of the paper: I saw it work (and resize itself) seamlessly across big monitors, tablets and phones. It was beautiful. I also saw a mini-lab with about 10 devices that allowed developers to test the new paper in real time: as I surf, all the devices show the page I am on at the same time.

These are small parts of Jeff’s bigger vision of how the paper should innovate: “We’re building a media lab where we can prototype new ideas and work on emerging technologies.” The idea is to both physically and socially build innovation into how the Boston Globe works.

IMHO, this is an awesome environment for a MoJo challenge fellow to land:  there are real people and resources in place to help the fellow play, invent and innovate. For someone building a career in media and technology, that’s a pretty awesome platform. And, it’s the kind of platform all of our news partners are building inside their organizations. That’s why we chose them to host our first fellows.

If working in Jeff’s lab — or a similar setting at Al Jazeera, BBC, Guardian or Zeit Online — sounds interesting, enter the MoJo challenge and compete to become a fellow.

–

This is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge.

Filed under: drumbeat, mojo, mozilla

May 23, 2011 02:25 PM

Over the past few weeks, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla have been running a series of news innovation challenges. The goal: get the world’s smartest hackers, designers, and tech-saavy journalists thinking about how news organizations can harness the open web.

The first challenge was all about “unlocking video“—bringing the best qualities of the web to the staid medium of news video. The second was about “going beyond comment threads“—using open web technology to create more dynamic spaces for news discussion.

Today, submissions are open for the final news innovation challenge. The topic: harnessing the power of the web to make news better for the people who create and read it. Of course, there’s a twist—you can only use open web technologies. That means no Flash, iOS, or any other proprietary SDKs.

How do we get data, reporting and local knowledge into the hands of users, wherever they are, no matter what devices and platforms they’re using? This is an open-ended opportunity to share your world-shattering news innovation concept. You could end up with a paid fellowship to work on this problem inside Al Jazeera, the BBC, Boston.com, the Guardian, or Zeit Online.

The Open Web Opportunity

For this challenge, we’re looking for your most revolutionary ideas. How can we harness the open web—the technologies, the connections, and the people—to make news better for the people who create and read it? What should a news website look like in 2011 and beyond?

We’re not talking about infographics, mashups, or interface tweaks. We’re not talking about solving corporate IT problems. We’re talking about reaching right into the core of journalistic endeavors and hacking the system. As Matt Waite writes at the Nieman Journalism Lab:

All this talk about a digital future, about moving journalism onto the web, about innovation and saving journalism is just talk until developers are allowed to hack at the very core of the whole product.

And as Stijn Debrouwere writes,

The news industry needs to start thinking about journalism in terms of information and the myriad ways in which we can present that information to our readers.

The open web offers unique, as-yet untapped advantages to journalists. New types of newsgathering, new types of presentation, new types information and engagement. As our own Phillip Smith writes,

Many news organizations are still thinking about innovation (as pointed out frequently on [the MoJo community] list) through the lens of corporate IT… there needs to be a radical shift toward thinking about news as a problem of creating successful consumer Internet experience vs. filling column inches or news holes, press deadlines, and delivery trucks. That is where the innovation and potential lies, I would propose, not in a re-arrangement of the chairs on the deck of the corporate IT Titanic inside of news organizations.

For the final MoJo challenge, we’re looking to you for this kind of radical thinking. We want to work with you to develop new technologies to inform, educate, and elighten. We think that participation is the key. And we think journalism can learn a lot from the open web here.

Some Examples

In all our dicsussions during the first months of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, a few themes keep emerging. Here’s some ideas to get your brain spinning:

1. People-powered curation and editing. Instead of putting curation and editing in the hands of a single indidvidual, what would it look like to put it in the hands of many people? From sources and experts to those directly impacted by the story. Like a “Storify” for the people. What kinds of tools could be put in the hands of young people in the midst of a popular uprising to help tell their story?

2. Visualizing how stories evolve online. Where does a story start and end? What are the people involved in the story saying, and what are reporters and other trusted sources saying? How does that relationship, and the story, evolve over time and by geography? How can we give journalists and readers a context that goes beyond a single moment, site or page?

3. Interfaces that balance real-time information with deeper context. News organizations are struggling to find the right balance between the presentation of breaking news and more in-depth ‘explainers.’ And the larger challenge of making it all mean something. What possiblities open up when you bring ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ and new user interfaces into the mix?

4. Crowd-sourced verification and fact-checking. In breaking news situations, there’s often a rush to get the scoop. As new types of sources become more relevant, like micro blogs and social networks, new challenges are introduced into the verification process. How can these news sources be verified and fact-checked in real time with the help of people outside news organizations? What workflows would you build?

5. Community rewards and incentives. How can news publishers create “better readers,” readers that are more engaged and that provide quality contributions? What would rewards and incentives achieve on their own, and in the context of the many ways news organizations seek to involve readers across issues and across sites? Think of this as “Badges for news participation.”

These five areas exemplify problems that the web is uniquely suited to solve. Of course, there are many more challenges and opportunties in news the web can tackle—it’s up to you to define and propose them.

We’re not looking for marginal improvements that orbit legacy technologies like content management systems. We’re looking for ways to foster more participation in the important local, national, and global issues of the day. We’re looking for compelling news experiences, for journos and readers alike (after all, that distinction is blurring every day).

