Tool Opening Up Doc2Media
Earlier this year at La Nación, we developed Doc2Media, an app that adds media resources to documents hosted on DocumentCloud. We created it to visualize hearings from a famous trial led by Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who died in unclear circumstances hours before testifying against the Argentinian president. After we finished the project, we wanted to extend its functionality and abstract it to a tool that can be used in other projects as well as by other newsrooms.
Project Demo Sites Are Weird
Since the launch of Autotune, we have been approached by people interested in adopting it for their own newsrooms. While a lot of people didn’t mind diving right into the set up, a few people asked us “Is there anywhere I can try this out?”. Fueled by the amazing coffee selection at the most recent OpenNews code convening in Portland, we decided to build a demo site that allows users to try building projects and get a feel for the framework.
Project Introducing Lunchbox
- By Tyler Fisher, Livia Labate
- Danny DeBelius, David Eads, Tyler Fisher, Alyson Hurt, Livia Labate
- NPR
At the OpenNews July 2015 Code Convening, the NPR Visuals Team built and released a desktop app for creating shareable images across social media platforms.
Roundup Fellows + Code Convening = New Open Source Tools
- By Erin Kissane
- Tara Adiseshan, David Eads, Juan Elosua, Tiff Fehr, Tyler Fisher, Alyson Hurt, Livia Labate, Pablo Loscri, Ryan Mark, Gabriela Rodriguez, Eric Sagara, Linda Sandvik, Julia Smith, Alex Spangher, Kavya Sukumar, Francis Tseng
- OpenNews
Our fifth OpenNews code convening wrapped up last Friday. Uniquely for our convenings, this one included all seven of our current Knight-Mozilla Fellows, each working with a colleague from their news organization or another organization with shared challenges and complimentary skills. Over the next week, we’ll be posting project introductions from each of the seven project teams that joined us in Portland for the event. In the interim, a quick intro to the teams, the projects they brought to the convening, and what they got done.
Roundup Seven Projects from the OpenNews + Write the Docs Code Convening
- By Kathryn Beaty, Scott Blumenthal, Audrey Carlsen, Stijn Debrouwere, Cathy Deng, Ben Keith, Erin Kissane, Ryan Nagle, Gabriela Rodriguez, Michael Strickland, Seth Vincent, Thomas Wilburn
- INN, OpenNews, Texas Tribune, The New York Times, The Seattle Times
Journalist-coders tackled last-mile work and documentation at our Open News code convening in May, held in affiliation with the Write the Docs conference. Here’s what they did and what comes next.
Project Introducing Clarify
An open source elections-data URL locator and parser for Clarity Elections results, from the team at OpenElections.
Project Introducing MinnPost’s Election Night API
The Election Night API is a set of tools, configurations, and instructions to collect and serve election results on election night, while still providing an off-season service, and focusing on saving resources as much as possible.
Project Introducing Wherewolf
Last week, as part of the OpenNews post-election Code Convening, Jenny Ye and Noah Veltman put the finishing touches on Wherewolf, a JavaScript library that lets you run a boundary service in a browser.
Project Introducing Whippersnapper
As part of the OpenNews Code Convening held earlier this month, we’re releasing Whippersnapper—an automated screenshot tool to keep a visual history of content on the web. It builds on top of other open source projects to capture and upload screenshots of a web page, giving users creative power to track how the internet visually changes.
Event Return of the Code Convenings: Elections and Updates
- By Erin Kissane
- Geoff Hing, Erik Hinton, Alyson Hurt, Tom Nehil, Alan Palazzolo, Katie Park, Ryan Pitts, Kevin Schaul, Noah Veltman, Ben Welsh, Derek Willis, Jenny Ye
- California Civic Data Coalition, MinnPost, NPR, OpenElections, OpenNews, ProPublica, The New York Times, The Washington Post, WNYC
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.
Project Introducing PourOver and Tamper
PourOver is an attempt to standardize an efficient and extensible model of client-side collection management, weakening reliance on server-side collection operations. Even on modern networks with beefy machines, the roundtrip to a backend is irredeemably slow for responsive UIs. Users aren’t encouraged to explore when every manipulation triggers a half-second pause. With PourOver, the server-trip bottleneck is gone because collection operations are done on the client. The hardest limitation becomes render speed, much simpler to improve upon than the latency of the internet.
Project Introducing FourScore
At the 2014 OpenNews code convening, we took on the task of making a reusable system that could allow other organizations to produce something sentiment grids with a bare minimum of technical know-how. The result was FourScore, a library that allows you to set a few configuration options to produce your very own interactive sentiment grid. It even works in IE8, and maybe doesn’t totally not work in IE7.
Project Introducing Landline and Stateline
Today we’re releasing code to make it easier for newsrooms to produce maps quickly. Landline is an open source JavaScript library for turning GeoJSON data into browser-based SVG maps. It comes with Stateline, which builds on Landline to create U.S. state and county choropleth maps with very little code out-of-the-box.
Project Introducing Pym
- By Jeremy Bowers, Alyson Hurt
- Jeremy Bowers, Tyler Fisher, Christopher Groskopf, Alyson Hurt
- NPR, OpenNews
NPR’s Visuals team breaks down Pym, a new responsive-iframe library and the first project launched from the OpenNews Code Convening.
Event What We Learned from the First-Ever OpenNews Code Convening
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.
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.
