Introducing the Open(source).athon in NYC

The Hacks/Hackers NYC is throwing an open(source).athon in the OpenPlans penthouse on Oct 2 to see how much great software for news/information we can open source in 12 hours?

If you are a hacker, bring your code and get the time and some help to push it out the door (Or bring your expertise and help others). If you are a hack, we need excellent writers and editors to help with documentation. This is a great opportunity to learn about the world of open source.

Every journo-nerd has a project they know is worth open sourcing, and that only needs documentation, or to be unbaked from a CMS, or generalized in some semi-trivial way, before they can finally push it out to a public github repo.

Maybe they just haven’t found the time. Or maybe they need a little help. Or maybe they have questions: What license should I use? How should I write my docs and structure my code so strangers can figure out how they should be contributing code? How can I release this so anybody notices and cares?

Hear about Open Source best practices from Jeremy Ashkenas, lead developer at DocumentCloud and author of popular open source projectsUnderscore.js and CoffeeScript.

Get free licensing advice from the Software Freedom Law Center, authors of the GPL.

Caffeine, pizza, and snacks will be provided, courtesy of the Knight Foundation. Participants will receive a schwag bag including a copy of Karl Fogel’s “Producing Open Source Software,” published by O’Reilly, and a snazzy t-shirt designed by us. Prizes TBA.

The view from the penthouse at OpenPlans is amazing. It’s just a great place to make things happen.

We don’t want the $25 to be a deterrent. If you need a waiver, email us at nyc at hackshackers dot com, and you can volunteer for Hacks/Hackers at some point.

Also if you want to hold your own Open(source).athon, please email us! We want these events to spread.

10 LET KARMA = KARMA + 1
20 PRINT KARMA
30 GOTO 10

Chicago Debut Meetup: September 15 at the Holiday Club

Hacks/Hackers Chicago is getting into gear with its first Meetup on Wednesday, Sept. 15 from 6-8 p.m. at the Holiday Club (4000 N Sheridan Road). More details below

Meet up, geek out, and enjoy complimentary food and beverages with programmers, journalists and others in Chicago’s media and tech communities who want to explore and strengthen the connections between technology and journalism. In addition to refreshments and conversation, Chicago Tribune News Applications Editor Brian Boyer will talk about the Apps team’s first year, and The Media Consortium’s Tracy Van Slyke will give a special sneak preview of its upcoming Independent Media Mobile Hack-A-Thon.

The Chicago Hacks/Hackers kick off event is organized by Rich Gordon, Director of Digital Innovation at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and co-founder of Hacks/Hackers; Tracy Van Slyke and Erin Polgreen of The Media Consortium, a network of the country’s leading progressive, national media outlets; and Tracy Samantha Schmidt of ChicagoNow, a network of local blogs sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. McCormick Foundation is providing support for the event.

ProPublica Redesign Involves the Readers in Complex Stories

At ProPublica, we make a habit of sharing. We give our biggest stories for free to news organizations, and we hand out recipes for some of our most complex investigations. We encourage other news organizations to steal our stories, and give out, free to use, clean, reliable, analyzed data that is often available nowhere else. Our mission is to have real-world impact, and we think the best path to that is not through owning an issue, but through igniting coverage of an issue everywhere.

We also spend a lot of time trying to learn from other news organizations (and non-news organizations) about how to tell journalistic stories in most effective ways we can, and how best to take advantage of our medium.

Last year, Google did an experiment with The Washington Post and The New York Times. They tried to find a way to optimize the presentation of what are called “rolling stories” — coverage that unfolds in real time, and that comprises many sequential stories — for example, a presidential election, a trial, or a hotly debated piece of legislation. Rolling stories are often complex and hard for readers to follow over due to long timespans and many (and sometimes changing) key facts.