Mozilla focuses on those point where the Internet and people come together. That’s where this challenge lies as well: the place where news & people come together on the Internet. So, let’s hear your ideas!

May 23, 2011 03:23 AM

Hosted by Product Design Dundee — in collaboration with Mozilla, Knight Foundation & Hack/Hackers Edinburgh.

• Do you have ideas for how news and journalism can be edgier, cooler, and more interactive online?
• Are you a web developer, designer or just a news junkie with a hankering to hack?

Why not head to the University of Dundee for the day, team up with innovative peers & brainstorm ideas (fueled by Irn Bru) — that will help journalists take advantage of the open web and engage with citizens in new ways.

Event Details

When: Friday 27th May, 2011 (09.00 – 18.00 with Beer, Pizza & Irn Bru included)
Where: University of Dundee Student Union, Airlie Place, DD1 4HP (map)
Tickets: FREE! Now available on Eventbrite

Also, be sure to check out the full agenda & follow @KnightMozilla on Twitter for the latest news and updates.

Challenges – ‘Hack the Future of Journalism Online’

Team up with innovative peers and brainstorm & sketch ideas that help journalists take advantage of the open web and engage with citizens in new ways.

At the same time, qualify directly for a yearlong paid fellowship at the Guardian, the BBC and other major news outlets by entering your ideas for any of these #MoJo challenges.

• Unlocking Video: Tell stories better w/ video online
• Beyond Comment Threads: Re-invent commenting and discussion
• The Open Webs Killer App: Create news web apps

May 20, 2011 08:32 AM

Riffing on Amanda’s comment on my last post, I decided to ask NPR’s Andy Carvin how he’s been using online conversation to cover recent revolutions in the the Arab world. “I’m using twitter to produce journalism on an open source model,” he said. “I find experts who chime in in a very public fashion. They help me do everything from identifying landmines to translating obscure dialects.” I asked Andy to say more:

Andy’s got a very different take on our “how can we reinvent online news discussions?“  challenge: he sees online conversation as a way to get people involved in making news. “There are so many people out there who are subject matter experts or who are witnessing real history being made. Now they have the tools in their hands to document it.” Andy is bringing these people into the process, getting them to make the news alongside him and his NPR colleague.

To borrow a phrase from the MoJo discussion list, what Andy is doing is “as old as the Cluetrain Manifesto”. But that doesn’t make it any less exciting.

IMHO, what Andy is talking about is at the core of what MoJo hope to produce: tools and practices that get audiences involved in making and shaping the news. If you’re a developer or designer with ideas for tools like this, enter the MoJo challenge. All you have to do to get started is submit your idea.

–

This is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge.

Filed under: drumbeat, mojo, mozilla

May 19, 2011 10:28 PM

“Workflow and how that is coded into the CMS is a huge issue for newspapers.” — Suw Charman-Anderson

For the past few months, I’ve been hearing a consistent message from some folks working in so-called ‘legacy’ news organization: “our corporate content-management systems and our corporate culture are the main barrier to innovation.”

But I’m starting to wonder if that fenced-in technical reality is leading to fenced-in thinking from those that are in the best position to push for change?

I’ve been around long enough to see some news organizations change their content-management system three or four times. You know what? It didn’t change the way they think about news at all.

From Atex to Movable Type, from NewsGate to Wordpress, from Interwoven to Bricolage: I’ve experienced them all over the last fifteen years. If there’s anything consistent to any CMS, it’s that they all suck. It’s just a matter of which one sucks less in your specific situation.

IMHO, the problem isn’t that news is stuck in the wrong CMS, it’s that new thinking is stuck in something much harder to get out of: the belief that change isn’t possible (or already happening).

Change is happening, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. ;)

There are ‘traditional’ media organizations with wonderful, journalist-friendly enterprise content-management systems out there — just have a look inside of MSNBC or Le Monde. Does it change their thinking dramatically? I’m not convinced.

Innovation can come from anywhere; you just have to be willing to look for it.

May 19, 2011 02:14 PM

“A great community isn’t something that you just set up and periodically patch. Running a great community is a full-time job, not a weekend hack project.” — Alex Payne

The last week was a valuable learning moment. The launch of the Beyond Comment Threads challenge stirred up a lot of conversation around the Web: on sites like Slashdot and Hacker News, and also on the MoJo community list.

Around the same time, I was busy kicking the hornets nest again with a post over on the PBS MediaShift Idealab (related Hacker News thread).

It was an incredible opportunity to see the potential of online discussion, comments, and debate applied to the very challenges that have been presented:

• Re-think the relationship between news users and producers;
• Demonstrate new forms of user interaction with news;
• Push beyond the ways we currently think about comments and online debate.

Meanwhile, I’ve been speaking with a number of publishers about the tension between their aspirations for discussion in the context of news, and the realities that one must face when the comment switch is flipped to the on position.

I’ve tried to distill some key themes below, but I’m hoping that you can also weigh in with your own experiences.

1. The “Eyes on the Street” theory still holds online: Most publishers now agree that it’s critical for them, their staff, and the authors of the content to play a role in the community that they are convening at the end of their articles. Without visibility and natural surveillance, comments threads can quickly become a no-mans land.

