Tag: MozFest

MozFest 2013 Reflection: Making & Teaching

After almost 2 weeks, I almost feel like the Mozilla Festival was a dream, but an awesome one, one where people were very productive, one where people were inspired and inspiring. I once again thought I’d have a very tiny role simply as a participant this year, but just like last year, I was proved wrong. Warning, this is no way told in a chronological order. Continue reading “MozFest 2013 Reflection: Making & Teaching”

MozFest Day 2: Opening Plenary

Starting off with Mark Surman recapping why he feels happy this morning. The vibe in every room was great, and so much diversity in each room. We are here building a culture, and it’s something that is growing bigger.

Where We Can Build This Culture

New York Times – Aaron, Digital Strategies

The erosion to newsrooms is rampant. The traditional media is not business model that necessarily needs to continue, but Everywhere there are people trying to make the world a better place. That’s why he got into journalism and what unites the people in this room.

Open news reaches in, and has the power to make change.

This will work. Document cloud is to upload source documents, annotate, and share them, but it would be completely public once it’s updated. Culture of sharing is a bit foreign to journalism. Now has thousands of documents.

New way of measuring impact came about this year. Journalism has a bright future with OpenNews.

OpenNews – Knight-Mozilla, Dan Syncer

Journalism that is “of the web” rather than just “about the web.” Believe in empowering communities of news developers, journalists, coders, and more. Collaborate to make code that matters to the web and to society.

Code that came out of the newsroom but had a great impact on the web: django, backbone.js, data-driven documents (D3). Flexible, adaptable are design requirements because has to react, but this applies to the web and not just the newsroom. Code that goes from transforming the newsroom, then the web, then the world.

It’s not about generating code, but informing the world. Help to inform the direction that we should take. How important to have tech-savvy people inside newsroom not only to develop, but also to inform the news.

Tabula: PDF is the worst format for data exchange, but still used constantly. Tabula allows you to upload a PDF, select the table, and export it to a spreadsheet.

The Knight-Mozilla Fellows were presented with some of the work that they did. Beyond Tabula include German election dashboard, alternative metrics, learning lunches at BBC (available on GitHub).

OpenBadges – Erin, Jess

Reimagine credentials and providing an identity to users. Yesterday, created prototype AppMaker + BadgeKit component. Set up a hacklab to connect volunteers to those in needs in an emergency, but the method is not sustainable, so putting together emergency response badges and kits in the hack lab.

This way, not only recognize, but also connect people, also through pathways. There is also the social aspect.

Launch of Badge the World. Pledge to bring badges into communities in order to connect people in meaningful ways.

Hive Maker Party – Kathryn

Production centred, but have created teaching or activity kits in Thimble to continue the Maker Party. e.g. How to make Kumi papertoys, Bandadas, custom notebooks, pocket time capsules inspired by Andy Worhol.

Free Formers – Guy

“Can we learn as fast as the world is changing?” are we teaching fast enough in schools? Are these going to be exploited?

Optimistic from searching the web. e.g. teenager who learned how to and bilt wind powered generators; some guys learned to code; changing the way people think. – the way these people do it

Find a purpose. Shape the world. Don’t wait.

Learn as much as you can in order to fulfill that purpose.

Back to Mark

Want to leave us to leave us with the idea that we grab hold of things. Not wait for permission, to build the web, culture we want. This culture of the web is infectious. Let’s take it out into the world with our values, and help our culture spread.

MozFest: Practicing Failure in the Newsroom

Dan Sinker & Dylan Richard

Basic premise: Saw a lot of big websites go down. This is a really stupid problem for news to have. We have a major problem if your site goes down when you’re the single source.

Need to think about how to approach this problem, in a manner of strategic thinking rather than throwing servers into it. Continue reading “MozFest: Practicing Failure in the Newsroom”