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Return of the Code Convenings: Elections and Updates

By Erin Kissane

Posted on November 24, 2014
Earlier this month, we held our third-ever OpenNews Code Convening, and our first one west of Portland, Oregon. Code Convenings are short events that bring together pairs of developers from news organizations to finish, document, and release open source projects they’ve been chipping away at.
CrowData Grows Up

By Florencia Coelho and Gabriela Rodriguez

Posted on October 14, 2014
A La Nación hackathon to enhance the open-source file-freeing tool behind VozData results in a better CrowData and a tall list of changes to come.
SRCCON: How Not to Skew Data with Statistics

By Kio Stark

Posted on August 5, 2014
Notes from a lively SRCCON discussion on tricks for avoiding error, led by Aurelia Moser and Chris Keller.
SRCCON: Human-Driven Design

By Kio Stark

Posted on July 31, 2014
Ryan Pitts and Sara Schnadt on how to know your users and build just what they need.
The Great SRCCON Brain Dump

By Erin Kissane

Posted on July 30, 2014
SRCCON, the first-ever OpenNews conference, wrapped up last Friday night at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. As Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad notes in his wrap-up post, the problem with even the most energetic and inspiring conference is that the motivation found often fades when everyone returns to the daily hustle and sprint. Like Sonnad, we’re confident that the news-code community that showed up in force at SRCCON has the stamina and sustained interest to maintain the momentum that built up in sessions and around the coffee-hacking stations, and we want to help with that as much as possible. We also want to scoop up as much of the energy and intensity and brain-sharing from SRCCON as we can and pour it out into the wider world that couldn’t fit into the physical conference itself.
Announcing SRCCON

By Erin Kissane

Posted on April 25, 2014
Everything you need to know to get psyched about coming to SRCCON 2014.
What We Learned from the First-Ever OpenNews Code Convening

By

Posted on April 14, 2014
When we talk with newsrooms about open-sourcing their work, often the response we get is that they’d love to, but deadline pressures keep the last-mile work and documentation that signifies a good open-source project on the to-do list. So at OpenNews, we came up with a simple proposition: What if we free up that time by getting developers out of the deadline grind? Let’s put them up for a few days, feed them, and help get the work done.
A cybersecurity installfest for journalists

By Mike Tigas

Posted on October 2, 2013
Mike Tigas recaps the recent security-for-journalists talk and installfest at Hacks/Hackers NYC.
Projects from the OpenNews-MIT Hack Day

By Erin Kissane

Posted on June 25, 2013
On the weekend leading into the Knight-MIT Civic Media Conference, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and MIT sponsored a hack day focused on data liberation and housed at the MIT Media Lab.
OpenVis Conf Wrap-Up and Videos

By Erin Kissane

Posted on June 13, 2013
The first ever OpenVis Conf, held last month in Cambridge, MA, was jam-packed with excellent talks. All the talks are now online, and we’ve pulled out a selection of special interest to people working in and around journalism.
The Boston Globe’s Gabriel Florit on Responsive Visualizations

By Erin Kissane

Posted on June 3, 2013
Gabriel Florit creates data visualizations at the Boston Globe, and was at OpenVis Conf to talk about the surprising difficulties of bringing the principles of responsive design to data viz.
Twitter’s Miguel Rios on Choosing Viz Methods

By Erin Kissane

Posted on May 22, 2013
In our second dispatch from OpenVis Conf, Twitter's Miguel Rios digs into four major options for displaying visualizations on the web.
The NYT’s Amanda Cox on Winning the Internet

By Erin Kissane

Posted on May 17, 2013
Our first write-up from OpenVis Conf in Cambridge, MA features the opening keynote from Amanda Cox of the New York Times Graphics desk.
The GEN Newsgaming Hackathon

By Alex Bordens, David Eads, and Ryan Mark

Posted on April 25, 2013
Last weekend, ten teams participated in a competition to develop newsgames at Editors’ Lab New York, a hackathon organized by the Global Editors Network and The New York Times. Combining the fantastical and playful aspects of gaming with hard news is a hard problem and there are few examples of well-conceived and executed newsgames. Thanks to the hack day, there are now a few more.
Election Hacking at MozFest

By Erin Kissane

Posted on November 11, 2012
At MozFest today in London, OpenNews led a 70-person session on election-related news apps and tools.