What came out of these experiments was a set of user interface ideas, as well as some open source code, called “Living Stories.” At ProPublica, we paid close attention to Living Stories, and though ProPublica tends to shy away from the “tick tock” coverage found in many rolling stories, we realized that a lot of the key findings of the Living Stories project are perfectly applicable to the kinds of stories ProPublica does a lot — long-term investigations, made up of different size stories unfolding over months, covering many facets of a complex narrative. In fact, we realized were already doing some of the things that Living Stories tried out, and over time we’ve adopted other ideas we thought would strengthen our coverage.

One of the things advocated in the Living Stories findings — which we’ve been doing for a while at ProPublica — is maintaining a “continually updating summary” of long-running investigations, so a reader who is new to an investigation that’s been running through many stories over months can read a simple synopsis to be caught up enough to understand the importance of the latest installment. Our version of the continually updated summary — usually called the “Story So Far” — is typically written by the lead reporter of that series and edited by their editor, just like any other story.

Living Stories experimented with a persistent timeline of stories that hung on the top of the Living Stories page, functioning as navigation but also situating the reader in time, making it easy to see what stories came before and next in the sequence of coverage.

We added a persistent timeline to the top of all of the pages in a special package we made for our coverage of post-Katrina police shootings in New Orleans. That package originally comprised four separate stories about police-involved shooting of civilians, and grew in the year since it launched to six different unresolved — and in some cases uninvestigated — shootings.

Our timeline includes the major events that people outside New Orleans remember watching while glued to their televisions in August 2005: the storm made landfall, the levees were breached, President Bush flew overhead, etc. To that timeline we added arrows for each of our story summaries, called “Case Files,” so a reader could add the events on which we and our partners reported to their own memory of Katrina, and to keep track of everything.

Like many news sites, ProPublica collects all of the stories in a given investigation onto a single page. (Some call these “series pages.” We have a host of names for ours.) The series pages weren’t easy for new readers, who need a way to understand where to being and what stories are the most important, or for readers already familiar with the story, who want to see what’s new very quickly.

For the redesign, we took our cue from the way Living Stories let users customize the Living Story page. Our new series pages lets readers filter among the dozens of stories in a series — they can select just the stories they haven’t read, or just the major installments, or just stories by a certain author. In the future, we could easily add filters for aspects of the story: perhaps a reader could focus on the regulatory aspects or a story, or the environmental impact, or legislative progress, etc. We also took inspiration for these series pages from similar ones on the excellent Spokane Spokesman-Review website.

As for results, it is still early days, but qualitatively we’ve been very pleased with the way our new series pages present our biggest stories, and our reporters tell us it’s gotten easier to use the pages as a way to introduce their work to sources. Our series pages are among our most popular, and perhaps unsurprisingly among our most highly ranked in search engines.

We’re grateful to Google, the Times and the Post for experimenting with this form and for being so open about sharing their results, and we look forward to using and sharing more great ideas.

Incidentally we’re planning to open source the code we wrote to power some of the interactive elements in our redesign, including a JavaScript framework we’re calling Glass, which speeds development and lets developers bind behaviors to the DOM in a nonblocking, unobtrusive way. Keep an eye out on our Github pages for the announcement.

If you’ve tried any of the Living Stories ideas on your site, let’s compare notes in the comments.

Google’s ‘Living Stories’: An End to Static Online News

Source code for Living Stories (including a WordPress plugin) can be downloaded from Google Code.

The Launch of Hacks/Hackers London

We’re delighted to announce that the first international chapter of Hacks/Hackers got off to a fantastic start yesterday.

Having originally expected a modest turnout, we were bowled over when more than 50 journalists and coders gathered at The Shooting Star pub in Spitalfields on Wednesday evening for the first London Hacks/Hackers meetup. A big thank you to everyone who turned up!

Attendees represented a whole host of  media brands including  The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, MSN, Reed Business Information and Emap.

