How we designed a visualization platform and API to share data about the alarming decline of elephant populations across Africa.

Our SRCCON session was sparked by our work on an audio-sharing tool called Shortcut, which is a tool that makes it easy for podcast fans to share their favorite moments on social media. What seemed like a relatively straightforward project ended up spiraling out into a set of super-interesting questions around design, technology, and reasons why people share.

Over the last several months, the New York Times R&D Lab has been thinking about the future of online communities, particularly those communities and conversations that form around news organizations and their journalism. When we think about community discussion, we typically think about comments sections below our articles, or outside forums that link to our content (Twitter, Reddit, etc.). But what comes after free-text comments? To explore this further, we developed Membrane, which is an experiment in permeable publishing. By permeable publishing, we mean a new form of reading experience, in which readers may “push back” through the medium to ask specific, contextual (and constrained) questions of the author.