Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Community Call | December 4, 2013 Every-other Wednesday @ 11AM EDT - GMT 4PM *****NEW CALL-IN NUMBER***** * Conference Number: +1 800-503-2899 <-- NOTE NEW NUMBER * 7-Digit Access Code: 5435555# * International toll-free numbers: http://mtion...zl.la/International Call Wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/OpenNews/Calls Call Calendar: http://bit.ly/HUpfkbX Subscribe to Calendar: http://bit.ly/xrffFm ______________________________________ Agenda 12/4/13 ---> We will mute all lines at the start of the call. To unmute, *7. To remute *6<-- Memo to anonymous listeners! You might think we aren't interested in what you're doing, but we are! Say hello down in the Introductions section at the bottom, especially if it's your first time on the call. Tell us who you are, what brings you to OpenNews, and what you're up to! We don't bite. ROLL CALL: Who's here? * Dan Sinker (@dansinker) * erika (@erika_owens) * Marcos Vanetta (@malev) * katharina (@cutterkom) * Friedrich Lindenberg (@pudo) * Bruno De Bondt (@brunodbo) * Annabel Church (@annabelchurch) * Phillip Smith (@phillipadsmith) * Michael Keller (@mhkeller) * Samantha Sunne (@samanthasunne) * Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) * Sarah Squire (@sarahjsquire) * Sisi Wei (@sisiwei) * Stijn Debrouwere (@stdbrouw) * Aurelia Moser (@auremoser) * David Eads (@eads) * wes lindamood @lindamood * alyson hurt @alykat * Gabriela Rodriguez (@gaba) * Kio Stark (@kiostark) * Piotr Fedorczyk (@presentday) * Laurian Gridinoc (@gridinoc) * Mike Tigas (@mtigas) * Jason Dean (@the_dean) * Noah Veltman (@veltman) * Will Sullivan (@Journerdism) * Francis Tseng (@frnsys) * Mark Boas (@maboa) * Erin Kissane (@kissane) * Maarten Lambrechts (@maartenzam) * TODAY: Planet Money from NPR - Wes Lindamood and Alyson Hurt * http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/ * A lot of visual material was gathered for the project and the team started to think about how to present it, text focused or video driven? Landed on a narrative driven by video. When you get to the end of a section, there are questions to see how you've engaged with the content, part of user testing was about trying to see how people understood and got through the content. "Constrained interactivity" that would help people continue their journey in video or in text, even in a single page experience give a lot of opportunities to engage. Average time on page is 33 minutes, so we think it's a pretty engaged user base. * Question - project started as a Kickstarter to follow the production of a t-shirt, when did the apps team get involved? * Project has a pretty long history, even three years ago wanted to find the cotton and the yarn. The pre-news apps version of this team was aware of the project, but after the Kickstarter happened, the team went up to NYC to check in with the Planet Money team, before they went to Bangladesh and before hired a videographer for the project. Before the video was shot, the news apps team met with the Planet Money team to talk about how the web experience would be different from the radio experience and how to convey similar things in both. The exact specs were sketched out in the beginning, and as more material came in the project evolved. * Question - we've seen a lot of iterations of an approach that combines video, text, charts. One thing that's interesting about this project is that this feels like it has a combination of linear and non-linear, the ability to jump chapters feels more prominent than in other pieces and that the video is the key element until you want the text. Curious about those design decisions and how they were arrived at. * We had such a strong story, especially in the people chapter. Video doesn't lend itself as well to exploring economic concepts, but we realized we'd be missing a big part of the story if we just had video supporting the text. Giving users a sense of control was really important, examples like Snow Fall or the Guardian's NSA story, for example, the videos were almost sound bites supporting the text-driven story. With this project, there was more of a duality with this story, I don't think it would have worked to intersperse text, or to have it be a documentary with a little bit of text. Another part of thinking was how to build the experience well for tablets or mobile devices, we wanted the video-driven experience to work well across all devices. * Question - one of the nerdier aspects of this is the loops at the top of each chapter, you've got a clean video loop as the chapter header. I'm curious about the process that went into that and how those are working. * That's a looping HTML5 video. Because we had so much material, we wanted to set the tone with that looping video. We had discussed using sound to set the atmosphere, but that