Everyone was encouraged to put forward suggestions for future meet-ups and it looks like the next Hacks/Hackers London may start with some short sessions offering practical tips on digital journalism. However, we’re still open for hearing lots more ideas (including ways we can make the ‘Free Beer’ idea a reality) on our Meetup Ideas page.

Also keep an eye out on our Meetup page for details of the September meet. If you’re a hack, a hacker, or something inbetween, we look forward to seeing you there!

August 18 NYC Meetup: Learning From Google’s Living Stories

Next meetup: Wednesday, August 18, at the NYC Google offices, where we will discuss the concept of “Living Stories.” Presentation starts at 7 p.m., but come early and socialize (and gawk) at 6 p.m.

Google, in a three-month experiment with The New York Times and The Washington Post, created a format called Living Stories. The site mapped a timeline of events and aggregated articles and opinion pieces, images and video, and other materials to give readers the big picture.

Other news sources have taken tips from Living Stories and melded them into their own sites. Among them is ProPublica, which launched its redesign in June.

Get a chance to see the storied New York Googleplex (Lego secret kitchen! For geeks: see the A, W, and K of AWK done in plastic portraits), when Josh Cohen, senior business product manager of Google News, and Scott Klein, editor of news applications at ProPublica, discuss what they’ve learned about displaying complex stories online and cultivating an active audience.

If you want to test Living Stories for yourself, Google has released the code. For you WordPress users, Google also created a WordPress plugin and theme.

We’re also looking for volunteers to take detailed notes about the meetup, which we’ll post on the Hacks/Hackers blog here at hackshackers.com Interested? Email us at nyc@hackshackers.com.

The charge is $5, but that is not meant to be a deterrent (mostly to make sure people who RSVP don’t flake). If this is a problem, please email nyc@hackshackers.com, and you can volunteer in exchange.

A big thanks goes to Google for generously providing beer, wine and crudites in addition to meetup space. Hope to see you Aug. 18!

Help us design the Hacks/Hackers and Mozilla course for journalists and programmers

Congratulations Corey Takahashi: Winner of the Hacks/Hackers scholarship to Poynter

We’re delighted to announce that freelance journalist Corey Takahashi is the winner of the Hacks/Hackers scholarship to Poynter’s workshop on programming for journalists / journalism for programming.

Based in Los Angeles, Corey is planning to apply the digital skills from the Poynter workshop to revisit demographic trends that he wrote about during the 2000 Census through a data-focused lens. As part of his trip, Corey also will create a video reflecting on what he learns at the workshop and lessons from bringing together the cultures of journalism and programming — and we’ll be sure to post that here.

Corey’s career has taken him across the entire media spectrum as he has stayed on the cutting edge of journalism. He started as a founding editor at hiphop magazine Blaze, and later worked for Vibe, Entertainment Weekly, Newsday and New York Public Radio. He then moved from print to broadcast and has been a contributor to NPR, the CBC and the BBC/PRI/WGBH newsmagazine, The World. He’s a fully multimedia journalist who works across all formats.

Thanks to all the applicants for taking the time to write out their pitches. We were excited to see the range of different people who applied — from college students to hacktivists to full-time freelancers — and the range of ideas. More opportunities soon.

Please join us in congratulating Corey!

Introducing Hacks/Hackers Los Angeles

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the New York Times “Moment in Time” Project

The latest Hacks/Hackers NYC gathering was all about photojournalism, hosted in the breathtaking Open Plans penthouse (with a wraparound balcony and a fantastic view) on July 27. Jonathan Tepper, co-founder of Demotix, talked about his crowdsourced photo wire based in London, and the team behind The New York Times’ “Moment in Time” discussed their project that mapped 14,000 user-submitted images onto an interactive globe.

Around 70 people attended with a good mix of programmers and content folk. There was a big contingent from Newsweek, which arrived together, and we even had a representative from 10gen, the company which makes MongoDB, the database that was used for the “Moment in Time” project. (He came wearing a MongoDB T-shirt, so was easy to spot)

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