Even among the many wonderful World Cup interactives and news apps we saw this year, the NYT’s Spot the Ball was a standout, both in conception and execution. We spoke with the team behind it about the project’s design, world-class Photoshopping, and surprising inspiration.

We are exactly one month away from the August 16th deadline for applying for the 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, and this is the perfect time for you—the people actively wrangling data, building news apps, and designing interactives in newsrooms—to help chase amazing candidates toward the Fellowship application. We’ve assembled a one-stop shop of your arguments for joining development teams in news organizations, along with some of our former Fellows’ experiences and exhortations to future candidates.

Matt Waite thinks epistemology (and a little fake software) could save journalism—here’s why.

This week news nerds and data lovers descend on Berlin for the Open Knowledge Festival.

Meetups this week in Hong Kong, Lima, and Denver.

Data editor and soccer fan Tom Meagher rounds up interesting, unusual, and beautifully executed apps and interactives.

In the days before the World Cup’s knockout stages, with their potential for games to end in shootout finishes, The Wall Street Journal unveiled an app that visualized the tendencies of the top penalty kicks takers on the teams advancing in the tournament. Chris Canipe, senior news apps developer on the Wall Street Journal’s interactive graphics desk, talked with me about the thinking behind the project and how he and his colleagues put it together. What follows are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Zoe Fraade-Blanar on why and how good interaction design thinks about users.

Last week, the New York Times published an interactive photo-mosaic of 43,634 Detroit properties at serious risk of foreclosure. As you scroll down the page, viewing neighborhood after neighborhood, the number of properties and the total amount owed on them adds up at the top of the page. We contacted Matthew Bloch and Haeyoun Park at the Times to ask about the making of the interactive and the design choices they made along the way.

Hacks/Hackers London meetup today and tomorrow kicks off Julython, a month-long event where developers around the world work on pet projects and track their progress and commits.

In part one and part two of our #owhack report-backs, we introduced four new projects that emerged from the Hack Day. Today, we introduce the final two and wrap up with our notes from the event’s closing circle.

On Tuesday, Vox Media announced that it was acquiring the technology and co-founding team of the late and much-missed collaborative writing tool Editorially. We chatted with Editorially’s Mandy Brown and Vox Media’s Trei Brundrett about the team’s next steps, the probability of open sourcing more code, and the internal Vox hack week going on at this very moment.

Over the weekend, we put on the third Knight-Mozilla-MIT Hack Day, leading into the 2014 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. As usual, the hack day was loosely organized around the conference’s theme: this year, “The Open Internet and Everything After.” After 24 hours of hacking in the welcoming environment of the MIT Media Lab (spread over two days because we believe in sleeping), we ended up with six wonderful projects ranging from an ultra-practical redaction utility to a fake astroturf campaign againt Net Neutrality.

Open Source Bridge and Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences on the west coast of the U.S. this week, plus Hacks/Hackers round the world.

Mini hit the web, and it reached newsstands today. It was accompanied by an explainer video that demystifies 3D printing tech, and a downloadable, printable 3D model of a sales growth chart from the review itself. The combination of hardware and data was irresistable, so we chatted with Jon Keegan about the project’s origins and their physical-digital plans for future features.

The BBC News Labs team explores ways of exposing linked data in public-facing election coverage, and encounters some interesting challenges.

Ronald Campbell on using census data to find facts in a world of speculation

Melody Kramer on how a user-centered design process and attention to newsroom culture can make or break your internal tools.

“Follow the money” hackathon this weekend throughout Latin America, and get your SRCCON session proposals in by Friday.