2. There is no free content: CP Scott may have said that “Comment is free,” but convening the specific type of online discussion & debate that many publishers aspire to have on their sites comes with a cost. The cost of having moderators, community policing tools, and — in many cases — the liability insurance quickly starts to add up. For many sites with active comment threads, just reviewing the comments that are reported as ‘offensive’ can take up significant time, let alone reading through to look for comments that are insightful, informative, or contain new information.

3. Publishers & authors are still ‘on top’: No matter how you slice it, the pristine words of the bourgeoisies & intellectuals still sit high above the comments of the unwashed masses, the rabble, the proletariat (how these filthy ‘wage slaves’ have time to comment all day continues to defy all explanation). In all seriousness, this visual presentation can work to re-create the classic divides in society, with both groups feeling inaccurately reflected or simply not respected.

4. Comments become the culture of a site: If a publisher is lucky enough to become the flash point for lively conversations — especially conversations that happen between commenters, and not just ‘up’ toward the original article — it often becomes evident that a specific culture starts to emerge. It is that emergent culture that becomes the environment that other passers-by (and, um, potential advertisers) use to assess and evaluate the community. Is it a ghetto full of broken windows? Or is it a bohemian coffee house brimming with spirited debate? It is this culture that is both the risk and reward for publishers.

To keep up with expectations and aspirations, publishers appear to have two choices:

1. Create better systems: This is the focus of the current Knight-Mozilla innovation challenge, and is often a controversial option. There rarely is a one-size-fits-all solution, and interventions that work incredibly well in one context can easily fail in others. What looks visually uncomplicated to one, may appear like an inaccessible mess to another. Most worryingly, I fear that publishers looking for silver bullet will turn to “real names” as the only answer and that the open web will lose the identity battle, while commenters lose the choice to be anonymous.

2. Create better commenters: It is this idea that intrigues me the most today. What does it mean to create better commenters? Is it simply the badges and reward systems that sites like Huffington Post are experimenting with? Is it an extension of the kinds of ideas that the Sacremento Press is working on where contributors earn virtual accreditation by attending workshops? Or is it something else entirely, where those who comment have to pay or earn their spot on the virtual podium? Or perhaps a system where one can endorse another, similar to sites like LinkedIn?

What are your experiences?

May 18, 2011 01:43 PM

Hosted by the Guardian — Join Mozilla, Knight Foundation & Hacks/Hackers London in London, for an all-day brainstorm and design jam about the ‘Future of Journalism Online‘.

• Do you have ideas for how news and journalism can be edgier, cooler, and more interactive online?
• Are you a web developer, designer or just a news junkie with a hankering to hack?

Event Details

Date: 28 May 2011 (Saturday)
Time: 10:00 – 17:00 (doors open at 09:00)
Venue: Guardian – Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG (map)
Transport: Kings Cross or St. Pancras
Tickets: FREE! Now available on Eventbrite (includes beer & pizza)

Also, be sure to check out the full agenda & follow @KnightMozilla on Twitter for the latest news and updates.

Days Challenges

Team up with innovative peers and brainstorm & sketch ideas that help journalists take advantage of the open web and engage with citizens in new ways. At the same time, qualify directly for a yearlong paid fellowship at the Guardian, the BBC and other major news outlets by entering your ideas for any of these #MoJo challenges.

• Unlocking Video: Tell stories better w/ video online
• Beyond Comment Threads: Re-invent commenting and discussion
• The Open Webs Killer App: Create news web apps

May 16, 2011 02:29 PM

Cross-posted from PBS MediaShift Idea Lab

Let’s face it — technically speaking, comments are broken. With few exceptions, they don’t deliver on their potential to be a force for good.

Web-based discussion threads have been part of the Internet experience since the late 1990s. However, the form of user commentary has stayed fairly static, and — more importantly — few solutions have been presented that address the complaints of publishers, commenters, or those of us who actually read comments.

Publishers, for the most part, want software that will stamp out trolls and outsource the policing to the community itself (or, failing that, to Winnipeg). Commenters, on the other hand, want a functional mini-soapbox from which to have their say — preferably something that is easy to log into and has as few limitations as possible (including moderation). The rest of us are left to deal with the overly complicated switches, flashing lights, and rotary knobs that we’re expected to know how to use to dial in to the conversation so it’s just right for our individual liking, not too hot and not too cold.

Thankfully, there is an opportunity today to really innovate. New capabilities in the browser, and emerging standards provide an opportunity to completely rethink the relationship between news users and producers — between those who comment and those who are commented upon — and to demonstrate new forms of user interaction that are atomic, aggregated, augmented, or just plain awesome.

That’s why our next Knight-Mozilla Challenge is for you to come up with a more dynamic space for online discussions. You can submit your idea here, and you could win a trip to Berlin to compete with other innovators — or even win a year-long fellowship in a newsroom.

Publishers’ dirty little secret

The truth is, many news publishers don’t actually think comments are a good thing. Or if publishers won’t go so far as to admit that, they’ll usually agree that the so-called return on investment when enabling comments, discussion and debate on their site is not entirely clear.

Therein lies the biggest tension in the “beyond comment threads” challenge: At the end of the day, those who comment on stories, and those who have their articles commented upon, often have very different views on the topic.

