Features
Roundup Event Roundup, July 29
- By Erika Owens
Start brainstorming ideas for the Hacks/Hackers Media Party and the Mozilla Festival.
Roundup Event Roundup, July 22
- By Erika Owens
Meetups in DC, London, and Jerusalem on Wednesday. And Friday in New York, we’re holding an info session on the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship.
Project Década Votada, a News App to Track Voting Records
- By Mariano Blejman
- Luciano Amor, Gonzalo Bellver, Mariano Blejman, Martín Szyszlican, Andy Tow
- Hacks/Hackers
In April 2013, Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires hosted a hackathon on D3.js. As part of a project co-sponsored by the International Center for Journalists, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews provided seed funding to the winning project, an app called “Década votada” (q decade in votes).
Tool All About Transcribable
Yesterday, ProPublica released Transcribable, a new open source tool that makes orderly crowdsourced transcription available to any organization that uses Ruby on Rails. ProPublica’s Al Shaw introduced the project to the public in a post on ProPublica’s Nerd Blog yesterday and here answers all our questions about the project.
Roundup Event Roundup, July 15
- By Erika Owens
This week is the summer OpenStreetMap editathon and a media mega mixer in NYC.
Roundup Event Roundup, July 8
- By Erika Owens
Many summertime meetups are taking happy hour form, but in India on Sunday Hacks/Hackers will host lightning talks on data visualization.
Project Meet Poderopedia Plug & Play
Let’s say you would like to map politicians and their connections, build a semantic database of companies and top executives in a specific industry, or create a visualization of lobbyists and their clients. With Poderopedia’s free, open source Plug & Play Platform, you can.
Roundup Event Roundup, July 1
- By Erika Owens
July is quiet for events, but there are a few great things happening and it’s never too early to apply for the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship.
How-to Live Streaming History
The Texas Tribune’s Travis Swicegood explains how his organization handled a massive, unexpected wave of traffic when they became the only news organization closely covering the SB 5 filibuster in Texas.
Event Projects from the OpenNews-MIT Hack Day
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.
Roundup Event Roundup, June 24
- By Erika Owens
This week, open data in Latin America and Hacks/Hackers meetups in London and NYC.
Roundup Event Roundup, June 17
- By Erika Owens
Big week for OpenNews: we opened up applications for 2014 Knight-Mozilla Fellows today and we’re hacking in Boston this weekend. Also this week, hack events in Romania, Chile, and France.
Project How We Made It: Your Hospital May Be Hazardous To Your Health
- By Justin Falcone
- Justin Falcone, Scott Klein, Nicholas Krusick, Matthew McVickar, Michael Nieling, Al Shaw
Your Hospital may be Hazardous to Your Health is an interactive web presentation on the widespread danger of in-hospital injury, built in a single week by PBS Frontline, ProPublica, and Ocupop.
Event OpenVis Conf Wrap-Up and Videos
- By Erin Kissane
- Amanda Cox, Gabriel Florit, Tom MacWright, Kim Rees, Miguel Rios, Doug Schepers, Juan Velasco
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.
Project Slouching Toward Sensor Journalism
Matt Waite explains his drought sensor project and breaks down the promise of sensor journalism.
Roundup Event Roundup, June 10
- By Erika Owens
DataBootCamp in Bolivia this week and municipal data hacking in Johannesburg on Saturday.
Project How We Made Finding Care
- By David Eads, Maria Ines Zamudio
- David Eads, Yana Kunichoff, Wilberto Morales, Lucio Villa, Maria Ines Zamudio
- The Chicago Reporter, The Chicago Tribune
The Chicago MigraHack, held earlier this month, focused on the use of technology and open data to produce innovative apps and information tools on immigration and related topics. Nine teams participated, and we spoke with two members of the team that produced Finding Care, winner of the prize for best storytelling with data visualization.
Project Lessons of Running My First News Apps Team
AP Google Scholar and former Trib Apps intern Tyler Fisher breaks down what he and his team got wrong, and what they did right.
Roundup Event Roundup, June 3
- By Erika Owens
Two local ONA chapter meetups this week, and later this June, join Knight-Mozilla OpenNews at MIT.
Event The Boston Globe’s Gabriel Florit on Responsive Visualizations
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.