would have been difficult, the ambient sound of machines would have been distracting. We explored using a JPEG filmstrip concept, which we used elsewhere in the project, but the image quality versus the file size didn't work as well for that. It wasn't too hard to create the seemless loops, the mechanical processes lent itself well. One technical challenge we had that we had a lot of crashes on Windows in Firefox, we think the Vimeo player in Flash on Firefox was probably causing crashes, so we used a poster image instead in Firefox. * Question - what size team was working on this on the production and development side? * On the news side, the video and reporting team was large. For development, Brian Boyer, Wes, Alyson, and Jeremy Bowers (built the Instagrammed-powered photo grid). * Note! First project to come out of new NPR Visuals team, combination of apps and multimedia team. * https://github.com/nprapps/tshirt/ * http://source.opennews.org/articles/collaborating-t-shirt-project/ * http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/232069/how-nprs-planet-money-spun-an-interactive-yarn-about-making-t-shirts/ * http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/09/can-you-build-a-better-gif-zeega-wants-to-remake-the-aged-animation-format-for-mobile/ * Questions/comments from the peanut gallery * This project is so freaking cool. Awesome job all. +1000 * Are you doing any bandwidth detection/serving different video quality to different devices? * that was one of the reasons we went with Vimeo with this project. We wanted to do variable bit rates. We had early in the project considered using Popcorn, but with the limited interaction with the video files, the Vimeo API was sufficient. In future projects we need to figure out an HTML5 video solution so we wouldn't need to rely on Vimeo. * We also ran into unexpected problems with Vimeo related to music rights. Unless music is not involved, we probably wouldn't use Vimeo again. * What % of the audience is coming from mobile devices? * mid-40s, 40-45% * Re: WOW. * Is that a standard traffic pattern for NPR? * I think it's a little higher than usual. Not sure if it's about launching on the weekend and more people are on their phones. * Want to dive into the analytics more, added some items to track to get an idea of how people are using the project. Why DDJ? - David Eads * "Just find a project" is usually pretty facile. How to find a project to work on? * Want to talk a little bit about how data journalism can be a great way to learn to code and build fundamental tech skills, whether they are interested in data journalism specifically or want to make that their career, but wanted to get some feedback on one piece of it: "find something you care about and work on it!" and that can be really hard to do. So wanted to address some of the nuances and difficulties of that question and what are some good ways to find projects. This came out of a project I've been doing for a year now, which grew out of something else that failed, have been meeting every Saturday working with data scraped about a local jail in Chicago. Teaching fundamental coding skills, data management skills, and data visualization skills by going to this website, scraping it, getting data about inmates, and finding data that is useful. * Question - how did that group come together? * I've got a personally wacky organizing style, a lot of it was shoe leather and outreach to hand select the group that was going to start this so that it was racially diverse, generationally diverse, half women. To be really intentional from the outset and letting it grow from there so that we didn't get overwhelmed by one type of person, one demographic, one skillset. Want to make it really open for a variety of skillsets to plug in. * Question - the original impetus for this, how much was driven by wanting to work with the jails data, and how much was about wanting to get new people invovled? * Entirely the latter, all about wanting to get new people involved. * Question - what was your hoped end goal in getting these people together in a room? * Just to encourage people who are promising and talented and interesting and expressed interest in "learning to code" to let them get some support and resources to get started. * Question - how did you decide to work with the jails data and grow from there? * Originally, we were focused on content, teaching WordPress and Drupal, "write a blog post about your day!" and that didn't go very well. The jail project came from seeing that we could take some civic data, we started with birth rate data and you could see a lot of changes in demographics over time. That was a guess. I started working at the Tribune and I thought it might be interesting to folks and it ended up that it was. * Question - one question that jumps out to me is, how can people