Ask publishers about the purpose of comments and they’ll often speak to the very aspirations of independent journalism and a free press: democratic debate, informed citizens, and free speech. Ask them about the reality of comment threads on their site, and a very different picture is likely to emerge.

On the other end of the spectrum are the people who comment. No doubt, for some, it’s their very comment — or comments, in the case of those who actively comment — that creates the value on a given page, not the editorial. For others, the value is in the conversation that coalesces or unfolds in the context of a given story — but, to ease the minds of publishers, always at a safe distance from the “real content,” usually at the end of a story, or well below the fold.

In between are the rest of us, the people who benefit from the tension between publishers and commenters. We rely on the individuals who choose to comment to add context and clarifications, do extra fact-checking (a skill that’s often a casualty of newsroom cutbacks), and, ultimately, to hold the publisher accountable — publicly — and using the publishers’ own soapbox to do so. At the same time, we rely on publishers and reporters to start the conversation and keep it civil.

No wonder publishers are still asking questions about the value of comments: It takes a lot of work to build a successful online community, and the outcome is not guaranteed to work in their favor.

The Slashdot Era

Sometime in late 1997 or 1998, a bunch of hackers who agreed that commenting was broken (or — at that time — just simply missing) on most news sites decided to take matters into their own hands. Enter the era of Slashdot, an early example of the kind of sites that would begin to separate church from state by disconnecting the discussion from the content being discussed. These sites — with lots of comment and little content in the editorial sense — threw some powerful ideas into the mix: community, identity and karma (or incentives).

Fast-forward to today, more than 10 years later, and not much has changed.

Newer sites, like Hacker News and Reddit, continue in the Slashdot tradition, but don’t break much new ground, nor attempt to innovate on how online discussion is done. At the same time, publishers — realizing the conversation was increasingly happening elsewhere — have improved or re-tooled their commenting systems in the hope of keeping the discussion on their sites. But instead of innovating, they’ve simply imitated, and little real progress has been made.

In an era where Huffington Post is the “state-of-the-art” for online discussion, I ask myself: What went wrong?

Enter the innovators’ dilemma

Meanwhile, as the events above unfolded, the rest of the web went on innovating. As publishers and comment-driven communities lamented their situation and pondered how to improve it, the conversation left those sites entirely. The people formerly known as the audience were suddenly empowered to have their say almost anywhere, via micro-blogs, status updates, and social networks.

It was the classic innovators’ dilemma at work. While focusing on how to make commenting systems better, many people didn’t see the real innovation happening: Everyone on the Internet was given their own, personal commenting system. Services like Twitter and Identi.ca solved the most pressing issue for commenters: autonomy. Services such as Facebook and LinkedIn addressed another problem: identity.

Unfortunately, not all innovation is good. Local improvements do not always equal systemwide benefits. That is the situation we are left with today: Comments, discussion and identity are scattered all over the web. Even worse, the majority of what we as individuals have to say online is locked in competing, often commercial, prisons — or “corporate blogging silos” — and is completely disconnected from our online identity.

The Sixth Estate

The opportunity in the beyond comment threads challenge is to radically re-imagine how we, the users, relate to the people producing news, and to each other. It’s time to get out of a 10-year-old box and completely rethink the current social and technical aspects of online discussion and debate. It’s time to stop thinking about faster horses, and start thinking about cars (or jetpacks!).

To get specific, let’s start with a list of great experiences that are made possible with comments:

• Providing value to the publisher: Think about the times that comments have revealed new facts, uncovered sources, or pointed out easily correctable errors. This exemplifies the opportunity for a community to provide value back to a publisher, and helps answer the return-on-investment question. Recently, during the uprising in the Middle East and the earthquake in Japan — when several news organizations introduced real-time streams that mixed editorial content with user-submitted comments — we witnessed a glimmer of something new. What does it look like to push those ideas to their extremes?

• Publishers and users working together: Sites like Stack Overflow (and the other sites in that network) introduced a new standard for directed conversations. More than just question-and-answer forums, these sites attempted to leverage the sense of community on sites like Slashdot and Hacker News, but also direct that energy toward a socially useful outcome, such as collective wisdom. If the Press is a “key social institution that helps us understand what’s going on in the world around us,” then we are all responsible for making it better — reporters, publishers and news readers. So what does that collaboration and the goal of collectively assembled wisdom (other than Wikipedia, of course) look like?

• Holding publishers, or authors, accountable: If the publishers’ aim is to stamp out trolls, the commenters’ equivalent goal is to squelch bad reporting. Many readers expect news stories to be factually accurate, fair and balanced, and free of hidden agendas or unstated personal opinions. Comments were the first opportunity to quickly point out shortcomings in a story (versus a letter to the editor that may or may not be printed some days or weeks later). Think of that span — an immediate retort versus an edited response published well after the fact — and project it into the future, and then ask yourself, “How far could an idea like MediaBugz go?”

The last example on my list has to do with providing value to the community and learning together. How do we address the myriad concerns on both sides of the fence and come out the other end with something that isn’t broken? How can the historical tension between the need for anonymity and the perceived advantages of a real identity be overcome using our knowledge and the tools of the open web? In what way can the visual language of online discussion be taken beyond “thumbs up” or “thumbs down?” And what does it look like to enable commenting on the HTML5 web, which is increasingly driven by video, audio, animations and interactivity?

