Features / Event
Event Beyond “Be Like Facebook”
The SND judges’ controversial decision to give Facebook its “World’s Best Designed” award in digital—and the resulting unease in the journalism world—points to larger questions in our relationship with third-party platforms and our understanding of the scope of “design.”
Event Data Journalism Problems in Europe
- By Zara Rahman
Zara Rahman reports back on surprising insights from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.
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.
Event CrowData Grows Up
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.
Event SRCCON: How Not to Skew Data with Statistics
- By Kio Stark
- AmyJo Brown, Emma Carew Grovum, Jacob Harris, Chris Keller, Jeff Larson, Aurelia Moser, Latoya Peterson, Sara Schnadt, Noah Veltman
Notes from a lively SRCCON discussion on tricks for avoiding error, led by Aurelia Moser and Chris Keller.
Event SRCCON: Human-Driven Design
Ryan Pitts and Sara Schnadt on how to know your users and build just what they need.
Event The Great SRCCON Brain Dump
- By Erin Kissane
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.
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 A cybersecurity installfest for journalists
Mike Tigas recaps the recent security-for-journalists talk and installfest at Hacks/Hackers NYC.
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.
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.
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.
Event Twitter’s Miguel Rios on Choosing Viz Methods
In our second dispatch from OpenVis Conf, Twitter's Miguel Rios digs into four major options for displaying visualizations on the web.
Event The NYT’s Amanda Cox on Winning the Internet
Our first write-up from OpenVis Conf in Cambridge, MA features the opening keynote from Amanda Cox of the New York Times Graphics desk.
Event The GEN Newsgaming Hackathon
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.
Event Election Hacking at MozFest
- By Erin Kissane
- Bloomberg, Knight Lab, NPR, OpenNews, ProPublica, Sourcefabric, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Spokesman-Review, The Times and Sunday Times, Ushahidi
At MozFest today in London, OpenNews led a 70-person session on election-related news apps and tools.