replicate this? How do you do the community building, the outreach, how do you bring people in? * The two questions -- how do you find a topic -- We got really lucky, we were tipped off to the existence of this data who knew what we were doing and liked what we were doing. On the community organizing side, this is where it gets wackier, there's an impulse to say, let's go to the industry events, Hacks/Hackers, recruit people, and that's great. But a lot of what we've done is going to public schools, going to small nonprofits and community centers. A lot of times that work is pretty thankless and you teach a class and 95% of people are zoned out, but every now and then you find someone who is really excited and that's how you slowly recruit this group. It's a hard thing to say, and that's part of why I'm coming to this group to find out how to talk about this without sounding like I'm nuts. * Question - where is the draft post going? * It's really to tell this story of how moving towards data journalism with this certain style of orgaizing got us to a point where we have a pretty successful project, after a lot of struggling to get there. And a lot of attempts that didn't go very far. The three key components are - outreach beyond what we see as the industry; having something long running that people can plug into; and having something that is public interest related cause that creates a lot of ways for people to plug in. For example, we have someone in our group who is mentally ill and has spent a lot of time in jail. He's not a great coder, but is great at QA and UI, and he can tell us stuff about the data, he's told us what being in holding at the jail is like. The public interest in exactly what helps journalists and public policy folks get engaged and that feedback gives the computer programmers useful feedback. It gives people a place to plug in. In terms of the blog post, to tell this story and to make these arguments and to encourage people to think about doing this in their town. We're maxed out at our capacity right now. We need more contributions, but we're going to reach a point where we can't sustain much more for the size of the project, so we want to encourage other people to sustain the project. * Draft post: https://docs.google.com/document/d/163dK-zFAwQAbw3ajlTBTexvRakzlBrfLL1VHDZgecZM/edit * 26th and California: http://26thandcalifornia.recoveredfactory.net * * Questions/comments from the peanut gallery * [or type in your comments here!] * Have you seen Mozilla's Web Literacy Standard specification? It might be a great way to hook into wider skills/competencies? http://webmaker.org/standard :-) * Project Lead = Doug Belshaw (doug@mozillafoundation.org) if you want to know more! Hi Doug! I'd love to connect! Thanks! Have emailed back :-) * great to connect with the mozilla web mentor community * How to get involved or ask more questions or continue conversation with you, David? - Twitter @eads / email davideads@gmail.com * Cool project. Id see if there were any universities with Jail Library Programs. i was part of one In madison and developed a backend cataloguing system because I couldnt visit the jail; there are loads of techie librarians who would want to replicate you project. Maybe market to them? ~aurelia - Brilliant. * From the other perspective, someone with limited journalism and coding skills who wants to get involved, where do I begin? How do I hear about these projects before they reach carrying capacity? Who was this? Just drop me a line, I suppose. I don't know there's a magic way to find such projects. But if there were more... Al Jazeera Data Training (Past Prologue updates) * 3 Knight-Mozilla 2012 fellows (@maboa, @datamineruk and @gridinoc) were in Qatar last week at Al Jazeera Training Centre teaching mad data journalism skillz to people from Al Jazeera English, Arabic and Balkans. Sparse course notes in https://github.com/maboa/shape-journalism/tree/master/courses/web-for-news (I will update some links in those markdown files later, after I recover all my 200+ browser tabs) * (@maboa) We created our own coursework and took resources from various online tutorials (credited of course :) and adapted for journalists / journalist-developers. The idea is that the material will be available to others and will hopefully evolve. Would be great to have a base of material we can assemble courses from. Pull requests welcome :) * Journalist-journalists and developer-journalists were on separate tracks and pulled together at the end for a kind of hackday . * Questions: * @maboa: delivered in English, or with translation? English, although some al Jazeera Arabic Flash developers were there! (Language wasn't a problem) * Awesome thanks. * @gridinoc will be helping transcribe a data journalism handbook in arabic from Word XML to markdown. FELLOWS UPDATES: 