In those rare inspirational moments — when two sides of a conversation come together and actually listen — there is the nucleus of the idea that inspired the world to embrace comments in the first place. How do we weave that idea into the web of tomorrow? How do we turn up the volume on everything we love about comments, discussion and debate online, without losing what we love in the process?

That, if you accept it, is your mission.

Cross-posted from PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. Feel free to comment here, or on the original.

May 13, 2011 05:44 PM

I asked DocumentCloud’s Amanda Hickman to respond to the question: ”How can we reinvent online news discussions?“  “We do a good job getting people to comment on things like the royal wedding. But we all have insights on things like how our city works or where our food comes from,” she said. “News could be doing more to get audiences weighing in on real policy issues like these.” I asked Amanda to say more:

Amanda also talked about the kind of people she hopes to see getting the MoJo fellowships. “If you’re talking back to the evening news, apply to the challenge.” Which gets at a key point: the MoJo challenge really is about shaping the future of news. There is a chance to develop a web app or online tool that puts ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ in the drivers’ seat.

If you’re passionate web designer or developer you should enter the MoJo challenge. The current challenge asks: “How can we reinvent online news discussions?” All you have to do to get started is submit your idea.

–

This is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge.

Filed under: drumbeat, mojo, mozilla

May 11, 2011 06:45 PM

Over the next few weeks, the Knight Foundation and Mozilla are running a series of news innovation challenges. The goal: get the world’s smartest hackers, designers, and tech-savvy journalists thinking about how news organizations can harness the open web.

We announced the first challenge a few weeks back. It was all about “Unlocking Video“ — bringing the best qualities of the web to the staid medium of news video.

Today, submissions are open for the next news innovation challenge. The topic: ‘Beyond Comment Threads‘. This is a chance to show off your best ideas about how to create more dynamic spaces for online news discussion. You could end up with a paid fellowship to work on this problem inside Al Jazeera, the BBC, Boston.com, the Guardian, or Zeit Online.

Beyond Comment Threads

One of the best things about the web is that it enables new voices to be heard. Blogs, forums, comment threads, and social networks like Twitter empower people to take part in new kinds of discussion, dialogue, and debate.

But if you take a look below the fold — The best discussions around the web can be pretty isolated. Take comments, tweets, and other fragments out of their original context, and they can become meaningless or lost in the clutter. Also, comment threads all over the web – including CNN, political blogs, and YouTube — you’ll often find that the loudest, most irrational, most hateful voices drown everyone else out.

At the same time, media is moving beyond the traditional “news story” as the only unit for commenting and interaction, stretching to include narrative arcs of multiple stories over periods of time, “explainers” that provide background knowledge for strings of stories, “streams” that include initial reports followed by updates and corrections, and more.

With all that activity happening across the web, how do we enable more coherent, elevated discussion? How can news organizations improve the signal-to-noise ratio in public news commentary?

What technologies would you use to make two-way news discussion better? The best challenge entries will go beyond technology, and tackle some deeper questions.

Questions like:

• What is the role of anonymity in online discussion?
• Would persistent identity lead to more civil debate, or discourage unpopular positions?
• To what degree is political polarization “part of human nature?”
• What are the dangers of filtering and crowd control?
• Where have moderated threads succeeded, and can those concepts scale?

“We do a good job getting people to comment on things like the royal wedding,” says Amanda Hickman of DocumentCloud. “But we all have insights on things like how our city works or where our food comes from. News could be doing more to get audiences weighing in on real policy issues.”

Eric Schoenborn, community manager at the Knight Foundation, elaborates: “We need to get online discussion past the lowest common denominator. We need a way to get people who actually care about democracy engaging online.”

How to Enter

To enter, simply submit a rough idea or napkin sketch. You can do this however you see fit. For this first stage, we’re interested in learning how you would tackle the problem. We can work together to advance your ideas.

For some inspiration, check out the full challenge brief, which includes links to some interesting ideas and technologies.

Winners of the first round go on to build prototypes, attend a news innovation workshop in Berlin, and may even take on a one-year paid fellowship to build their apps.

You have until May 22nd at 11:59 ET (GMT -5) to make your submission. Good luck!

May 10, 2011 08:41 AM

I asked Knight Foundation web lead Eric Schoenborn about what’s broken with comments, news and the web. He said: “We need to get online discussion past the low common denominator trolls. We need a way to get people who actually care about democracy engaging online.” The second MoJo innovation challenge is all about this: asking developers and designers to re-imagine online discourse around the news. Eric said more:

I also asked Eric why a web developer or designer would want to enter the MoJo challenge. “These fellowships offer a chance to work at a really high level,” he said. “You can have a huge impact on your community and humanity in general.” It’s true that our news partners — Al Jazeera English, BBC, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, Zeit Online — can provide huge stage for fellows. There is chance to do something truly world changing.

If you’re passionate web designer or developer you should enter the MoJo challenge. The current challenge asks: “How can we reinvent online news discussions?” All you have to do to get started is submit your idea.

–

This is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge.

Filed under: drumbeat, mojo, mozilla

May 09, 2011 06:31 PM

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May 08, 2011 06:43 PM

“Journalism and data collide into an awesome explosion” — BCNI Philly

The Knight-Mozilla News Technology challenges officially kicked off last week. The first challenge — Unlocking Video — has seen more than forty submissions with three days still to go until the challenge closes. (If you were going to submit an entry to this challenge, time to get a move on!)

