Over the last several months, the New York Times R&D Lab has been thinking about the future of online communities, particularly those communities and conversations that form around news organizations and their journalism. When we think about community discussion, we typically think about comments sections below our articles, or outside forums that link to our content (Twitter, Reddit, etc.). But what comes after free-text comments? To explore this further, we developed Membrane, which is an experiment in permeable publishing. By permeable publishing, we mean a new form of reading experience, in which readers may “push back” through the medium to ask specific, contextual (and constrained) questions of the author.

This week, the Mozilla Festival descends on London. Join us at MozFest or related events.

Meet agate, a Python data analysis library optimized not for performance, but for the performance of the human who is using it. That means focusing on designing code that is easy to learn, readable, and flexible enough to handle any weird data you throw at it. Here’s why you should try it.

A bunch of meetups this week, plus applications are now for the Philip Meyer Award for data journalism.

On October 19, the Guardian published Homan Square: A Portrait of Chicago’s Detainees as a part of its ongoing investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s alleged abuses of detainee rights at a warehouse facility on Chicago’s west side. We spoke with the Guardian interactive team responsible for the interactive feature, both in their NYC offices and via email.

This week Berliner Gazette hosts UNCOMMONS while organizers around Europe begin to prepare for hackathons related to refugees.

Our browser tabs overfloweth with beautiful, remarkable things from the news dev world and beyond. Here’s a few we especially appreciated, from the past few weeks.

When Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP, naturally) arrived late last week, the journalism internet produced a rainbow of responses. We invited a few news developers to comment at greater length, and they dug into the issues with gusto and rigor.

Meetups in Singapore and Colombia, plus a conference on decentralization in London.

The Global Investigative Journalism Conference comes to Norway this week, plus meetups and trainings around the world.

Lots of activity in the Pacific Northwest this week: Open Source and Feelings Conference, engagement conference, and a chance to learn more about The Coral Project.

Here’s another ICYMI roundup: an inspiring handful of recent cool stuff that deserves another look.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton interviews a number of workers at a biscuit manufacturing company and concludes, unsurprisingly enough, that the place is rather dreary. The difference between a happy home cook and our listless biscuit manufacturing employee comes down to what Ursula Franklin describes in The Real World of Technology as holistic versus prescriptive technologies. In a holistic technology, a single person or small group of people carry through an entire process, from inception to sweeping the crumbs off the floor, making their own decisions and adapting along the way.

As with most of our well-meant advice, we tend to target people at the heights or depths of mindsets—in this case, you on your career path. We don’t do as earnest a job of giving constructive advice for people in the middle, those metaphorically on a plateau or simply soldiering up a small hill.

Don’t let a debrief go to waste. The SF Chronicle’s Michael Grant explains how to dig deeper, solve longstanding communication problems, and support the development and implementation of new ideas.

A newspaper investigation is a messy thing, and it generates a lot of stuff—papers, reports, spreadsheets, interview transcripts—that never sees publication. Should that change now that many publications work primarily online?

The Online News Association Conference comes to LA this week, plus newsgames, git, and other meetups around the world.

Across many days at SRCCON, I heard many people express a common wish: a single piece of software that would unify every piece of knowledge in a newsroom. Reporters’ notes, interview transcripts, style guides, story drafts, published articles, and updated corrections: All of it would be eaten by this wonderful engine. It would store notes and publish stories and accumulate knowledge and even handle permissions.

When I started the interactive team at the Sun Sentinel in 2013, I thought the biggest challenge would be the code. I was wrong. Experimentation, no matter the size, requires creating new processes and collaborating in new ways. For the next two years, I worked closely with reporters and editors to plan, shape and create interactive journalism, retooling the already fantastic journalism coming out of the newsroom to reach audiences in a sophisticated way online. Most of the time we were successful; occasionally it didn’t work out. The biggest thing I learned was that getting things done in a newsroom only works when everyone is on the same team.

QA can be okay. We promise. Here’s how Serious Eats makes QA happen, even with a small team.