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows A moment to say farewell to Brian and Friedrich who join Noah and Stijn in alumni village. * Friedrich Lindenberg (@pudo, SPIEGEL ONLINE) * Moved back to Berlin, and left Spiegel yesterday - but still wrapping up two projects for them: a year-end review based on scraping their news coverage, and a network vis tool. Both to be released mid-month. * Speaking at 30C3 (Chaos Communication Congress): https://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/Fahrplan/schedule.html * Working on nomenklatura 2 data cleaning tool; discussed & planned collaboration with dedupe folks to integrate their library. New version hopefully done before Xmas. * Spent some time trying to get a new job (boo!); many thanks to those in the OpenNews community who helped me with letters :) * Planning a quick DDJ training excursion to Addis Ababa next week * Wrote a blog post for KnightLabs upcoming Untangled site * Sonya Song (@sonya2song, Boston Globe, flying to Germany and won't be attending the call) - Good trip and see you very soon :) Yah, hug! * Will talk about censorship at a conference in Berlin, whatever happened to journalism: http://berlinergazette.de/symposium/whtj/ * Will meet up with Annabel and Pudo at HHBer and give a talk on what I've been doing as an OpenNews Fellow (social media + censorship) * Will host a workshop at Der Spiegel on news promotions on social media * Met with an MSU professor in linguistics + ad and explored possibilities of analyzing online content. Will keep you posted when new ideas are created and implemented. * Seeking opportunities for next year, including Berkman Center and Nieman Center. Wish me good luck! Roar! hope you get in! samesies! #rahrah ++ * Annabel Church (@annabelchurch, ZeitOnline) * Heading to Whatever happened to journalism -> Hopefully see Sonya there! * Will head to Chaos Communication Congress at the end of the year, just after having my first real German Christmas * Rolling up to HHBer next week - so exciting * Wrapping up a project that was started at Complicity * Moved appartments * Settling back into Zeit * Mike Tigas (@mtigas, ProPublica) * Manuel, Jeremy and I are working on Tabula 1.0 and trying to get that out this month, in preparation for http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/11/15/opengov-voices-pdf-liberation-hackathon-at-sunlight-in-dc-and-around-the-world-january-17-19-2014/ * Will also be going to 30C3 (Chaos Communication Congress), which will basically wrap up my fellowship time. * Big project crunch at ProPublica! Lots of projects that I'll be sharing later this month. (And hopefully an open-sourced pluggable Ruby thing, too.) COMMUNITY UPDATES: Do you have any projects you want to tell folks about? * (via Josh Stearns @jcstearns) Big open source newsroom news coming from the Freedom of the Press Foundation tomorrow (Thurs). Happy to talk to folks about it offline. [Follow me or @freedomofpress for updates - or ping me and we can chat] * * INTRODUCTIONS: Let's get to know you! There are lots of names on the etherpad that we don't know. If you're new to the call, or haven't introduced yourself, please let us know who you are, where you're from, and why you've joined here. We love meeting new people. Welcome! * Your name here / What do you do? * hey, my name is katharina. I am a economics student from Germany. I hope I'll end up doing cool news technology projects (and getting paid for it) -sz? I would love to * Hey everyone - Josh Stearns here - been wanting to join these calls for awhile and am just eager to connect and hear about the work folks are doing. Specifically interested in how PlanetMoney connected code with community engagement and crowdfunding. * Hey, I'm Francis (@frnsys, http://frnsys.com/), an interaction designer and web developer at IDEO, a design consultancy. very interested in journalism and designing systems around it. * Hello, my name is Piotr (@presentday), I work at Interactive Things, a datavis studio based in Zurich. Getting into online journalism slowly. Much interested in the subject though. Getting involved with hacks/hackers Zurich now that the local chapter has opened. Recent work piece: http://d.pr/lLCQ site: http://piotrf.pl/ * Hi, I'm Maarten (@maartenzam) from Belgium. I'm webeditor at mo.be and just started working as a data and datavis consultant (http://www.maartenlambrechts.be). Always interesting to read here what is happening at the cutting edge of DDJ. * Good to see you're also out here Maarten ;-) UPCOMING EVENTS: * NON VERBAL UPDATES: * NEXT CALL, DECEMBER 18: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/opennews-calls-Dec18 Call calendar: https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=r2u7nkls68sk5cbqr5u07c36kc@group.calendar.google.com Call wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/OpenNews/Calls