By far, we’ve found that the most effective way to do outreach is face-to-face. To facilitate as much of that as possible, we’re working with Hacks/Hackers and other organizations to encourage local events that bring people together to brainstorm challenge entries.

So far, there have been outreach events in:

• San Francisco
• Buenos Aires
• Philadelphia
• Boston

There are currently events planned for:

• Managua, May 8
• San Salvador, May 11
• Guatemala City, May 13
• Dundee May 27 (tentative)
• London, May 28 (tentative)
• Birmingham, UK, May 31
• Seattle, TBA
• Berlin, TBA

Don’t see your city listed? What a perfect opportunity to pick-up the gauntlet and organize one. Michelle Thorne has been kind enough to pull together a bunch of resources to help you organize your own local event — it’s easy, it’s fun, and a great excuse to get your local ‘hacks’ and hackers together.

(I especially like the new Bingo cards that Jenny 8. Lee suggested. Great ice breaker.)

Most recently, I headed down to Philadelphia to do a (super-productive, if I say so myself) MoJo session at BarCamp News Innovation. As usual, I managed to corner a bunch of interesting people, point a video camera at them, and then asked them what they were doing there:

Many thanks to the following folks for subjecting themselves to the camera:

• Sean Blanda from TechnicallyPhilly.com
• Andrew Mendelson from Temple University
• Kyle, Allan, Aaron, and Amandine from War News Radio
• Wendy Warren from Philly.com
• Bas Slabbers from NewsWorks.org
• Tim Wisniewski a ‘Geek-in-command’ at the hackathon
• And the various other folks that got caught in the frame

If you’d like help creating an ‘explosion of awesome’ in your city, or at your next event, drop us a line.

May 05, 2011 02:09 PM

Recently, we’ve seen a huge change in video online. The advent of web native <video> makes it possible to mash up moving images with social media, tie clips to data from across the web or, more simply, create simple transcript-based interfaces for navigating long pieces of video. Yet, despite the these capabilities, we’ve seen almost nothing in the way of new kinds of storytelling. Telling stories with video online today looks pretty much the same as it did when I used to shoot local TV news 20 years ago.

This is something we hope to change with the first Knight Mozilla news innovation challenge topic. We’re inviting hacks and hackers from around the world to answer the question: how can new web video tools transform news storytelling? People with the best ideas will get to bring them to life with a full year paid fellowship in a world leading newsroom.

The next ‘montage moment’

What do I mean by transform storytelling? Just that: taking today’s online video tools beyond the mechanical and obvious, bringing people, ideas and events to life in ways we haven’t seen before. To get your imagination going, think back to how visual storytelling emerged in the world of cinema.

The Lumiere brothers made some of the worlds first films. Workers going to a factory. A train arriving at a station. Etc. The Lumiere’s fixed frame wasn’t much to write home about in terms of story. But seeing moving photographs was hugely impressive to most people at the time. It was a technical wonder.

It took 25 years for Eisenstein to grab hold of this technical wonder and then say: wow, I bet you we could tell a more powerful story if we varied the shots a bit and then edited them together. With Potemkin, he invented the visual language we still use to tell stories today: montage.

The fundamental technology didn’t change in those 25 years. The Lumiere’s knew how to splice film and move the camera around. Eisenstein’s breakthrough was to use basic film technology to tell a story in a new and creative way. Which is very much like where we are at with web native video today: huge technological potential just waiting to be seized for creative storytelling. What we need now is a ‘montage moment’ for the web era.

Open video: a huge palette of awesomeness

The potential of web native <video> truly is awesome: we can now link any frame within any video to any other part of the web. This was hard to do in the world of Flash video. The introduction of the HTML5 <video> tag over the last two years has made it easy.

Early experiments and demos hint at the potential of this new open video palette. With the recent State of the Union, PBS used Mozilla’s popcorn.js tools to synchronize their live blogging with the timecode of the President’s speech:

The same tools have been used to show how transcripts can be used to search and then navigate immediately to anywhere within a long clip. This demo from Danish public radio shows how this can work with web native <audio>. The same thing could easily be done with video.

Of course, the big potential is in connecting video to the massive amount media and data that already exists all across the web. Imagine if you could weave the sum of all human knowledge seamlessly into your news story or documentary. That’s now possible. This book report demo shows the basics concept, with a student connecting her narration to wikipedia articles and news reports.

Google and Arcade Fire took this idea a step further, pulling moving images from street view and Google Earth into a rock video. If you enter your zip code, your neighborhood becomes a character in the narrative in real time.

The Japanese based Sour-Mirror went even further, pulling you into the video. Enter your Facebook ID and turn on your camera, and then you become a character in the band’s video. Again, in real time.

These demos make an important point: the line between what’s in the frame and what’s on the web is dissolving. Or, put nerdily, timecode and hypertext are fusing together. They are becoming one.

Are you the next Eisenstein?

Despite all the niftyness, there is a problem: these demos do not yet tap the open video palette to tell stories in meaningfully new ways. Open video tools like Mozilla’s Popcorn and Butter provide a starting point. But they need people with a creative flair for both web technology and storytelling to bring them life. Which is exactly why Knight and Mozilla threw out ‘how can new web video tools transform news storytelling?’ as our first MoJo challenge question.

We’re hoping that you — or someone you know — is up to this challenge. If you think you are, you should enter the MoJo innovation challenge. All you need to do is: draw up a napkin sketch showing how you might tell a story in a new way with open video, write a brief paragraph about it and then submit it online. If your idea is solid, you’ve got a good chance at a fellowship where you could actually bring it to life at the Al Jazeera, BBC, the Guardian, Die Zeit or the Boston Globe. Who knows, maybe you could be the Eisenstein of open video?

Find out more about Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership on the MoJo web site. Or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge today.

Filed under: drumbeat, mfw, mojo, mozilla, openweb, video, webmademovie

May 03, 2011 03:47 PM

I asked Mozilla Web Made Movies Lead Brett Gaylor excites him about news and video on the web today. He said: “Open video can help re-establish journalism as the fifth estate.” As the first Knight Mozilla news challenge topic is about video, I asked Brett to say more about this:

Brett riffs on the idea of a ‘wonk-a-pedia’ that uses open video on the web to connect video clips of politicians to their voting records, past positions and so on.

The current MoJo challenge topic is about exactly this question: how can new online video tools transform news storytelling? Tying video snippets to other web content and data. Letting audiences join into the debate. And do on.

If you’re a talented web developer excited about HTML5 video, you should enter this first MoJo news innovation challenge. If you want advice or inspiration, head on over to popcornjs.org or Mozilla’s popcorn IRC channel. Lots of people there who can help you out.

Just think of it: you might end up at BBC, the Guardian or one of our other news partners working on the next big thing in online video. All you have to do to get started is submit your idea.

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This post is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more about the partnership on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge today. I’ve also posted a really simple primer on MoJo.

Filed under: mfw, mojo, mozilla

April 29, 2011 11:33 AM

I asked Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Nanabhay what excites him about news innovation on the web today. He said: “I’m excited by the sheer velocity of change going on. The web has taken the concept of live news and stretched it to the limit”. As a part of our joint work on the MoJo, I asked Mohamed to say more about this:

Mohammed also talks about the merging of traditional media and social media: a phenomena that has shaped a great deal of the coverage of recent events in the Middle East.

As Mozilla Knight News Innovation partner, Al Jazeera English will be hosting a fellow who will work on web apps that explore this trend. I know that Mohamed is especially interested in fellows who want to work on grassroots reporting, social media and video, which  ties into our current MoJo challenge topic.

If you’re a talented web developer or designer, you should enter the MoJo news innovation challenge. Who knows: you might end up at Al Jazeera building the next big web news app.

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This post is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more about the partnership on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge today. I’ve also posted a really simple primer on MoJo.

Filed under: drumbeat, mfw, mojo, mozilla

April 28, 2011 07:46 PM

Earlier this week, Mozilla and Knight launched our first news innovation challenge (aka MoJo). We’ve had good buzz, but also people saying ‘what is this thing?‘

I wanted to come up with the simplest possible explanation. At the top level, the idea behind MoJo is:

Back five individuals to build mind blowing web apps
in collaboration with world-leading news sites.

Broken down a little more, Mozilla and Knight plan to:

1. Find five incredibly talented web developers and designers.
2. Give them a paid fellowship in a world-leading newsroom for a year.
3. Using these newsrooms as a lab: build open tech and web apps that shape the whole field of news.

If you are an incredibly talented web developer and designer, you should enter the challenge over the next five weeks. Here is how:

a. Submit your idea for a news web app or tool. All you need is a napkin sketch to start.
b. If your idea is good, the brightest minds in web tech and news will help you build a prototype.
c. If your idea is really good you’ll have a chance to build out your app during a one year fellowship.

Why does Mozilla care about the future of news on the web? Because:

We want to see the open technology and participatory culture
of the web become a core part of how news is made. This is
good for the web and good for society.

If you want a slightly more detailed but still simple overview of MoJo, you might want to watch this two minute explainer video:

Phillip Smith’s 10+ reasons to enter the Knight-Mozilla news innovation challenge is also a great read. And, of course, you should also check out the MoJo web site and the first challenge around open video and story telling.

Filed under: drumbeat, mfw, mojo, mozilla

April 28, 2011 03:44 PM

“I am passionate about both news innovation and the proliferation of openness and I want to see both concepts make significant progress.” — Geoff Samek

Hey there Geoff, I’m glad to see that we’re on the same page with regards to the outcomes that we’re both passionate about, and I’m to carry on this conversation at BarCamp News Innovation Philly this weekend. (Have you got a session idea ready?)

Here are some quick responses to your latest post:

“Legacy media organizations are where brilliant news innovations go to die.”

Having recently had the opportunity to meet a whole bunch of innovators that are working inside of legacy media organizations, I just don’t believe that these people have hung up their spurs and put aside the notion of innovating inside their respective organizations.

To the contrary, I do see a fair bit of innovation happening inside of established news organization, just take Jonathan Stray (Associated Press), Andy Carvin (NPR), or Hari Sreenivasan (PBS Newshour), for example.

“What I really want to know, is how putting the very best and brightest news hackers in large media companies will proliferate the concept of the open web.”

It’s really quite simple.

Take a quick look at other fellowship programs around the world, for example the Knight fellowship at Stanford, the Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship, the Shuttleworth Fellowship, or the Massey College journalism fellowship right here in Toronto.

These fellowships are an opportunity for people like Wendy Norris, Dave Cohen, or Mozilla’s own Mark Surman to step back from the day-to-day, and to focus on big-picture questions or projects that all too often get overlooked.

Here’s a practical example: Burt Herman, an AP bureau chief with more than ten years working as a reporter, accepts a Knight fellowship at Stanford where he works at the design school to explore the future of journalism. Today, Burt is putting meaning back into the term ‘entrepreneurial journalism’ through his award-winning start-up, Storify. Tools like Storify, and Document Cloud, are changing the way people produce news, and the way that news is consumed by users, and — thus — they are changing the Web.

“The concern being that your MoJo fellows might flourish as well as a Saber-toothed tiger stuck in the LaBrae Tar Pits.”

Let me conclude with this:

We don’t see our news partners as dinosaurs. We see them as hubs of important conversations about the future of the Web, journalism, and — more broadly — civic engagement and public participation in everyday life.

Will there be challenges for the MoJo fellows? No doubt. But what fun is life without a few healthy challenges to overcome?

See you this weekend!

April 28, 2011 03:16 PM

A handful of recent conversations, some public, some private, have uncovered that the incentives for getting involved in the Knight-Mozilla challenges are not as clear as they could be.

I sat down with Matt last week to try and hammer out some copy for the new KnightMozilla.org site that focused on the incentives, but — oddly — that copy didn’t actually make it onto the site.

I’m a bit stubborn, and I kinda’ think that answering the questions “Why should I care?” and “What’s in it for me?” are important in the context of what the initiative is trying to accomplish, so in the interest of time & efficiency, I’ll just steal that missing Website text and re-use it here. :)

So, here’s the skinny on what’s in it for you to take part in the Knight-Mozilla challenges:

1. Take your news-technology idea from napkin sketch to specification to working prototype, with Mozilla’s help. That is the core of what we’re trying to make happen over the next six months. We want to help you make your idea better, more clearly defined, and — most importantly — prototyped. We have a bunch of steps to make that happen. It all starts by entering a challenge.

2. Put your best ideas in front of the people shaping online journalism’s future. Your challenge entry is a chance to say “Hey, I’ve really been thinking deeply about this,” or “I have an idea that is just screaming to be tested in the real world.” It’s also your chance to put your idea in front of an amazing community, other challenge participants, and — finally — a panel of whip-smart judges. Roughly sixty people who submit challenge entries will be invited to participate in what we’re calling a ‘Learning Lab.’

3. Rub virtual shoulders with some of the Web’s leading luminaries, like Christian Heilmann, Burt Herman, Aza Raskin, John Resig, and many more. The learning lab is a four-week intensive online workshop aimed at pushing your idea one step further toward a working prototype. Each week, guest lecturers will wax poetic on how to take an idea from the drawing board to working demo. Our expectation is that participants will finish the lab with a blueprint for taking their idea to the next level. Roughly twenty participants will be invited to come together and use that blueprint to build a prototype.

4. Get flown to Berlin for a face-to-face prototype-building event with some of the world’s leading news app developers. This is where the rubber hits the road. We bring you and nineteen of your learning lab peers together for a ‘Hack Day’ (probably more than one day, actually) to build a prototype in record time. You’ll ‘hack’ side-by-side with other passionate designers, developers, and creative people of all stripes, in a hard-core endurance race to get a working demonstration of your idea finished and ready to present publicly by the end of the event. Hack day winners — everyone who presents a working demo — will be highlighted at the 2011 Online News Association conference in September, where the online news community converges to discuss the future of online news.

5. The ‘big prize’: spend a year evolving your ideas in one of the world’s most prestigious newsrooms as a paid Knight-Mozilla fellow. A few short weeks after the in-person event, five individuals will be invited to become a Knight-Mozilla fellow.

What is a fellow? What does a fellowship entail? Great questions.

Practically speaking, fellows receive a stipend equivalent to a full-time salary, plus generous supplements for housing, childcare and health insurance as well as moving and research/equipment expenses. Fellows also get a desk one of the world’s most prestigious newsrooms, with access to some of the world’s best journalists, editors, and news app developers.

More than that, fellows are dubbed as Knights of the Idea Table, deputized to carry out brave missions, and to lead an army of awesome into the battlefield of ideas. (Okay, that’s more than a little bit corny.)

On a more serious note, being a fellow means:

• A year to ponder deeply about the ideas that will shape the future of journalism & the open web
• A year to sketch, mock-up, prototype, and demonstrate those ideas in action
• A year to do research, conduct interviews, and organize events that bring thought-leaders together to discuss the nexus of the open web & journalism
• A year to collaborate with four other Knight-Mozilla fellows, and the Knight & Mozilla communities at large
• A year to soak up the newsroom experience, and to work with leading newsmakers on the big, pie-in-the-sky, ideas that might never get to see the light of day otherwise

If I wasn’t already working on the project, I would have just convinced myself to submit a challenge entry.

How about you? Convinced? If not, let me know what kind of incentives would get your attention when we run the challenge again next year.

April 26, 2011 03:38 PM